Author: Monica Lee

Monica Lee is the author of four memoirs/autobiographical fiction books: her latest is Church Sweet Home: A Renovation to Warm the Soul. Also available: Truth, Dare, Double Dare, Promise or Repeat: On Finding the Meaning of "Like" in 1982, How to Look Hot & Feel Amazing in Your 40s: The 21-Day Age-Defying Diet, Exercise & Everything Makeover Plan and The Percussionist's Wife.

If plastic cups could clink: ‘Here’s to the church’

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We made an offer on a 126-year-old Methodist church with the intention of converting it to our home, but we became impatient when the closing was delayed twice and drawn out two and half months.

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For all the buildup to closing day, the closing meeting itself was uneventful. We arrived at the designated location for the hand-off of the keys, and within 45 minutes, we’d paid our cash, signed the papers, shook hands with our long-suffering real estate agent and the poor pastor who just wanted to write sermons not track down 100-year-old paperwork, and we were done.

We drove straight back to our rental house, where Tyler dropped me off so I could change into something more … suitable for demo.

“Grab a couple of cups,” he instructed as her put the truck into gear. “I’ll meet you at the church.”

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Pink boots from Safety Girl: Fashion first.

I changed into my new pink work boots (yes, because if I’m going to get dirty, I might as well do it in style) and grabbed two red Dixie cups. I put poopy puppy, our 10-year-old miniature schnauzer, on a leash, and we walked the two blocks to the church.

Meanwhile, Tyler stopped at the liquor store (conveniently, only two blocks from the church in the other direction) and invested in the finest bottle of champagne, er, sparkling wine, the village had to offer.

Tyler was fingering the key to the front door when I arrived.

“Oh, you waited for me.” I smiled.

And then we were sitting on an abandoned office chair and a 25-year-old padded banquet chair in the middle of our sanctuary, sipping champagne from red Dixie cups.

“Here’s to the church,” Tyler said.

“The church,” I said, looking around the quickly dimming room. We’d turned on the electricity (and, glory be, it worked) but we couldn’t find switches to the sanctuary lights, so as the winter sun began to set, the room took on a romantic atmosphere.

“Are you ready for this?” he asked.

Methodists don’t have confessionals, so I had to own up in the dimming light of the sanctuary.

“Now I’m scared.”

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Tomorrow: First things first. Read it here.

A place for every thingy-whatsit and every thingy-whatsit in its place

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: We’re waiting (and waiting) to close on the 126-year-old Methodist church we intend to renovate into our home.

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On Black Friday, Tyler got up before the sun did to wait in line at the nearby Home Depot. He arrived back at the rental house before I’d had my first coffee with orders:

“Help me get this thing unloaded.”

The thing was a tool chest. Or, more precisely, another tool chest. If I had a thing for books (and I did), Tyler had a thing for tools. Every time he used one of his tools to fix something or save us the cost of hiring someone to do the work, he reminded me: “I couldn’t have done that without the thingy-whatsit, you know. Aren’t you glad I have so many thingy-whatsits?” Only he didn’t say thingy-whatsit. All his tools had specific names and uses that somehow eluded me. I understood hammers and screwdrivers; I could even differentiate between a flat-head screwdriver and a Phillips screwdriver. But I could never remember the difference between a wrench and a pliers. And God help me if he started lauding the values of various kinds of saws.

All of these various implements required storage (of course—what’s jewelry without a jewelry box?). We might need a screwdriver or a wrench or a pliers (or a measuring tape or a sledgehammer) to transform our church into a house so thank goodness he found a tool box at Home Depot, right?

“It was too good a deal to pass up.”

Sort of like the church, I suppose.

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Tomorrow: Are you as tired of waiting for us to close on the church as we were? Then don’t miss tomorrow’s segment. Read it here.

A peaceful moment before the chaos to count blessings

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: The closing date on the old Methodist church we intend to convert into our home is delayed again.

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Chapter 8

Every Thanksgiving, I make Tyler verbalize all the things he’s thankful for in the past year. I hate to think of the holiday as only an opportunity stuff oneself, watch football and read the ads for Black Friday. Usually, on our way to a feast of turkey and pecan pie, we count down the Top 10 people and experiences for which we’re grateful.

