Hitches in our hospitality

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We had come a loooong way in renovating the old Methodist church into a home, but our early guests tolerated a few inconveniences in the midst of finishing the project.

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None of the bathroom doors had locks. The pocket doors on the powder room and guest bath didn’t even have handles yet. And while the toilet, shower and sink were all operational in the guest bath, the tub remained dry. We still didn’t have the proper faucet to turn the big basin into an oasis. And vanity mirrors? Oh, those were waiting for vanity lighting which was waiting for proper wiring and then cosmetic surgery to the drywall. My mother, who gamely got ready the first morning she visited without any mirrors, was inordinately grateful when I lent her the makeup mirror from the master bath (an act I should have performed sooner).

Also awkward for guests: Our beautiful French doors leading to our bedroom lacked window coverings, revealing our bed (and whoever was in it) to the hall. A guest using the back stairs walked right by these doors on their way to or from their own sleeping quarters.

french doors with no window covering
The doors have panache. But not so much privacy.

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Tomorrow: Little finishing touch that works. Read about it here.

Neighborhood ruckus

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We moved into the old Methodist church and tried to make it a cozy home.

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Imagining how awesome you’ll be at making sure your guests are comfy and cozy and actually executing your theories, as it turns out, are two different things.

Oh, sure, we had a nice bed. And we even found a nice place to put it. But when we entertained our first overnight guests in the church, we didn’t even have a door for the guest room. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

Our first overnight guests were Tyler’s mom and her mate. They were excited to see our work, and we were excited to show it off, so they paid us a visit a few days after we moved in. They were very forgiving of our semi unfinished spaces and the plethora of boxes we had everywhere, but we managed to pull together real dishes for dinner and we had the guest bed assembled for sleeping.

The next morning, we inquired as to how they slept, and we listened carefully to learn how we could make the guest experience better.

“Oh, well, I’m such a light sleeper anyway,” Tyler’s mother began.

Uh-oh.

She described how a car alarm woke her up in the middle of the night, and how it kept her awake for an hour.

Tyler and I exchanged puzzled looks. We hadn’t heard any car alarms. In fact, our room was so well insulated, we hardly heard any street traffic. Hmm.

She went on to say the car’s owner must have tried using a dremel tool to get inside his car. “Hum, hum, hum,” she re-enacted the sound.

Her mate nodded in agreement. He heard it, too.

How odd, Tyler and I said to each later. We were skeptical. We heard nothing. “Maybe the belfry lets in more noise than we know,” I suggested. “Maybe we need to sleep up there and see how noisy it really is.”

The next night, Tyler hogged the covers and I couldn’t get comfortable, so I crept upstairs to try the guest bed.

At two o’clock in the morning, I awoke to an alarm. As I got my bearings, I realized the sound was a cell phone. At first I thought Tyler was playing a trick on me to get me back to bed, so I got up to investigate. The sound was coming from the kitchen, which was right below the second-floor guest room. I tiptoed down the spiral stairway to find my old cell phone ringing and vibrating on the granite countertop.

I switched it off and realized my mother-in-law hadn’t heard a car alarm the previous night, she heard my phone alarm. And the dremel tool? It was the reverberation of the vibrate buzz. Tyler had pulled my old phone out of a box of cords he unpacked a few days before in order to find all his stereo parts, and we plugged it in to see if it still worked. In all the time it sat idle, it somehow confused a.m. with p.m., and it had been going off–for an hour–every night at 2 o’clock because long ago I had an alarm set to give my dog (who had been gone seven months) her afternoon epilepsy pill.

We never heard the phone go off, but without a door on the balcony to the guest room, the sound carried clearly up there. As Sergeant Sacker made famous in 1979’s When a Stranger Calls: “We’ve traced the call … it’s coming from inside the house!”

Turning off the phone fixed this problem, but our early guests endured other hardships and inconveniences.

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Tomorrow: Tough to tell who’s the fairest without a mirror. Read about it here.

