The former church we now call home once hosted meetings for Alcoholics Anonymous, and about twice a month, someone rings our doorbell about 7:30 in the evening asking about the weekly AA meeting.
“Nope, it’s not here anymore,” we say, conscious of the lack of anonymity represented by one of us standing in our open doorway. “AA meets at the church around the corner now.” And we offer directions to the nearby Congregational church.
We have had to admit our powerlessness over old Web listings that continue to show our address for Tuesday evening AA meetings. If it’s got “meeting,” “recovery” or “AA” in the web address, it might list our house as the meeting locale when you drill down in the search results.
That’s one of the weird things about living in a former church. What with the belfry and the church sign, which I still adore, we look like we might still be a church, so no one can be blamed for knocking on our door. No one has shown up for a Sunday morning sermon, but we’ve also had a couple of people drop by looking for the Loaves & Fishes food bank, which was once hosted in our basement. We give them directions, too, not nonperishables.
I don’t mind.
Those infrequent confused visitors are beautiful reminders that our home was once a hub in the community, a place where people met and extended their hands in support to each other.
The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members.
We suffered a loss here at the Church Sweet Home estate, and it hit me harder than I expected.
We cut down three mostly dead Chinese elm trees on our property line last month. Well, to be specific, we had them cut down by the pros. Removing 65-foot-tall trees is not for amateurs unless you’re interested in starring in stupid idiot videos involving chainsaws and house disasters.
Our tree, iced.
We knew they were mostly dead. During an ice storm earlier this year, one of the trees split nearly in half. The branches clogged up the driveway next door, and that’s when we understood we needed to take drastic action. Before some fallen branches clipped a car. Or a person.
So, Tyler called a tree guy, and he diagnosed the trees as kaput. I suspect he was a little like a surgeon who fixes every malady with a scalpel, but we didn’t have any holistic remedies at the ready. So chainsaw it was.
The project required two days, four trucks (some with buckets) and at least six guys. Strange weather befell us, and the men worked through sunshine, clouds, rain and snow. They started at the top of the trees, which towered far above the top of our belfry, and worked their way to the ground.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Yes. It sounds like a chainsaw and feels like an earthquake. The church literally shuddered when the trunks were felled. I shuddered, too.
The tree guys knew what they were doing. Our trees were removed without incident.
Where mulch comes from.
Except to the trees. Which were essentially massacred. The trunks were cut into pieces and hauled away to be used for pallets, we were told. The branches were turned into chips, mulch for someone’s yard maybe.
Chinese elm is a rapid-growing species native to eastern Asia. It is highly resistant to Dutch elm disease (which killed off three-quarters of all American elms in North America). It wasn’t disease that killed off our trees. It was just age. And ice, I guess, which is problematic for the older set who is a little unsteady on their feet, too.
Eventually we’ll dig out these stumps, too.
When the tree guys finished their work, I inspected the remaining stumps in a way I had never looked at the trees in the first place. I didn’t appreciate them when they were around. I was sort of sad. I counted 70 rings in the stumps, so they were planted about the same time the church underwent a major renovation to build a new entryway and move the altar from the east side of the sanctuary to the north side. The ’40s must have been a good decade for the Methodists here. Renovations like that take money, which in the church world, required enthusiastic members.
Our yard, even without the spindly leafless branches, looks weirdly naked without our dying Chinese elms. Of course, it doesn’t help that the gray of early spring casts a pall on the entire landscape.
I suppose the trees lived a good life and died a good death. But I miss them.
Here is how our trees looked while the men were working on them (I don’t have a good picture of them with leaves from this angle).And here’s how our side yard looks now.
# # #
Today’s headline is a quote from American author Karen Joy Fowler. She is best known as the author of the best-selling novel The Jane Austen Book Club that was made into a movie.
I learned a few things about my husband of ten years as we renovated our 127-year-old church into a home. I knew he had a lot of tools, but I didn’t know he was so skilled at using them—hammers, sanders, saws, paint sprayers. I didn’t know he knew how to run an excavator. I didn’t know his good taste extended to interior design.
And I didn’t know he was an audiophile.
