Our story so far: After nine months of elbow grease, days with the satisfaction of finishing a task at the old Methodist church we were turning into our home were becoming more frequent.

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Ah, yes, the laundry room. Oh, how I missed a nice clean laundry room I could call my own. When we lived in the RV, I used a different laundry room at every campground, some fresher smelling than others. Then when we lived in the rental house, I used the dank, scary cellar laundry room with an exterior entrance to do the laundry. I was tired of other people’s laundry rooms, tired of collecting quarters and tired of lugging bulging baskets of clothing from place to place.

My new laundry room was inside my walk-in closet. Talk about convenient—no hauling clean or dirty clothes anywhere but across the room. It would be so convenient even Tyler would be able to throw in a load of laundry once in a while!

Looking back through the mental file, we realized neither of us had ever purchased a brand new washer or dryer. We always inherited them in the houses we purchased, or we splurged on used models because as far as appliances go, washers and dryers were usually repairable. But with the laundry in the master closet, we wanted the appliances to look as good as they functioned, so we had determined we would splurge on new matching ones for the “chome.”

Shortly after assembling the cabinets, Tyler and I went shopping one day while we waited for the sanctuary floor to dry. We weren’t shopping specifically for appliances, but we had laundry on our minds, and we found a floor model dryer on sale for a price we couldn’t pass up. It had a big pink sign: “Display Blowout!” Plus, we could get an 11 percent rebate! So we invested in the matching washer, too. On top of everything else, we could save an $80 delivery fee if we hauled them ourselves. We tasked the painter with doing the closet first, persuaded the electrician to drop by with a GFI outlet, and a few days later, I fetched the washer and dryer.

As usual, we experienced a tiny hiccup during installation that required an emergency trip to the hardware store (actually, I made the first emergency trip and Tyler ran the second, ultimately successful errand for parts) but in no time, we had an operational laundry room. It was the first, fully functional room in the house.

Never before had it felt so satisfying to wash a load of clothes.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 34 opens. You might have noticed I never posted a picture of the finished sanctuary floor. Learn why here.

Our story so far: My husband assembled cabinets he acquired from an online retailer for the old Methodist church we were renovating into a home.

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A few days later Tyler’s uncle paid us a visit, and Tyler looped him into helping assemble the cabinets for the mudroom and laundry room. (Mental note: More cabinet hardware needed.)

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Tomorrrow: Chapter 33 wraps up with the story of the washer and dryer. Read it here.

Our story so far: After a middle-of-the-night phone call from the security company in April, Tyler threw on his clothes at our rental house and drove to the old church we were renovating to find a dozen boxes filled with cabinets stacked at the front door. And then a cop showed up.  

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I’m no policeman, but I can only imagine the officer found it strange that a bedraggled old(er) man would be loading his pickup with boxes in the middle of the night outside a church that was widely known in the village to be a construction site.

Of course, Tyler—who dressed in a hurry while still half asleep—didn’t have his wallet or ID with him.

But he proved his ownership of the church by punching in his security code and unlocking the door. He and the officer tiptoed through the church looking for the housebreaker who set off the alarm, and they found nothing. Whatever small talk Tyler made while on patrol must have assured the officer that yes, indeed, he was the owner not an interloper, and the cop made his getaway before Tyler could talk him into helping load the boxes of cabinets into the pickup.

We assume the cabinet company had hired a fly-by-night delivery company. Literally. And the delivery company thought it would be OK to leave the boxes outside the church at eleven o’clock.

In any case, these boxes of cabinets sat unopened in the rental unit for a couple of months before Tyler hauled them back to the church basement to assemble them.

Compared to sanding floors, putting together cabinets was easy work, but Tyler required all day to put together the drawers and cabinet pieces for our 132-inch bathroom vanity. In the basement, they looked black, and I initially thought we had received the wrong ones, just like with the errant kitchen cabinet. But no, in daylight, our espresso cabinets were the perfect color. (The other thought I had when I saw the assembled cabinets for the first time was, oh yeah, we need knobs for those cabinets, too. Another item to add to the to-do list.) After the countertop was installed, the upper cabinets in cream would flank the gently arched vanity mirrors on order from the glass guy.

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Tomorrow: More cabinets. For the laundry room. Wait, there’s a laundry room? See it here.

Our story so far: Our carpenter trimmed out all kinds of nooks and crannies in the old Methodist church we were turning into our home.

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You-Can-Call-Me-Al also trimmed out our master bedroom tray ceiling with crown molding and tin salvaged from the basement ceiling. Originally, I had hoped to show off the original tongue-and-groove wood ceiling inside the tray, but I was overruled when Tyler determined he couldn’t repair the holes in it. So we covered it in tin which added tons of historic texture. The tin looked dirty against the bright white of the ceiling so it would need to be painted, but I had just the right distressed technique to try with it.

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Tomorrow: Ooh, the tray has secret lighting. Read about it here.

Our story so far: Tyler cleared the sanctuary floor in order to finish it, so our carpenter, You-Can-Call-Me-Al, got busy with trim at the old Methodist church we were turning into a home.

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You-Can-Call-Me-Al trimmed out the baseboard and the windows in the master suite, and among other details, he hung the linen closet doors and trimmed them out. Shaped sort of like a cramped confessional only without the screen between, those strange little cubby holes leftover in the master suite floor layout had become handy little closets for sheets and towels. All we needed was shelves and doorknobs! Oh, and paint. But at least now we could envision the closets instead of strange voids in the two-by-fours.

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Tomorrow: The tray ceiling in the bedroom. See it here.

Our story so far: Nearly every day, we checked finishing details off our long to-do list at the old Methodist church we were turning into a home.

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In fact, during the preceding month, You-Can-Call-Me-Al had replaced all the windows on the west side of the house plus the only one on the north side. Tyler guessed the old ones might have been in place as long as seventy years or more. The seals and gaskets were shot, and the wind blew right through them. The new ones looked virtually the same, only the new ones had two panes instead of four, but their insulation value was vastly improved.

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Today’s headline is a partial quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, author of “On Death and Dying.” The full quote is “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”

Tomorrow: A temporary shelf. Read about it here.