Our story so far: We installed cabinets like mad when we could finally tackle this phase in the conversion project of the 126-year-old Methodist church.

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Meanwhile, I had been working on the dressers that would become the vanity for the upstairs bathroom. After I painted them, most of the drawers wouldn’t close anymore, so I spent one morning sanding edges. I also dragged my lot of eBay crystal knobs to the hardware store to find appropriately sized screws.

You-Can-Call-Me-Al installed the dressers in the bathroom, created fillers and built a ledge for the makeup table in the center. More work would be necessary; Tyler would have to modify the drawers for the sink, I would have to paint all the added bits and pieces, and we needed mirrors, but like the kitchen, this vanity was ready to be measured for counter tops.

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Tuesday: Cabinets for the mudroom. Wait, there’s cabinets in the mudroom? Check them out here.

 

Our story so far: As we installed cabinetry and appliances in the kitchen of the old Methodist church we were converting into our home, a bit of creativity and old-fashioned ingenuity were required.

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And then there was the refrigerator.

There had been no refrigerator in the display kitchen. I guess display people don’t need cold food. But we were real people, and ice cream was a requirement, not a negotiable.

When we designed our kitchen in the chome, there was a perfect 37-inch-wide nook on the left side of the back wall of the kitchen; the congregation had a custom cabinet in the space which we imagined might have stored bread and wine. This slot was maintained when Tyler installed the header to support the balcony. The drywallers drywalled the space, and we were set to shop. Only with five-eighths-inch drywall, our slot ended up 35-and-three-quarters-inch wide. A 36-inch refrigerator would not fit.

That’s OK, refrigerators come in a variety of widths. We knew we’d find one. And while we were shopping for the washer and dryer, we did find one. It was 35-and-five-eighths-inches wide. We liked it because it had more capacity than some 36-inch-wide ones (so much more than a skinny 32-inch-wide or 34-inch-wide refrigerator). It would be snug fit perhaps, but hey, we had an eighth inch to spare. We signed the dotted line and committed to a delivery date.

I suppose you know where this story is headed.

Back at the church we measured the twice we should have measured the first time.

We did indeed have 35-and-three-quarters inches at the top of the opening. But we had only 35-and-a-half inches at the bottom.

At one point, Tyler, who has used brute force in the past on obstinate inanimate objects, said he’d shove it in one way or another. I’m sure he could have.

But he reconsidered.

And he called the drywallers.

Who came by a few days later to replace the five-eighths-inch drywall with quarter-inch drywall, thereby buying us a whole inch of play, top and bottom.

Our painter Low Talker painted the slot just in time for delivery of our refrigerator.

No brute force required.

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Tomorrow: More appliances. More issues. Read about it here.

Our story so far: We had finally progressed to the cabinets phase of renovation in the old Methodist church project.

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We had purchased the stove hood as part of the castle door deal. The door seller had a strange variety of stuff in his garage, including the enormous wood stove hood. Tyler got him to throw it into the deal. This was long before we found the display kitchen and long before we purchased the 36-inch wide stove on Craig’s List, so we tiptoed around it in the basement for months.

It seemed like an incredible deal to me.

Until I saw the tab for the vent. The hood was just decoration. To make it operational, we needed a vent. In the correct size. Tyler found a new one he liked. Cha-ching.

No matter how good your vent, you need ducting to transfer the smoke (or whatever it coming off your cook top) to the outdoors. During the mechanicals phase, Tyler thought ahead enough to get ducting from the hood to the outdoors. Cha-ching.

The vent needed to be inside the hood, and that required You-Can-Call-Me-Al’s expertise. Cha-ching.

And to make a vent operate, we needed electricity.

So we put the electrician to work on the project. Cha-ching.

Of course, it wasn’t a simple connection. It didn’t work on the first try, so we would need to remove the vent, problem solve, and try again.

Cha-ching.

The incredible deal was actually a money pit. Or money vent, I guess. Poof, money floating out of the chome through the stove vent ducting.

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Tomorrow: Hmm, the stove hood isn’t the only challenging appliance in the kitchen. Read about the other one here.

Our story so far: The display kitchen cabinets we found on Craig’s List for an incredible price to install in the church we were converting were a Rubik’s Cube without instructions. 

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That’s the problem with doing it the way we did. We had a lot of jerry-rigging to do.