He kept this fact mostly secret throughout construction. Maybe it wasn’t purposeful. Maybe the language he spoke just went in one ear and out the other (did you see what I was doing there with that idiom?). I didn’t know the difference between a tweeter and a woofer let alone between a Klipsch and a Miller & Kreisel.
Before we even built the cabinetry for the back wall of the great room, we had enormous speakers lining the floor. He struck a deal with a friend on some of them (of course he did), and he collected a few more from a relative’s collection. Then, some weeks later, he found online a woofer, or maybe it was a subwoofer, with all the bells and whistles. He already owned the receiver. Or at least I think we did. At a certain point, I quit asking questions about what had been squirreled away and what was being newly acquired. But he wanted me to mention his receiver has “4K ultra HD network AV surround” with 1,200 watts of something-or-other 11.2. I literally have no idea what that means. But an audiophile does.
That’s one of the reasons we “needed” so much cabinetry in the great room. It was necessary to accommodate our hobbies. One of my hobbies is, or at least was, scrapbooking, and I have at least 20 finished 12-by-12 scrapbooks that need to be stored somewhere. And one of Tyler’s hobbies is listening to music. To do that right, at least in his mind, he needed a lot of speakers.
See all those pink outlines? Those are speakers. Just the ones in the front of the room.
In the end, Tyler connected 25 speakers (including subwoofers, woofers, midrange, tweeters, horn tweeters and piezo tweeters) to his system using 700 feet of speaker wire. Speaker wire was like nails for a while there. Seemed like we were always buying another box of it.
Then, as he connected various components, there would be the inevitable tuning. He would play a few lines of some song at top volume over and over again, adjusting the EQ, tone controls, balance and fade on the big screen. Because, of course, the whole system has airplay, ethernet, wifi and bluetooth connection capability. Now, all he has to do is pull out his phone and he has access to just about any piece of music on Amazon Prime, Spotify and iTunes.
Thanks to digital music, there is not a single record, 8-track tape, cassette or CD in any one of those cupboards. When you have a system like ours, you appreciate when someone “remasters” the digital version of a golden oldie.
Oh, do I appreciate it.
For all the lack of attention I paid to Tyler’s machinations regarding his stereo system, listening to music in our chome now is like no experience short of a live concert in a concert hall.
It’s grand. A rock tune is one thing, but classical music, which Tyler plays nearly every Sunday morning, practically brings me to tears. It’s amazing.
We’ve watched the movie “Bohemian Rhapsody” in our living room, not once but twice, it was so good. Queen, in concert. Freddie Mercury was singing right to me.
We’ve also landed on a great parlor game. The other night, we entertained my mother-in-law and her brother (Tyler’s uncle). For an hour, Tyler the DJ had us making song requests, which he programmed into the mix. We enjoyed hits from Mötley Crüe, Blondie, Dave Brubeck, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils and Neil Diamond, to name a few. Everything genre from 1950 to 2019, Abba to Zhou. If I didn’t like someone’s choice, I knew my selection would be coming right up. What a show.
One of my requests was Peter Gabriel’s Big Time. I think there couldn’t be a better tune for our venue.
And I will pray to a big god As I kneel in the big church.
Big time I’m on my way—I’m making it. Big time. Big time. I’ve got to make it show, yeah. Big time. Big time. So much larger than life.
As we have reinvested in home furnishings and decorations to style our Church Sweet Home, we’ve run across a number of amazing artists and vendors. Sometimes the vendor is a big-box-type store but more often it’s an online retailer or a local vendor. On some Wednesdays here on Church Sweet Home, I will share our latest find and reveal who provided it to help other interested home designers.
# # #
One of the distinctive features of our great room is our ceiling beams. There is the fireplace, and the spiral stairway, and that fab reused kitchen, too, but today we’re talking beams.
Faux wood beams.
The very first minute I stood in the old church sanctuary when we were checking it out with our real estate agent, I knew I wanted to put wood beams on that big beautiful ceiling. And Tyler figured out how to do it without hoisting two-ton hunks of timber up there.
Tyler found rigid polyurethane foam beams online—lighter and more durable than actual wood beams and more affordable, they were advertised as being “virtually indistinguishable from real wood.” The array of options was dazzling.
