Add one cup kindness, stir with hospitality and serve

Monica Lee5 Comments

Our story so far: As we demoed the interior over the course of a number of weeks, we met a number of people interested in our Methodist church conversion project, including the pastor of the nearby Congregational church.

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In addition to a warm invitation to join the worship service sometime, Pastor Jennie also gave me a great gift: Copies of two church cookbooks, one from the Congregationalists and one created by the very congregation that had once inhabited our Methodist church. As she handed them to me, she noted the Congregationalists did this thing well: Feeding people. This was clear after seeing their basement kitchen, easily four times as big as the one in the church we had purchased.

Thumbing through the pages of the Methodists’ book, I recognized some of the last names of people who had introduced themselves to us as former members. This recipe book, created to honor the sesquicentennial of the congregation in 2009, was a historical gem. It included recipes from the congregation’s first known church recipe book in 1912 and from one printed in 1950. One 1912 recipe for “Chicken” began with “wash and be sure to remove all feathers” and the instructions included: “Cook until tender. If it should be an aged rooster it may take two days.” I bet even the aged rooster back in 1912 was tastier than the bland mass-produced chickens of today.

An interesting recipe for Jezebel Sauce contributed by Karen Hill Krolow caught my eye. Jezebel, whose story is told in the Bible’s Books of Kings, was a Phoenician princess who married an Israelite king. She did not, however, believe in his God; she worshipped Baal and forced her religion on the Israelites; she ultimately died a gruesome death. It makes perfect sense that an evilly delicious sauce named for this bad girl of the Bible would be good for ham since pork was on the list of food no-nos for the Jews.

Jezebel Sauce

Ingredients:

  • 1 (15-ounce) can crushed pineapple, drained
  • 1 (15-ounce) jar apricot preserves
  • 1 tablespoon dry mustard
  • ¼ cup good horseradish (German)

Instructions:

  1. Mix equal parts of pineapple and preserves.
  2. Add mustard and horseradish. Serve with ham.

Another recipe in the book is the only one billed as “award winning,” so I feel like it would be selfish not to share it here. Kathy Hill contributed the recipe for Mom Blakeman’s Pound Cake, noting that it won third place at the county fair:

Pound Cake

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 cup butter
  • 5 eggs
  • 2 cups flour

Instructions:

  1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Cream sugar and butter until light.
  2. Add eggs—one at a time—alternately with 2 cups flour, mixing thoroughly after each addition.
  3. Use two wide loaf pans. Butter pans BOTTOM ONLY [apparently this is very important as it is in ALL CAPS], and line with two layers of wax paper.
  4. Bake one hour. After cakes are cool, remove from pans and roll in powdered sugar.
sign
Pondering how to repurpose this sign.

At some point later, I will share Betty Lyerly’s North Carolina B-B-Que Pork recipe, the recipe used at the Methodist Church’s barbecues. Evidence of these community meals was left behind at the church, where we found the hand-painted signage for them. I don’t know why we kept the sign, but I felt compelled to do so, stacking behind some of our other wood designated for reuse.

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Tomorrow: The rezoning hearing. Read about it here.

Throughout history, small churches do their part

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: Interacting with folks interested in our church conversion brought us historical information, intel on local contractors and community activities.

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One day just as Tyler finished showing yet another contractor around the church in order to coax a bid out of him, a friendly young woman stopped by and introduced herself as the pastor of the nearby Congregational church. She welcomed him to the village, and invited him to have a look at some of her church’s historical record.

This piqued our curiosity because our Methodist congregation and the Congregational church had been yoked from 1974 to 1985, so we thought the Congregationalists might have some history of our church we hadn’t yet heard.

A few days later, I had the pleasure of enjoying coffee with Pastor Jennie and a couple of friendly parishioners of the Congregational church. They showed me around, and we paid special attention to the historical details of the church (it had been built twenty-six years before ours) and a twenty-foot-long bulletin board detailing the congregation’s history. We also looked into the written record, which provided a few examples of the little churches in our community having to weigh in on far bigger societal and political issues through the course of history.

In one example, the local Congregational congregation (say that three times fast) had been meeting in our village before they built their church and before the Civil War, which stirred up a bit controversy. A newspaper story noted: “In 1857, the American Home Missionary Society decided to withdraw aid to churches whose members were slaveholders. The society paid part of the Congregational church pastor’s salary which prompted the church to go on record against the “sin of American slavery.”

Later, as it turns out, members of the church we were now converting into a home and the Congregational church had started a chapter of the Red Cross in our little village during World War I. Here is the story, as told in the careful handwriting of the Congregational church record:

Year of 1918

With the passing of the year 1918 our church like many others has passed through one of the greatest trials it perhaps has ever had to go through. We can proudly say we have stood the test and are now in as encouraging a position as we have been for some years.