Fire in the hearth kindles hygge, but the fire of creative energy fizzles out

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We’d chosen a couple of different rugs for various rooms in the old Methodist church we had renovated into a residence and were now decorating.

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The bear rug looked even better once Tyler got the fireplace going. One rainy day during garage construction, Tyler supervised a fireplace installer (i.e., he sat on the couch while the installer connected the gas and built the fake logs); most of the project—like punching holes through the bricks and snaking the venting through to the roof—had been completed during construction, only the last 10 percent was left. Within ninety minutes, we had a roaring fire in the fireplace (“I could have done it,” Tyler said, “but it would have taken me a lot longer”). With a click of a remote, we could watch the flames dance, giving off heat in the old church as the days grew shorter and the evening chillier. Sitting in front of the fire wearing wool socks and drinking hot tea—now that’s hygge. The timing of our move couldn’t have been better for taking advantage of the coziness factor. Almost exactly a year before, in fact, we had been living in our RV in Tyler’s cousin’s yard buying propane a hundred dollars at a time, we were going through it so fast, while we waited to close on the church.

hygge churchsweethome

So we had a rug for the fireplace, just not one for the sectional. And now I felt like I had to coordinate whatever we chose to go under the sectional with the rug in the dining corner, and the tile rug in the kitchen and the bear rug in front of the fireplace, and oh, yeah, we had carpeting on the balcony, too, and technically, the balcony was part of the great room, right?

This is when paralysis set in. I couldn’t decide. I just couldn’t. Tyler and I went furniture shopping one Saturday, and we visited a warehouse store, a discount store, a mass market store and at least three different antique shops. We were looking for the right chairs to set in front of the fireplace, and oh, if we could find a living room rug and a sofa table and a couple of end tables, well, all the better. Oh, and we could use about a half dozen lamps, too. Nothing was right, and we hadn’t spent a dime all day. The day’s shadows grew long. When my stomach started growling and Tyler’s happy hour flag began fluttering in his mind, we were wandering around the sprawling showroom of a regional furniture dealer. The salesman showed us a pair of chairs that we could special order in just about any color or fabric. I was ready to choose anything, just to tick something off the to-do list and Tyler was so tired, he just sat in one of the chairs admiring the swivel mechanism. The salesman, who had by now heard our spiel about furnishing an enormous space that was once a church sanctuary, suggested we might like to enlist the help of one of their interior designers. Would we like to meet him? Sure, why not, I said.

Instead of walking about of the store with a couple of chairs neither of us really loved, we walked out with an appointment with Pierre (his name wasn’t really Pierre, but he reminded me of a creative spirit with distinctive taste and an air of serenity, like I imagined a guy named Pierre might have).

If Pierre couldn’t help us find a rug and ten other pieces of furniture and suggest artwork to hang on the walls, well, no one could. We were willing to give him a shot anyway.

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Tomorrow: Our poor first guests. Commiserate with them here.

Bearly

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: We covered our refinished wood floors in the old Methodist church with rugs of all shapes and sizes.

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My internet-shopping husband tried to get me to choose a rug for the “living corner” of the great room, too. He narrowed the search parameters to a particular size and color and still we could have paged through two million options. Nothing spoke to me. Then I began questioning the color. Then I wondered if I really wanted that size. Every choice looked right. Then they all looked wrong.

We’d already made one rug choice for the corner of the great room that contained the fireplace and sectional. Or rather, Tyler did. During one of his early morning shopping trips (some people shop the internet at night while consuming liquor—Tyler did his damage armed with coffee before anyone else got up), Tyler ordered a special rug.

A very large package of unknown origin (at least to me) arrived one day before we had even moved in. As Tyler unpacked it, he exclaimed, “Oh, it’s the bear rug! Check this out,” as he unfurled a huge, furry, strangely shaped mat.

Indeed, it looked a lot like a bear rug. Only it was made of polyester and didn’t have any teeth.