L beam or U beam?
Rough sawn or hand hewn (or any of eight other textures)?
How wide? How high? How long? Do you need endcaps?
What color? We knew we wanted “brown” but we could choose from among eleven shades of brown. We finally settled on antique cherry.
They arrived some weeks later by semi-truck, not your typical delivery but packed perfectly to protect our precious cargo.
Here are our faux wood beams, waiting in the great room for installation.
Remarkable. They really were virtually indistinguishable from real wood beams. And they were as light as cappuccino foam, which made them easier to install.
This was just the distinction we wanted for the cathedral ceiling of our great room.
Tyler found our beams at the Architectural Depot, “the do-it-yourself superstore.” Given their “superstore” tagline, they sell a lot more than faux wood beams. If you’re in the market for ceiling medallions, moulding, PVC millwork, shutters, columns, corbels & brackets, ventilation, doors and windows, siding and components, weathervanes or yard items, they offer things, too.
Here’s a close-up view from the balcony of our hand-hewn faux wood.Antique cherry is just the right contrast against our white ceiling.
We also used the faux wood beams in a smaller area: The entryway. We used them to add interest to an otherwise standard peaked ceiling.
When we bought the church, the entryway ceiling was flat, covered with undistinctive ceiling tiles.Here’s how the ceiling looked after we installed the beams (but before the light fixture). They coordinate perfectly with our castle doors.This picture of us chilling in our great room was taken by our Nest security system. This bottom-up shot really shows how grand the ceiling looks.
You can check out all that the Architectural Depot has to offer by clicking here. The website is user-friendly and you’ll find all kinds of great tips when you place an order. Also, we were able to order short sample pieces of beam before investing a couple thousand in the final product. I highly recommend doing that if you have a big project (or even a small one).
Today’s headline is a partial quote from commentator Andy Rooney: “Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.”
When you’re on a home improvement kick, absolutely everywhere you go offers the potential for inspiration.
Early on, Tyler and I bided our time waiting to close our deal on the church by visiting home improvement shows, home improvement stores, furniture stores, parades of homes, every show on HGTV, friends’ houses … you get the picture. We kept that up throughout construction.
Eventually, we got to the decorating phase, and I spent a lot of time at Pier 1. And as luck would have it, the nearby Pier 1 was next door to a Bath & Body Works store. So easy to stop in for hand soap (and body lotion and lip gloss …). I also spied this display in the back of the store behind the cash register. Where other people saw a brightly lit 100% guarantee, I saw 100% bright idea.
Welcome to Bath & Body Works.
The owner told me that in other franchise stores, that space filled by the sign was a big television screen with animated advertising; she just didn’t have the flat screen. I loved the lighting effect and the window pane design, and I thought, “That idea could work on the back wall of the great room.”
Click! I took a picture.
That retail display inspired the custom cabinetry on the right side of our fireplace in the church.
You’re going to have to use your imagination for this side.
Well, we’re not quite done, but I’ve been stringing you along on the back wall of the church for a week now. My “advertising” is still in the works. The flower, mirror and adorable picture of my granddaughter are placeholders for a grouping of a dozen canvas-wrapped vacation and family photos I’m going to display there. Also, we have rope lighting hidden in there, but these photos were taken during the day. You’re just going to have to trust me. It’s going to be epic.
This angle shows the pantry (left) and the entire back wall of the great room.
Overall, we don’t have perfect symmetry on the left and right sides of the fireplace, but we wiped that out as soon as we installed the spiral staircase. We have coordination. Matchy-matchy is so yesterday’s Sears showroom anyway.
Let’s remind ourselves where we began. Oh, dear.
Here’s what the back wall of the church looked like when we purchased the building.And here’s how it looks today.
Before I move along to the east side of the fireplace, let’s make a quick stop in front of the fireplace.
(Feel like you’re joining the conversation mid-stream? I’m sharing how the back wall of my great room in the converted 127-year-old church turned out. Check out this post to read about the pantry and this post to read about the left side of the fireplace.)