When a regular homeowner purchases a custom kitchen, someone comes to measure everything, draws up plans with illustrations and sends instructions to the installer. We measured, more than once, but our installation prep ended there. Which left of a lot of loose ends:

• We switched cabinets on either side of the sink so the wine rack would face the beverage bar.
• We ended up with a leftover drawer. You-Can-Call-Me-Al noted it would fit perfectly on the floor beneath the wine rack. It would be perfect for wine corks.
• We eliminated the shelves and drawers and moved the glass-fronted cabinets to either side of the stove. The cream-colored shelves were moved to the blue beverage bar, so they required painting.
• We shortened the tongue of the island and added cupboard doors so we could use the storage space. When cabinet doors in the wrong color arrived, our painter Low Talker spray painted them, and I glazed them. Ditto for the cupboard above the refrigerator.
• I painted yards of kick plate and quarter round to match both the cream-colored cabinets and the blue ones.
• We planned for a wider stove than in the display kitchen making the stove vent obsolete. Fortunately, we acquired a different one. But it was brown. We couldn’t decide if we wanted to leave it or paint it.

Oh, the stove vent. What a deal.

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Today’s headline is a quote from 20th century novelist Zelda Fitzgerald and wife of author F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Tomorrow: Penny wise and pound foolish. Read about our folly here.

Our story so far: My husband and I had toiled nearly nine months to transform a 126-year-old Methodist church into our residence.

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Chapter 37

We were stuck on Phase Three of our project—drywall, paint and flooring—for so long, I’d forgotten what Phases Five, Six, Seven and Eight were, but I remembered clearly what had been working toward during all those long days sanding wood floors: Cabinets! Finally, we’d arrived at Phase Four of our project: Cabinets & Appliances.

Oh, we had been picking around the edges for some time. We bought the display kitchen and gotten a quote for having it delivered. When we heard the number, Tyler and I agreed it was much cheaper to rent a U-Haul and perform the heavy lifting ourselves. That day back in March was filled numerous references to Devo and “Lost in Space.”

“Crack that whip!”

“Danger, danger, Will Robinson!”

We whipped it good, and we didn’t bust anything; we earned our soup that day.

In the time between buying the display kitchen and picking it up, I worried I didn’t have enough storage space, but handling every single cupboard and drawer disavowed me of that notion. Since the church wasn’t ready for cabinet installation when the remodeling firm was ready to get rid of their display kitchen, so we handled every single cupboard a drawer again when we moved them from the rental unit to the church, but that was an exciting day that signaled we were done sanding floors (did I say “done”? We weren’t done, exactly, but instead of churning the ice cream, the next time we sanded we would be putting a cherry on top the sundae).

Installing the laundry cabinets and the master bath vanity were the other bites we’d taken on the cabinet phase, but really, nothing compared to that kitchen. We had diddled with the upper cabinets and the additions we’d purchased during the rainy week of the longest days of summer but by the end of August, we were still waiting for the replacement cabinets in the right color (oh, that retailer was not going to like the review we planned to write—the firm epitomized recalcitrant).

In total, our kitchen cabinets were a Rubik’s Cube without instructions. We were moving around parts of the display kitchen, and we’d added a few pieces drawn from various sources, and now we had to figure out how to put them back together. And get them level. Tyler, You-Can-Call-Me-Al and I conferred several times that day, poring over the pictures we’d taken of the display kitchen when it looked like it was supposed to, instead of how it looked in pieces on the floor our church sanctuary.

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Tomorrow: Getting there. Check it out here.

Our story so far: Tyler struck a deal with Reroofer, our belfry repairman, to barter for the fire escape, which Reroofer wanted for a deer stand. The deal required Reroofer to dismantle and haul away the two-story solid steel fire escape himself.

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While Reroofer and his compadre conferred to determine a plan, I worked on a different project in the front yard assigned by the foreman: Removing the paint from one of the doors we found in the church so it could be painted by Low Talker, our painter. This was an effective distraction from the ruckus occurring around the corner of the house.

Reroofer and his friend cut the stairway into three pieces. At one point, a truck and a rope were employed to pull things apart, but I couldn’t tell you what other tools were employed. For the most part I didn’t really want to know how they were accomplishing this task so I didn’t ask questions and I didn’t hover.

I prayed. I prayed no one would get hurt and my house would remain standing.

Pretty quickly, I realized my project was a no-go. Too much of the door was rotted to salvage it. A few hours later, my prayers about the fire escape were answered.

You win some, you lose some.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 36 was a quick one. It closes with a look at the west side of the church, then and now. Check it out here.