Early on, after we made an offer on the church but before we closed the deal, we toured a house on a Parade of Homes. I spotted a bear rug (a real one) in one of those million-dollar homes, and I told Tyler we had to have one of those in the church. It was the sort of unique textural piece that would be right at home in a former church in southern Wisconsin, I thought. What’s more cozy than curling up on a bear rug in front of the fireplace? Tyler remembered.

“How much did you spend on that?” I asked, loving that he remembered, that he agreed he should have one, that he shopped for it and bought it, knowing I would approve.

“Only two hundred bucks!”

So when we moved in, we rolled it out in front of the fireplace almost right away. It did look right at home. Only the robot vacuum cleaner, which would get tied up in it every time he vacuumed, protested.

bear rug
Can almost hear him roar, huh?

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Tomorrow: The fireplace. Read about it here.

Tacky gets upgraded with texture

Monica Lee3 Comments

Our story so far: Choosing the right rugs for our newly converted church proved to be challenging.

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For more than a month, our new dining room table sat on a bed of furniture blankets as we weighed our rug options. One evening, as Tyler forced me to adjudicate while he paged through literally hundreds of rug options on various online retailers’ websites, we struck upon a jute rug with formal navy striping. I liked the texture of the twine-like substance (ease of cleaning remained to be seen) and the simplicity of the design which was on the edges, not the center of the rug (what’s the point of a center design when the table covers it?). When the rug arrived, we wasted no time replacing the ugly furniture blankets. Classy replaced crass in about ten minutes.

dining room rug
Here’s a look at our dining “corner,” complete with new jute rug, in this picture taken from the balcony.

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Tomorrow: You think jute has texture. Wait until you see what we put in front of the fireplace. Check it out here.

I like to say I believe in ghosts so I don’t get haunted by one

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We interrupt our storytelling to wish our readers a happy Halloween!

church sign halloween
Because people ask, for the record, we’ve experienced no sign of any ghosts residing in the old Methodist church. If they’re there, they’re fat and happy (i.e., quiet).

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Today’s headline is a quote from “The X Factor” contestant Ella Henderson. The quote on the church sign is a popular internet meme, sometimes attributed to @lovemydogduck.

Tomorrow: Anything is better than what we first put the dining room table on. Read about it here.

I’m with stupid

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: Choosing rugs to cover the hard-earned refinished wood floors in the old Methodist church proved difficult.

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I agonized for weeks leading up to the move about the color scheme for our master bedroom, mostly because I was too cheap to buy new sheets. We had good quality sheets for the king-sized bed in khaki and in a white-and-blue print. Either would work just fine in our master, but I didn’t have a decent quilt to match. (I was the sort of woman who liked to match her bra and underwear to match, too, even though almost no one but ever saw them.) I ended up with an all-white bed-in-a-bag with a comforter, knowing I still wanted a lighter quilt to fold at the foot of the bed (eventually, I found a great deal on a navy blue one). Maybe later I’d invest in some more printed pillow cases.

I settled on a mottled gray, black and turquoise rug. We also bought a matching runner for the Hall of History, which was right outside the bedroom. The runner was so wide, it covered up all the interesting paint we left on the floor, so I moved it into the bedroom as a path to the bathroom (so main rug was right size, runner was wrong size, at least for its intended purpose). Of course, this meant making another choice for the Hall of History at some point—ugh.

master rugs
An ant’s eye view of the master bedroom.

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Thursday: A rug with texture. Read about it here.

Magic carpet

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: My husband and I had renovated an old Methodist church into our home, and now worked to make it cozy.

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Floor coverings. Oh, you’d think we had the most difficult part done once Tyler applied the last coat of polyurethane to the refinished floors, but no. Wood floors are oh, so chic, but they are not cozy. Rugs are de rigueur, and choosing rugs is not for the timid. Google “how  to choose a rug,” and you’ll get 113 million pieces of advice. Tips on finding the right size sift to the top, so anyone with access to the internet and a few minutes of time can figure that out. Choosing a material, a design and a color proved to be paralyzing for me. These were not towels or curtains that could be easily changed if they were wrong—a properly sized rug covered a lot of real estate. And if I didn’t like what I purchased, cha-ching. Good rugs weren’t cheap.