Our pastor with the Methodist minister and a few others were instrumental in getting the Red Cross started here. As the War continued and conditions became more serious more and more people became interested in the great movement until now the village has a fine large auxiliary. In the Red Cross world our church has not failed to do its duty in giving both of time and money. …

We are all very glad we could do as much as we did in a time of great need. We have all learned the lesson of cheerful giving so in the coming year let us do our part.

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Tomorrow: It wasn’t only issues of history our Methodist church had in common with the Congregational Church. They were interested in food, too. Read about it here.

What every small town in America has: At least one church and one bar

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: While we demoed the interior, we combed the town for information about the 126-year-old Methodist church we’d purchased to turn into a home.

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Tyler became a lunchtime regular at the village watering hole, this one built appropriately on the banks of the creek in town. It was a typical Wisconsin bar that offered cold New Glarus beers, crispy fried cheese curds and a monthly meat raffle.

As all good neighborhood taverns are, this bar was a great place to catch up on gossip, and our church had become a subject of conversation. This worked in our favor as Tyler collected the names of local contractors; the bartender/owner was a great source of intel on that subject.

One day when I accompanied him there for lunch (chili, burgers and fries—no beer), I learned a group of women was scrapbooking in the back room.

“This place speaks my language,” I marveled. In a decade of working in the marketing department for the largest scrapbooking company at the time (a decade ago), I’d attended easily hundreds of scrapbooking events all over the nation and in the world. It was literally my job to go to one of these events with my personal photos and album and work with customers to learn what they loved, what they didn’t and their ideas for making our products better.

One of the more enthusiastic scrappers struck up a conversation at the bar where we were enjoying our hot bowls of chili on a cold day, and she invited me to the monthly scrapbooking workshop.

I felt honestly welcomed to town with that simple invitation. And a few days later, we’d get another one of those honest, small-town invites. We joked we went to church every day, but this invitation was to a real church service.

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Tomorrow: Another church in the neighborhood shares history. Read it here.

Photos offer insight into the history, soul of the place

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: A church historian helps us research the history of the 126-year-old Methodist church we purchased to convert into our home.

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basement cross section
The basement walls were sixteen inches thick.

The blueprints shared with me by the church historical society described the furnace room in the basement (the church was heated with coal, which had been converted to gas forced air at some point). They also included a drawing of the cross-section of the sixteen-inch basement walls, which we’d already figured out were quite substantial.

In the early ’40s, according to the newspaper, the church was remodeled to change the seating from east-facing to north-facing, and the new entrance—the one where we now planned to install castle doors—was added.

The archive included a copy of the photo Tyler and I saw hanging in the entryway of the church where the congregation had merged and a grainy picture of the church in 1959. But we were hungry for more.

A few days later, we stopped by the local public library. There we found two more photographs of our church.

Library 1
Did the caption number “19917” indicate a date or something else? Check out that elaborate spire on tip-top the belfry.

The first might have been taken when World War I began. It was labeled “M.E. Church, 19917.” The Methodist Episcopal Church [emphasis added] was founded in 1784; in 1939 it reunited with two breakaway Methodist denominations to form the Methodist Church, so the photo was taken before 1939 in any case. In it, a grand stairway leads to the front doors beneath the belfry; both the stairs and the doorway are gone now. The siding flanking the window in the belfry is hung in a chevron pattern; fancy painted shingles decorate the peaks. In Phase Six or so of renovation, we hoped to return that window to the belfry and return some of that interesting siding to the exterior.

Library 2
Another, newer image of the church hanging at the library.

The second photo hanging in the library was taken sometime after the early 1940s. In it, one can see the former entrance under the belfry and the new entrances to the basement and to the sanctuary. The new sanctuary entrance had French doors (they were replaced at some point with the current red exterior doors); we hoped to install similar French doors inside as an entry to our master bedroom.

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Tomorrow: A conversation at the local watering hole. Read about it here.

How old—really—is this old church?

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: Our old Methodist church we purchased to turn into a home came with a long history and many memories.

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Author’s note: As one might expect in a real-time memoir, facts don’t always come to light in perfect chronology, and today I’m correcting one of those facts.

During one of the early showings of the church, Tyler and I learned from the caretaker that the church had been built in 1899, so when I began this blog, we believed the church was 119 years old.

Well, that’s close. But not quite. I learned later that the sanctuary for the church was constructed in late 1891, making the church 126 years old. So I’ve attempted to correct every reference to the church’s age in this blog (and boy, were there a lot!). Today, I’m sharing that story of discovery.

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In early January, I joined the historical society meeting of the nearby congregation with whom the parishioners of our church had merged a year and half before. Tyler and I were curious about the history of the church, and I figured these ladies might have answers.