This year, Thanksgiving fell smack in the middle of our two-week hiatus from getting our hands on the keys to our new old church. So we had to be thankful for finding the church, if not grateful for getting started on the project. We had no choice but to travel to enjoy a feast. Our little rental house was so small, it didn’t have room for a table, and I don’t think anyone would have enjoyed standing around the kitchen island to dine. So we drove to Tyler’s mother’s house and counted our blessings along the way: Very happy to have sold our house in the suburbs. Grateful for becoming grandparents. Thankful we had the opportunity to travel around a bit before settling down again. Excited to begin work on our little 126-year-old church.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 8 continues with a description of a Black Friday score. Read it here.

Go big or go home

Monica Lee4 Comments

Our story so far: My husband Tyler picked up a lot of experience when he undertook a mammoth project back in the early 1990s to renovate an old tobacco farmhouse without any modern amenities into his house.

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One of the things I like to say about my enterprising husband is that he is one to go big or go home. He likes big steaks, big trucks and, fortunately for me, big women (or at least tall ones; I’m 5-foot-10). Our RV is among the biggest on the road, and of course, he’s fond of big houses, too.

finished house
Tyler’s addition to his reno house nearly doubled the original square footage.

This first renovation project was no different. Once Tyler had the old tobacco farmhouse livable, he decided he needed more space. So he built a 24-by-36-foot two-story addition; the main floor was the family room and above it was the master bedroom. (He deconstructed the Swedish wood stove and moved it to heat the addition.) And then he built a three-car garage on the other side of the farmhouse.

When I say “he built it,” I’m being literal. He would frame one wall and invite a buddy or a relative over to help him stand it up. People who know Tyler won’t be surprised he paid his buddies in beer. A lot of beer.

The entire project took just less than two years to construct. Five years after he and his wife bought it, they moved to Minnesota. They sold the old tobacco farm for ten times what they’d paid to purchase it.

Ironically, Tyler’s old tobacco farmhouse transformation was big enough to house a whole congregation—let’s call it cathedral big. We drove by it not long ago, and there’s cross, a flag and a rustic sign out front that reads “Eternal Light Fellowship/Faith Hope Family/ Sunday Worship 10:30 a.m.”

fellowship church
That’s Tyler first renovated house, er, church, in the background.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 8 opens with a moment of gratitude. Read it here.

Homegrown chicken makes for a memorable feast

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: My husband Tyler intends to draw on his previous experience in the early 1990s transforming an old house on a tobacco farm as he faces the renovation of a 126-year-old Methodist church into our dream home.

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When Tyler acquired the property, the first step was emptying the place of the decades of cigarette rolling papers and other assorted junk accumulated by two old bachelors. The unfinished half-story had two old iron beds with four-inch thick mattresses. Tables on each side of the bed were piled high with identical clothing for the brothers: Bib overalls, stained V-neck T-shirts and union suits in varying degrees of being worn out. Behind the tobacco barn, near a plow and disc (put into use in their time by mules) stood a stack of aluminum pie tins as tall and as wide Tyler.

“There must have been more than a thousand,” Tyler mused when he told me about his project. Here his story deviated a bit from renovation concerns to memories of this property.

“Back there was a stump, too, the brothers used for butchering chickens,” he recalled. “I did, too. There was a broad-head axe hanging in the tobacco barn that I still have, and I used it to cut the heads off the chickens I grew in the yard. My grandma Blair helped me. I chopped the heads off, dipped them in a caldron of boiling water, and Grandma did the feathers. I can still see her there in a lawn chair plucking feathers.”

“Did they taste good, those chickens?” I asked, thinking of a book I’d read recently about how free-range chickens in decades past have so much more flavor than mass-market chicken breasts of today.

“They were the best chickens I’ve ever eaten,” he remembered.

Tylers first reno
Tyler at work on his first reno, circa 1992.