I wanted to create a little conversation area in front of the fireplace, but Tyler and I struggled to find the right chairs. They needed to be comfortable and low profile in order to clear the spiral stair on the left side of the hearth. Oh, and the right color—not too gray and not too splashy.
This photo makes the chair look beige, but it’s more caramelly than that.
We ended up choosing custom back-tufted caramel-colored leather chairs. And they swivel! Which is perfect for a guest who might want to warm up by the fire and then turn to enjoy the conversation.
We ordered them before Thanksgiving, and they weren’t delivered until February. It pained me to entertain at Christmas without them, but when they finally arrived, they were perfect.
The nailhead detail coordinates with the dark navy storage ottomans we found at another furniture store. Beside stashing our granddaughter’s random toys and books inside between her visits, the ottomans perform as footrests and drink rests, as needed.
You can see a peek of the right side of the fireplace cabinetry.
The whole setting is arranged on the faux bear rug Tyler found online (no bears were killed in the making of this rug—read about it here).
(I’ll share another picture of the right side of the fireplace later this week.)
From the beginning, Tyler imagined bookshelves on either side of our floor-to-ceiling fireplace in our Church Sweet Home. I imagined he was thinking of something along the lines of a study in a Sherlock Holmes novel.
The shelves we ended up with are more open and airy than an English detective’s. As with the room in general, they are not symetrical on each side of the fireplace.
Here’s a reminder of how the back wall of the great room looked after we finished the floor.Today, I’m showing off the shelves on the left side. This spot is obscured to some extent by our spiral stairway.
Shelving, looking from the fireplace.The cabinets along the bottom hide all sorts of stereo equipment. There’s a front-throwing subwoofer (an audiophile understands this terminology) in a screen-covered cabinet on the bottom left there, and a huge standing speaker inside that screen-covered cabinet flanking the fireplace.
Shelves from pantry side.I’ve decorated the shelves in Joanna Gaines style, including some Methodist hymnals (bottom left), the wooden bowl created by my dad (middle right) and a couple of functional miniature cannons that have been in Tyler’s family for some years.
Finishing the back wall is no longer a mystery! I’ll share the right side of the fireplace later this week.
# # #
Today’s headline is a quote put into Sherlock Holmes’ mouth by Sir Author Conan Doyle in A Study in Scarlet.
If you were to do a deep dive into the computer files on my computer desktop for all things related to our church conversion project, you’d find among the first documents I created one called “House wish list.” It’s dated shortly after the congregation accepted our purchase offer on the church but more than a month before we actually took ownership. At this point in the project, we had walked through the church three times but we were just dreaming and planning because we couldn’t do any work yet.
On the two-page list are items like “method for displaying china,” “walk-in closet” and “ginormous *expletive* TV screen” (excuse my French). Check, check and check. We worked all those things into the design for our Church Sweet Home.
Also on the list for the kitchen? “Pantry area with lots of storage.”
In one of the early floor plans, our pantry was a walk-in closet sharing space from what is now our walk-in-clothes closet, but we had to scrap that idea when we found the amazingly priced display kitchen. We designed our kitchen around the cabinets that came with the display kitchen, and that meant putting our refrigerator into the pantry space. The display kitchen also failed to leave room for a microwave.
We plowed ahead knowing we would figure something out.
This picture was taken shortly after we took ownership of the church before we demoed much of anything. The closet on the left became our back door to the garage. The area on the right is the spot that would someday become our pantry. In the area on the right, you can see the step-up of the altar area and the end of the communion rail, both of which were torn out during demo.
At some point, I saw a picture of a bank of shallow floor-to-ceiling cabinets in a kitchen, and I figured we could turn the northwest corner of the great room into our pantry using some version of this concept. When we moved into the church, a pair of beat-up wicker cabinets served as the pantry.
A pair of wicker cabinets under the spiral stairway comprised our pantry when we moved into the church last fall.
After Christmas, Tyler took up the project of building cabinets for the pantry and the back wall of the great room. Note: That’s about 25 linear feet of cabinets which is to say a lot of cabinetry (“go big or go home,” remember?). After much shopping, he determined he could buy ready-to-assemble cabinets for about $10,000 not including counter tops.