Three women had gathered in one of the rooms of the parish hall, and they were already hard at work when I arrived. One efficient woman was filing bulletins. Another was writing thank you notes for donations to the church. The third, a long-time member of the congregation of our church whom Tyler and I had met when we attended the worship service a few weeks prior, greeted me warmly.

“Oh, I brought some things you might be interested in,” she said. “I didn’t know if you would make it here today.”

As we chatted, the woman writing thank-you notes realized I was the person who’d purchased the former church. “Are you the woman who bought the church? The one writing about it?”

She looked at me like I was a celebrity, and I was flattered.

“Yup, that’s me.” I’m sure I wasn’t blushing.

Bludeprint of main floor
Original blueprint of the old Methodist church.

This friendly group welcomed me, and directed me to a number of interesting newspaper articles about the church and the original blueprints (which were actually blue). Meanwhile, they continued their work. I learned that day that the best history keeping occurs in the present, not the past. Their work to document what was going on in their congregation in the here and now—the pastors, the weddings and funerals, baptisms and confirmations—might be best appreciated in a hundred years, just as I was appreciating the work of nameless women and men in the past who saved blueprints and cut out newspaper articles.

Poring through the newspaper stories, I learned the Methodist congregation in my little village formed in 1859 at a time when total membership in Methodist societies in America was growing rapidly and the U.S. Civil War was still the subject of speculation; Wisconsin had become a state only eleven years before. Services were conducted in the schoolhouse and in a building also used by Congregational and Baptist congregations.

The building Tyler and I had taken ownership of on Nov. 28, 2017, had been built in late 1800s by a Rev. Smith who had collected donations in order to purchase the lot for $300 on Sept. 29, 1891, not long after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes mystery and Benjamin Harrison was in the middle of his single term as president of the United States. The Sunday school and preaching hall (the modern-day sanctuary portion of the building) were dedicated two months later on Nov. 29, 1891, according to a history of the church recounted in a local newspaper.

So our church was almost exactly 126 years old.

(The motion picture “Hostiles” playing in theaters right now makes mention of a direct order from President Harrison and dramatizes the struggle of Native Americans and pioneers in that era; it’s difficult to imagine women wearing bonnets and men carrying shotguns and driving a team of horses to our church, but surely, that’s what was happening at the time.)

By 1894 (a year after inventor Whitcomb Judson debuted his “clasp locker,” more popularly known as a zipper, at the Chicago World’s Fair), the church membership had increased to twenty-five. Since women didn’t earn the right to vote in national elections until 1920, I’m guessing the figure of twenty-five was of men. An addition—what I have been calling the overflow area—was built. The addition also must have included the belfry though that isn’t specifically mentioned in the historical papers.

mauve wallpaper
Could this be original mauve wallpaper?

The 1890s became known as the Gay Nineties (history books today are quick to clarify the meaning of the word gay back then—an age of merriment and decadence). The era is also sometimes referred to as the Mauve Decade because chemist William Henry Perkin’s aniline dye—a synthetic alternative to the expensive natural dyes in use at the time—introduced the widespread use of that color in fashion. Interestingly, what appears to be the original wall covering in the sanctuary of our church is mauve-colored paper over the plaster.

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Tomorrow: We find more old photos of the church. See them here.

Stewards of memory

Monica Lee4 Comments

Our story so far: Our purchase of the old Methodist church to turn into our home created a buzz around town.

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“Old houses,” author Gladys Tabor once wrote, “do not belong to people ever, not really; people belong to them.” The old Methodist church had been a cultural center in our little village for more than a century. It had been such a long-time mainstay that members who were baptized there had gotten married there, and their funeral service had been held there when they died.

basement before demo
Many church potlucks were probably served in the basement kitchen. Here’s how it looked when we purchased the church, before demo.

Every room in the old church belonged to people from all over the region. Families were formed when couples married beneath those rafters and baptized the children they raised together. Performers found an audience and worshipped God singing in the choir loft. The seeds of faith found soil when little children learned about Jesus in the Sunday school rooms. Women earned reputations for their seven-layer salad and pie crust in the basement kitchen where many meals had been served and fellowship enjoyed. Unlike most homes—even long-standing ones—that possessed the memories of a few families, ours carried with it the feelings of generations of people.

We owned the building now, but we were only stewards of the memories the place held. I felt responsible for honoring those who came before us, and both Tyler and I wanted to be true to at least some elements of the historical architecture even as we transformed what had been a church into a family home.

To a person, everyone who chatted with us about our project was complimentary and supportive. If a former church member was upset that we were changing the building into a private home, they didn’t share that disappointment with us.

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Tomorrow: A correction and a story of discovery. Read about it here.

Tell me what’s a-happening

Monica Lee3 Comments

Our story so far: We bought an old Methodist church to turn into our home and spent a couple of months demolishing the interior.