Tyler returned to remembering his renovation experience and the difficult physical labor required to pull off such an undertaking. After cleaning up the property, he knocked all the horsehair plaster and lathe off the walls of the farmhouse, installed 100-amp electrical service and wired the whole house. Tyler had taken vocational classes on electrical and picked up real-world experience by wiring rental housing and cabins with his grandfather. He installed a high-tech (at the time) Swedish wood stove outside and ran HVAC channels to heat the entire house.

Then he ran PVC pipe throughout the structure in order to bring running water (from a new well) inside to the kitchen, two bathrooms and a second-floor laundry. As the days turned into weeks, he put in his own septic system. The neighbor dug the trenches with a backhoe, Tyler laid the pipe and rock, and a guy came out to set the tank.

The septic system passed inspection. The plumbing passed inspection. The electrical passed inspection. Now it was habitable.

The basement was another phase. Years before, his parents figured out a masterful method for keeping the teen-aged Tyler busy: He dug out their entire basement by hand. So he put that experience to good use by digging out the tobacco farmhouse basement the same way, moving out the dirt with a little elevator into the back of a pickup truck. Once it was deep enough to stand up in, he poured a cement floor.

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Tomorrow: Tyler’s first whole-house renovation comes to a surprising and possibly ironic conclusion. Read it here.

One splinter of experience is worth a whole fixer upper of warning

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: Are you willing to take on a fixer upper? My husband and I thought we were, and we made a plan to renovate a 126-year-old Methodist church into our dream home.

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Chapter 7

My beloved husband Tyler knew well what it meant to renovate a house and why anyone about to tackle such an undertaking should proceed with caution.

Nearly thirty years ago, Tyler’s first whole-house renovation project began with Boone County’s oldest operational tobacco farm.

He and his wife at the time purchased the property in Northern Illinois for just the price of a new car in the 1980s from the two bachelor brothers who had grown tobacco there for decades. Now in their 80s, one of the brothers was in ill health and living in a nursing home; the other planned a move to join him.

tobacco farm
That’s Tyler there on the left, sawing. His grandfather, in the middle, and a buddy lend a hand to the construction project. The old tobacco barn is in the background.

One of the buildings on the farm was a distinctive tobacco barn with hinged foot-wide openings. They all locked from the inside with a wooden peg. The slates were opened to dry the tobacco hanging inside.

The brothers smoked their product. Every out building had Zig Zag cigarette rolling paper packages stuffed in every crevice.

The farmhouse had no heat except a warm-morning stove connected to a fuel oil tank. There was one light switch in every room connected to a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. Old horsehair plaster was on all the walls and ceilings. The flooring and trim was basic Douglas fir that could be refinished; the baseboards were distinctive. The main floor consisted of three rooms, and a steep stairway led to the second half-story. The basement was a five-foot-deep hole with a dirt floor.

There was no plumbing. The “running water” was a well pump outside. The brothers pumped water and brought it inside for drinking and bathing. When Tyler had the well tested, it was like death syrup, the levels of live bacteria and chloroform so high as to be practically toxic (chloroform was used an anesthetic in the Civil War). The “bathroom” was a two-hole outhouse on skids so the brothers could move it when the pit beneath it filled.

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Tomorrow: Hard physical effort transforms the old tobacco farm. Read it here.

The timeline for closing on a church is not ordained

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We moved into a rental house two blocks from the church, ready to get to work renovating it into our dream home.

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It was two weeks after we originally planned to close on the church (two weeks!), and no closing had been scheduled. The church still didn’t have the paperwork it required to designate authorized signatures.

Tyler had had it. He was anything but understanding at this point.

Sure, we were protected from the elements now, but really! We wanted to close on the church two months ago! Should we walk away from the deal?

Though we entertained a few conspiracy theories that the congregation really didn’t want to sell the church, we knew in our hearts they just weren’t as motivated to wrap things up as we were. So we decided to give them some incentive. We offered to extend our offer for two more weeks (admitting to ourselves it would be a regular miracle if we closed in two weeks), but we also lowered our offering price. Now our good deal was even better!

We sweated it out for twenty-four hours while we awaited a response, but the church accepted. So now we had a few thousand more in our budget and two more weeks to plan how to use it.