Well, we didn’t have $10,000 to built cabinets for canned food and stereo equipment. The Tequila Budget was so far back in our rear view mirror we couldn’t see it anymore but that doesn’t mean we didn’t think about the bottom line.
After consulting with You-Can-Call-Me Al, Tyler determined he could build and paint custom cabinets for significantly less than $10,000. In the end, the pantry and the back wall of cabinets and shelving cost about $8,300 in labor and materials (including the counter tops, cabinet knobs and finishing trim). We got exactly what we were envisioning, so going the totally custom route was the right choice for us.
Our pantry, after.
My pantry now includes space for a mop and broom (in the cupboard on the end there), space for the microwave and all my cookbooks, and a whole lot of larder space for canned goods, paper towels, potato chips and all kinds of chocolate (must have space for chocolate).
Tyler and You-Can-Call-Me Al built these cabinets from scatch, and You-Can-Call-Me-Al figured out how to accommodate our semi-straight walls and undulating floors (it’s a 127-year-old church, remember). We chose the same military blue cabinet colors as we have in the beverage bar in the opposite corner of the great room. The counter top is butcher block stained the same color as our front entryway steps. You-Can-Call-Me-Al, who we initially hired to tile our shower, tiled the back splash in the same manner as the rest of the kitchen.
It’s a party line. One-ringy-dingy, two-ringy-dingy…
The corner at the end of the pantry remotely resembles a phone booth. It seemed to be the perfect place to mount an antique telephone.
# # #
I’ll share pictures of the back wall of cabinets flanking the fireplace in the great room in Church Sweet Home posts next week. Stay tuned.
As we have reinvested in home furnishings and decorations to style our Church Sweet Home, we’ve run across a number of amazing artists and vendors. Sometimes the vendor is a big-box-type store but more often it’s an online retailer or a local vendor. On some Wednesdays here on Church Sweet Home, I will share our latest find and reveal who provided it to help other interested home designers.
# # #
We drove by the inconspicuous property at least a dozen times before we stopped, lured in with a sandwich board sign that promoted a deal on wool sweaters.
Our curiosity was amply rewarded when we discovered all the interesting imported goods at Ginger Blossom, a vendor for ethnic and traditional crafts, rugs, furniture, sweaters, antiques and more from all over the world, displayed and sold at a farm just outside of Richmond, Illinois.
We liked the furniture offerings so much, we invested in three pieces.
Our china cabinet is a huge piece (it came in two parts), and it displays all my china.
The dining room table is made of teak. My father teased that it could use a good sanding, but we love the rustic look of it.
And the dresser in our master bedroom is a charismatic piece that adds color and interest to the room while holding sweaters inside and our TV on top.
Most of Ginger Blossom’s goods were imported from Asia, so the farm has a wide selection of stone Buddas and Hindi gods, but it also offered unique jewelry, colorful dishware, one-of-a-kind furniture, hand-woven rugs and cotton bedding. According to the website, “The core inventory features primarily home furnishings and accent pieces, and ethnic and tribal collectibles, including rustic pine furniture, furniture made from architectural salvage, and antique Swati and Tibetan trunks.” There is an entire room of fantastic rugs.
For Christmas, I gave several members of my family hand-knitted gloves I found at Ginger Blossom, and in the summertime, it’s a great place to find pots and garden decor, too.
Ginger Blossom is absolutely worth the stop if you’re visiting the area. They’re open daily and you can find it at 3016 Route 173, Richmond, Illinois.
By the way, our china cabinet comes with a story.
My son-in-law, who has lived in the area all his life and has heard all the stories, jokes that our china cabinet is “the murder hutch.”
A couple was murdered by a motorcycle gang in 1993 at the property that is now Ginger Blossom, where we found our beautiful cabinet. The couple’s son was wrongly convicted of the crime and sentenced to die by lethal injection until a law professor and Northwestern University School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Convictions took up the case. He was released and wrote a book about it, which is for sale in the gift shop of Ginger Blossom. Look for In Spite of the System: A Personal Story of Wrongful Conviction & Exoneration by Gary Gauger.
Church Sweet Home 