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Chapter 14

Our purchase of the church injected the village grapevine with fresh subject matter. Unlike any other house either of us had ever owned, this one piqued the interest of a whole lot of people beyond our close friends and family.

“What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s a-happening,” the apostles sang to Jesus in the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.” I imagined this was what former church members, neighbors and village officials asked associates over cups of coffee or bottles of beer.

No doubt about it, there was a lot more activity around the church than there had been for a year and half when the congregation ceased having services there and the food pantry exited the basement. The building had sat empty and dark, the only signs of life in the bushes and trees, which we had liberally trimmed in our first days.

interior post demo
Welcome to our mess.

The neighbors, the former pastor, a parade of contractors stopped by during those first weeks of demolition. Our friends were very interested in this latest crazy project of ours, many paying a visit just to see the dust and two-by-fours of our “before” (we couldn’t even offer them a chair—or a bathroom with a door!). I’m sure they raised their eyebrows as we described our ambitious plans when all that could be seen was debris (and a whole lot of tools), but for the most part they offered the right enthusiasm, “This is awesome!” “That will be beautiful!” “I can’t wait to see it finished!”

A number of our friends expressed interest in being invited to a housewarming party, to which we readily assented.

If any house deserved a party, it was this one.

I was imagining a posh affair with tuxedoed butlers, finger sandwiches and classical music, while Tyler probably was thinking about where he could order a pig on a spit and a keg of beer, but I know both of us were looking forward to that party more than any of our friends.

We enjoyed the attention, I must confess. And we always welcomed a break from moving things around, tearing stuff apart or other pressing work. She was interesting, this old house, and we enjoyed talking about our grand vision for the place. As we relished in the future, though, some visitors were pondering the past. One doesn’t buy a historical landmark without buying its history.

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Monday: We had become stewards of other people’s memories. Read about it here.

Tell me a (color) story

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: My husband and I created a design plan for the renovation of the old Methodist church we planned to turn into our home.

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sofa-blog
Our former living room: Purple chairs, purple curtains, purple pillows (and that doesn’t even count the purple wall which didn’t make it into the picture).

And finally, I defined our color story. Color was the easiest way to create a cohesive space, and this part of the design dossier was probably most important in keeping us (me) on task. When we moved out of our previous home, I was appalled at how many purple home décor items I’d accumulated. It all began with a pair of microfiber purple chairs we’d chosen for the living room. They wore like steel and lasted through a redesign of the room, which included a purple wall in the kitchen. After that, I’d unconsciously chosen a purple rug, purple placemats, a purple bedspread and purple candles. Too much of a very distinctive color!

color story
Paint chip mania!

When I thought about our church, I wanted a more neutral background. Though I used words (“black and white, cream and chocolate brown, grays, light blues and aqua with occasional turquoise”), I knew actual color samples would be most useful in practice, so I cut apart a paint chip book (several, actually) to create a visual. The chips I chose had evocative names like marshmallow, snowdrop, planetary silver, Havana coffee, after rain and blue mosque. I decided a limited color palette would be most interesting with an array of textures: Metal, glass, wood and fur.

We referred to this document many times as we determined our floor plan, and we would be referring to it many times more as we made decisions about flooring, fixtures and furniture. The fun was beginning.

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Tomorrow: What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s a-happening. Read it here.

If it’s not in the mission statement or the summary, check the 10 commandments

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: As we pondered how to wire and plumb the old Methodist church we planned to turn into our home, we created some guidelines for designing it.

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Our brand personality would be a balance of necessity and luxury, of industrial and homemade, of modern and classic, of masculine and feminine, leaning toward economical, casual and subdued.

And then I wrote down ten design rules:

  1. Details matter.
  2. Rest Room Signed door
    This door, formerly on the basement bathroom, could be reused as the powder room pocket door on the main floor. After it gets some TLC. That’s the plan anyway.

    Recycle, reuse and repurpose whenever possible.

  3. Natural lighting brings the outdoors indoors.
  4. Build storage into every room. Two closets, two cupboards, two hooks, two nooks are better than one.
  5. Accent walls create a center of focus.
  6. Doors and doorways should be beckoning and give some clue as to what’s behind them (think: frosted glass with the word “laundry” and design that reflects the room within).
  7. Artwork should be graphic, realistic (think: photographs) or abstract. Large object art and quote art—words, saying and verses—should be used liberally.
  8. Flooring should be hardwood and/or tile with durable rugs made of natural fiber, jute and sisal.
  9. The two rooms we spend the most time in—kitchen and master suite—should be most luxurious and elegant.
  10. Curb appeal is worth spending money on. The front door sends a message. Our entryway should be functional and welcoming.

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Tomorrow: We wrap up Chapter 13 with the color story. Read about it here.