As we relaxed in front of the TV one evening in our little rental house, I asked Tyler how he was feeling about things.

“Excited,” he said right away. “And scared.”

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Tomorrow: Tyler is knows very well what he’s in for. Read it here.

What is an air bed without air? A sack

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We begin moving into a rental house two blocks from the church so we have a warm place to clean up and crash while we renovate.

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On Days Two and Three of our move, we transferred our meager belongings from the camper and the urgent items from the cargo trailer into our tiny rental house. Our most critical need: A bed. We would need restful slumber if we ever hoped to survive renovating the church.

We’d packed our big, beautiful king-sized Sleep Number bed into the cargo trailer the day before we moved out of our cardboard box in the suburbs. The camper had room for only a queen-sized bed, so we bid farewell to the best bed upon which either of us had ever slept when we moved out.

Unlike a standard mattress and box spring, a Sleep Number bed is a unique combination of foam, air pillows, zippered compartments and an inflation device. We’d carefully packed it all away in the cargo trailer. The last thing to go in was the first thing to come out.

Amid sleeting flurries in southern Wisconsin, we cajoled the pieces of the bed out of storage and hauled them into the little house. We slammed shut the cargo trailer doors and parked it on the now-muddy gravel driveway inside the garage foundation. A garage had once stood on this lot, but now, only the cement-block foundation remained. After much cold-handed grunting and groaning, we affixed a boot on the tire and paddle-locks on the trailer doors.

Tyler had built a platform for the bed in our new bedroom out of two-by-fours and plywood (the original platform remained in the trailer). We set to work assembling our bed.

After sorting out all the pieces, we realized we were missing one: The inflation device.

An air bed isn’t much of a bed without air.

Ugh.

Back to the cargo trailer to pinpoint the apparatus.

“What does it look like?” I implored, while climbing over boxes and craning to see the labels on bins.

Clearly, I wasn’t paying attention eleven months before when we disassembled the bed.

“It’s the size of a bread box,” Tyler instructed.

Believe me, a bread box is a needle when the 30-foot cargo trailer is the haystack.

Especially when the air is filled with ice-cold wet sleet.

Eventually, we found the contraption, repacked and re-secured the trailer, and retreated to the warmth of our little rental house. Once we had all the pieces, the parts went together pretty easily. As we lay on our beloved king-sized bed looking at the spiderweb-free ceiling of our warm little house, we were content. I was amazed at how quickly I felt comfortable in our little rental. It felt like a mansion compared to the RV, and I swiftly reacclimated to house living.

In three days, we would close on the church, and we could start our project at long last.

Or so we thought.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 6 concludes with a twist any fan of “The Money Pit” could have predicted. Read it here.

Moving day

Monica Lee3 Comments

Our story so far: Rather than move directly into the church we intended to convert into our house, the rapidly cooling autumn weather prompts us to rent a house nearby.

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Chapter 6

When it came time to move into little house two blocks from the church ten days after we’d signed the rental papers, we decided to do it over the course of three days. We spent the first day cleaning.

Oh, the house looked clean enough upon first inspection. No garbage. The floors appeared swept. The cupboards probably had been wiped out. Probably.

But my husband, born a Virgo, wasn’t one to trust when it came to cleaning. One of a Virgo’s principle traits is perfectionism. If a Virgo sets out to do something, he typically doesn’t rest until it’s done very (very!) well which I guess is a good thing when it comes to cleanliness (and church reconstruction).

He brought along five gallons of concentrated Simply Green. Five gallons.

We scrubbed literally every surface, and what we didn’t scrub, we swept or vacuumed. Gone were the whispery spider webs in the ceiling corners. Gone was the scrounge on the bathroom floor. Gone was the greasy dust on the ceiling fans that had clearly never been touched, let alone dusted, by the previous resident.

This was a good warm-up for the church, which had sat empty for sixteen months and had 119 years before that to accumulate gunk. Ceiling fan dust would be the least of it.

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Tomorrow: A bed, a bed, our kingdom for a bed! Read it here.