The first rooms to get rugs were the bedrooms (which saved us the trouble of having to move beds). Tyler’s favorite approach—shopping Amazon—led him to Houzz, where he found the rugs for the second floor guest room and our master suite. He parsed through hundreds of options, narrowing them to three, and made me choose.

On the second floor, where the trim was white and the walls were gray as in the rest of the church, my accent color was seafoam green. I knew I wanted to use a handmade quilt I’d won in a raffle on the bed (it was quite a prize for $5 in raffle tickets), and its main color was crimson, so a version of green would complement it. I also planned to put my antique steamer trunk at the foot of the bed, and Tyler had once had it painted for me by a Rockford, Illinois artist as a gift; the color scheme was cream and blue and seafoam green. For the rug, I chose a muted tradition design in gray and greenish, big enough to cover the floor beneath the bed and the walkway to the bathroom.

second floor bedroom before
Here’s a look at how the second story looked when we first took ownership of the church.
second story bedroom
And here is how it looks now, complete with rug. The door on the left leads to the bathroom, the little door on the right leads to the playhouse under the eaves and the white door on the far right is the belfry. (A different headboard is in store.)

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Tomorrow: A rug for the master. Read about it here.

You don’t know anything about space

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We moved into the old Methodist church we renovated, and commenced with installing creature comforts.

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One weekend morning, Tyler and I installed shelving inside our master closet. The closet rods were great, but only half the story. Shelving was necessary to make the space above our heads useful. Much measuring, sawing and drilling ensued, but we accomplished this necessary project, too, with only one mishap. While sawing a hunk of shelving on a table saw, Tyler lost his grip and the hunk hurled itself into his stomach. “Ooph,” he exclaimed in a manner eerily similar to Skipper on “Gilligan’s Island”; for a week, he had a perfectly rectangular bruise across his torso (fortunately for me, I earned no blame in this). Just another badge of honor earned by renovating a 126-year-old church.

closet shelves

With shelving and coordinating baskets installed, my master closet could now neatly contain all my purses, scarves, workout gear and swimwear.

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Today’s headline is a line from the ’60s television show “Gilligan’s Island” uttered by Skipper, to which Gilligan replied, “I do know one thing. You take up more of it than I do.”

Tomorrow: Choosing a rug is hard. Read about it here.

A place for everything and everything in its place

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We continued to make ourselves at home as we added cozy and convenience touches to the living space inside the former Methodist church, now our residence.

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As all of our cabinets were brand new, none of them had any sort of sophisticated organizers beyond shelving. One evening, early in our residency, Tyler and I addressed the storage situation inside the kitchen island.

tongue of island
That space beneath the tongue of the island would have been a lot of square footage to leave empty. See one of the cabinet doors we installed on the right.
lazy Susan
Lazy Susan, at your service.

As a display kitchen, the supporting structure to the tongue of granite that was a seating area was nothing more than pretty support. But in our real kitchen, where we had no lack of serving bowls and trays, that space could serve as storage—if only we could get to it. Tyler installed three cabinet doors, but the interior was so deep, even I with my freakishly long arms could not reach the back of the cabinet. So he ordered a two-deck lazy Susan. It was a bit of a trick getting the pieces through the narrow cabinet doors and reassembling it again inside, but we triumphed, and all that hidden space became useable.

Dad also helped a lot when he visited by installed the tip-out trays in the bathroom vanity and a number of wire racks inside various cupboards to contain spices, glassware and rolls of tin foil and plastic.

spice racks
Not too high, not too low–Dad installed these racks juuuuust right so the spice bottles would fit and the door would still close.

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Tomorrow: Master closet shelving. Read about it here.