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.

Our story so far: The windows in the sanctuary of the old Methodist church were reglassed so we could see our yard.

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About this time, I witnessed the strange details one must pay attention to when one is renovating a hundred-year-old church, and in this case, rehabbing the doors.

These doors, too, had to be painted. We had replaced the exterior doors to the entryway, but a second set of double doors divided the entryway from the sanctuary. At one time, when there was no entryway, only exterior steps, these doors now between rooms might have been the exterior doors so they were one-and-three-quarters inch thick. We wanted to remove the top wood panels and replace with glass, so we could see our entryway from the sanctuary. But like so many wishes that weren’t horses, this was not easily done. The door was a single solid piece of wood, and even You-Can-Call-Me-Al with all his carpentry experience and tools was skeptical he could cut out these holes. And even if he succeeded in doing that, he wasn’t sure about trimming out the glass again.

Much debate ensued. We shopped for alternative doors and discovered quickly we would have to buy (and wait for) custom ones because our ancient doors were extra thick and two inches taller than modern doors. You-Can-Call-Me-Al, who didn’t want to ruin our doors with a mistaken cut, reminded us how much more insulating modern doors would be.

But we didn’t want to wait (or waste perfectly good doors) so we urged You-Can-Call-Me-Al to try cutting holes in the doors so Low Talker could paint them with the rest of the doors.

You-Can-Call-Me-Al gamely tried.

And succeeded. (“It wasn’t easy!” he told me later. “I knew you could do it,” I said.)

Our original doors could be painted with everything else and glassed. Another reuse project on track.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 36: Instead of an addition, a deletion. Read it here.

Our story so far: As we continued renovating the old Methodist church into our home, my husband began most days by flinging open the double front doors and leaving them open all day to clear dust and cool the men working inside. The open doors had an ancillary benefit: They welcomed visitors. 

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While neighbors were dropping by to get a peek inside, we were thinking about looking outside.

When we purchased the church, all the windows in the sanctuary had obscured glass. Not frosted, exactly, but some sort of cloudy glass that prevented parishioners from daydreaming during sermons. Conveniently, it also prevented thieves and other marauders from peering inside the church, too, so we left it in place during many months of demolition and restoration.

It was time to replace the obscured glass with clear glass and let the sunshine in. Also, we wanted the sashes painted, and we might as well replace the glass first. So every window in the sanctuary was removed and hauled to the glass guy’s workshop where he replaced the glass. Meanwhile, You-Can-Call-Me-Al added quarter round to the frame edges, and Low Talker caulked the cracks. They discovered decades of dust and pine needles stuck in the top of the frames, easily twelve feet off the floor, and they shop-vacced it up. Surely, no church member had ever bothered to dust up there since the 1940s when the orientation of the sanctuary changed from east-west to north-south.

The windows came back to us with sparkling clear glass, and Low Talker lined them up along with wall like sentries in order to paint them.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 35 wraps up with a little door trouble. Read about it here.

Our story so far: Room by room, our painter transformed semi-finished spaces into finished ones in the old Methodist church we were converting into a home.

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In order for Low Talker to paint the rest of the second floor, You-Can-Call-Me-Al got busy installing trim. I’d chosen a simpler trim style for the second floor than what we were using in the sanctuary; I wanted more of a farmhouse look up there.

Among the items You-Can-Call-Me-Al trimmed out was the interior leaded glass windows Tyler and I selected months before to add decoration to the balcony wall while adding natural light from the second story to the sanctuary. Tyler was quickly emptying one of our rental units, and these carefully packed leaded glass windows were transferred to the church to be installed. The windows had the simple farmhouse trim on the inside and more ornate trim on the balcony side. The glassy artwork transformed the gaping holes in the drywall into light-dancing features over the tub in the second floor bathroom and along the balcony wall, and their installation confirmed we were making progress, yes, beautiful progress.

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Tomorrow: We should have considered a revolving door. Read about it here.

Our story so far: As we proceeded with renovating the old Methodist church, we purchased twenty-three gallons of paint for our painter, who I’d nicknamed Low Talker for his soft-spoken manner.

