Our story so far: After months of effort, we’d arrived at the drywall phase of renovation in the 126-year-old Methodist church we were turning into our home.

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While the drywallers were doing their thing inside the church, Tyler got busy outside. Finally, the weather made the Great Outdoors inviting again, and Tyler began work on his Garage of Dreams.

In the way that other phases overlapped one another, Phase Six: The Garage was overlapping Phase Three: Drywall, Paint & Flooring. This was necessary for two reasons. First, the weather was finally nice again. Second, it was becoming increasingly apparent we weren’t going to be able to move into the church when we elected to wrap up our lease on the nearby rental house. It looked like we were going to have to move back into the camper, which we preferred to park on the cement slab of our future driveway and garage rather than a muddy yard.

This wasn’t an entirely unwelcome development given the nice weather. Recall that we were forced to move out of the camper in mid-November only because of snow and the imminent threat of freezing sewage pipes. On the other hand, it would have been convenient to move directly from the rental house into the church. But without the luxuries of finished flooring, countertops and closet racks in the church, we elected to take up residence in the camper again.

When deciding to purchase this particular church, the size of the lot was as appealing as the location. No churches came with attached garages, and some small churches offered no place to build a garage. When we contemplated the church in Pecatonica, Illinois, the garage we planned would have taken up all the open lot that came with the church. Though there was no parking lot or off-street parking with our 126-year-old Methodist church, the structure itself was situated on the front of a long triangular lot, which left lots of land for a garage with space left for a garden and other green space.

For several weeks, Tyler had been pacing and tracing the outline of his garage and driveway, collecting bids, consulting with the building inspector on setbacks and footings, and pricing creature comforts (like urinals and method of garage heating). Bids on outsourcing all the work ran high, so with his eye on the Tequila Budget, Tyler took on some parts of the project himself. He was ready to break ground.

Or at least break concrete.

The first step in his grand garage plan was to break up part of the concrete stairway from the basement. The straight stairway required a turn in order to be situated completely inside the future garage. The top four steps had to go.

So Tyler rented a jack-hammer. And jack-hammered through several feet of concrete. His hired man St. Johnny earned his pay that day, hauling away the heavy chunks and digging a four-foot-deep hole to accommodate a new mid-stairway landing.

Tyler came home of the church that day in a state of exhaustion. After months of demolition and wall construction, he admitted that was only a warm-up. “I haven’t worked that hard in years,” he said at the end of jack-hammer day as he flopped on the couch, soon to be sleeping.

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Tomorrow: Some old dogs do have new tricks. Read about it here.

Our story so far: The building inspector approved the rough-in in our renovation of the old Methodist church into a home.

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As we neared the end of the Framing & Mechanicals phase of construction, Tyler was on box seven of nails for his air nailer. A box, you might recall, had a quantity of two-thousand nails.

And two-by-fours? He estimated we’d used at least one-hundred-and-fifty in constructing walls and ceilings inside the church. The Framing & Mechanicals phase had dragged on nearly twelve weeks, four weeks longer than demolition which had felt like it would never end. We were excited for the phase that signaled the most dramatic physical changes in the church.

Besides nails, lumber and lassitude, a measure of the effort we’d put into our construction project was Tyler’s belt.

During the first three months, he tightened his belt by about a notch a month. By Month Four, he had to bore a new notch in his belt, and that was apparently still not enough. One day, he had one hand on his air nailer and the other on a ceiling joist to hold it in place while he secured it. In front of an audience of St. Johnny, the carpenter helper, our electrician and an HVAC guy, Tyler’s pants fell to his ankles.

He ho-ho-hoed his way through a situation that would have mortified anyone else, but thank goodness he was wearing his new, snugly fitting underwear.

Another measure of our effort? Splinters and gloves.

Tyler picked wooden splinters out of his digits nearly every night as he sat on the couch decompressing from another long day. I wasn’t so rugged; I wore gloves.

Tyler had purchased a big box of cotton brown jersey gloves for me and his hired man to use. They were handy (get it? Handy gloves?) but too big for my slender (some might say bony) fingers. During the demolition phase, I’d run across a pair of work gloves that had belonged to the “DCE,” as evidenced by the Sharpie marker labeling. The only DCE this Lutheran had ever heard of was the Director of Christian Education, so I imagined the Methodist DCE had left them behind. They fit perfectly, so I commandeered them.

Four months and countless nails, pieces of wood and rolls of insulation later, the seams began splitting. I’d never worn out a pair of work gloves before. Before the church, I’d never even owned a pair of work gloves. I was never a gardener, and my hobby involved using writing utensils, not hammers. When more of my fingertips were bare than protected, I complained to the foreman that I needed a new pair of gloves “like these,” I said holding up my threadbare DCE gloves. Two days later, Tyler returned home from another trip to Home Depot with not one, not two but three pairs of work gloves eerily similar to my DCE gloves.

I would not be able to complain about my work gloves again.

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Tomorrow: Last-minute installation. Read about it here.