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The painter then moved on to the second floor, where he began by spraying a couple of coats of polyurethane on the pickled plywood ceiling. Spraying the stuff around a horrible, stinky job. At first, I thought he was just a sweaty guy—painting was hard work. But eventually, after I asked St. Johnny about how hot it must be on the second floor, we both realized Low Talker wasn’t covered in perspiration. It was much easier for him to get clean at the end of the day of spraying paint around when he first coated exposed parts of his body—like his flowing locks—with baby oil. No wonder his hair looked as soft as his voice sounded.

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Tomorrow: Interior windows. Read about them here.

Our story so far: As we progressed on the renovation of the old Methodist church into our home, Tyler hired a painter with experience and attention to detail. And a soft voice.

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Low Talker began work in the master suite, specifically the laundry room, which we were—I was—eager to get operational. After he’d covered several walls with paint, instead of the little patches I’d created, I knew I’d chosen the right color of gray, a light gray inspired by Behr’s Evening White but mixed by Sherwin Williams. It made me happy just walking through the rooms any time of day. The trim, a white inspired by Behr’s Bleached Linen, popped against the gray. And the wainscoting, a tan inspired by Behr’s Arid Landscape, brought warmth to the scene.

Low Talked also painted the tin inside the master bedroom tray ceiling with Arid Landscape, and it looked so good when he was done I decided not to distress it.

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Today’s headline is a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a 19th century American physician and poet.

Tomorrow: Painter’s trick for Breck hair. Read about it here.

 

Our story so far: Drywall. Check. Flooring. Check. We were making progress on renovating the old Methodist church we were converting into our home.

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Chapter 35

As we wrapped up the flooring part of Phase Three: Drywall, Paint & Flooring, the painter arrived. Truth be told, he showed up a little sooner than was convenient as You-Can-Call-Me-Al was still nailing trim in place, but this was not something we were going to grouse about after some of the flaky contractors we had dealt with. He showed up, first of all, and he showed up sooner rather than later, so we were happy.

Early on, I imagined Tyler and I would be painting the interior of the church ourselves. We had succeeded in just such a task together before when we painted the first floor of the first house we owned. Tyler hired out the work of painting the ceiling, and then he pretty much painted all the walls, leaving me to haul paint and ladders around, fetch more buckets and paint inconspicuous walls in the closets and the powder room.

But Tyler was tired—he had so many other things he could do, and he didn’t trust me to precisely cut in the line between the walls and the ceiling (I had proven to have an unsteady hand). We decided to pay a professional to do it right and more quickly than we could accomplish it ourselves. He collected quotes from a couple of men who came on recommendation, and settled on the one with the thick, wavy gray hair of a Greek god. This one had dropped by more than once to inspect the church, and when he chatted with me about the features of the old trim around the sanctuary windows, I was impressed with his attention to detail (and noticed nothing unusual about the volume of his voice).

It wasn’t long, however, before he earned a nickname: Low Talker.

Low Talker derived his name from a character on the ‘90s TV sitcom “Seinfeld.” Her lips would move, but Seinfeld and Elaine couldn’t hear what she said. To be polite, they would just smile and nod. As the plot of the episode evolved, Jerry smiled and nodded in agreement to something Low Talker uttered, only to find out later to his horror he agreed to wear one of her designer puffy shirts on a TV appearance. Ha, ha, ha.

This character trait was probably not a good one with any contractor, but certainly not with the painter who frequently consulted the spouse he perceived to be in charge of paint color decisions. If you smile and nod in agreement to something, you better be sure you heard correctly or pretty soon you’ve got a wall that’s the wrong color.

So I said, “What?” A lot.

For the record, Tyler conversed with Low Talker without any communication problems. Only I said “what?” after every sentence. So was it Low Talker’s soft voice or my poor hearing that caused the problems? Those with intimate knowledge of my family health history might pin the fault on me, but I maintain Low Talker was one of those men who speak softly and carry a big paintbrush.

It was a good thing he used a big paintbrush because it became apparent very early on that we would be using a lot of paint. We started with eleven gallons of wall paint, five gallons for the trim and two gallons for the wainscoting. Only a few days in, I was sent back to the paint store for another two gallons for the wainscoting and three more for the trim.

If you’re counting, we were up to twenty-three gallons of paint.

If that number didn’t make me glad I wasn’t the one doing the painting, I don’t know what would. That’s a lot of paint.

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Tomorrow: We chose better with paint colors than we did initially with floor stain. Read about it here.