Our story so far: Finally (finally!) we closed on the 126-year-old Methodist church we intended to renovate into the home of our dreams.

# # #

The list of “first things to do” at our old church was long.

First, there was demolition.

First, we had to pick up and clean.

First, we had to do some yard work.

First, we needed to address the deteriorating belfry.

But what happened first—really first—was moving in all of Tyler’s tools.

For the regular handy man, this might take a few hours. With Tyler, it took at least three or four days.

First we fished all of his tool boxes from our cargo trailer where they had been stored since January when we moved out of our previous house. Then we transported all the tools that had arrived at our little rental house via the productive guys at UPS and the Postal Service in the time we’d been there; thanks to Amazon Prime, Tyler was on a first-name basis with the UPS guy on Day Two. We retrieved saw horses Tyler had built and stored at his cousin’s house and his mother’s. And then he made a couple of trips to Home Depot for various sheets of plywood, doodads and, of course, locking mechanisms to secure everything.

When he was done (or as done as any man with a penchant for tools who still had money in his pocket), the sanctuary of the church (a 26-by-36-foot space) was filled with tool boxes, plywood work tables, saw horses, saws and duplicates of just about every tool known to man. Or at least known to woman.

Just the array of screwdrivers boggled this woman’s mind.

At one point in the demolition process, Tyler needed a very heavyweight hook. A little bit of digging revealed exactly the hook he needed, a medieval-looking device suitable for hanging a dead knight from the rafters.

“What is that?!”

“It’s a come-along.” (I didn’t ask what a come-along was. I looked that up later: It’s a hand-operated winch.)

“Why do you have that?”

“We needed it for the race car.”

Of course. For the race car.

Yes, the Renaissance Man who was my husband was a bit of a grease monkey, too. A few years before, he and his brother raced stock cars on the dirt racetrack in northern Illinois near our home at the time. Every weekend all summer long, they’d spend their evenings driving a $500 piece of junk around a quarter-mile race track wearing out tires. Invariably, by the end of the night, the vehicle would be inoperable for one reason or another (an encounter with another beat-up race car operated by a competitive wild man will do that), and the hunk of metal would have to be loaded onto a trailer so it could be returned home for repairs. This is why my husband had an enormous, scary-looking come-along.

Please do not ask why he still had an enormous, scary-looking come-along, four years after he quit racing. But the answer to that explains why it took us three or four days to unpack his tools.

# # #

Tomorrow: An angel joins our team. Read it here.

Our story so far: My husband Tyler picked up a lot of experience when he undertook a mammoth project back in the early 1990s to renovate an old tobacco farmhouse without any modern amenities into his house.

# # #

One of the things I like to say about my enterprising husband is that he is one to go big or go home. He likes big steaks, big trucks and, fortunately for me, big women (or at least tall ones; I’m 5-foot-10). Our RV is among the biggest on the road, and of course, he’s fond of big houses, too.

This first renovation project was no different. Once Tyler had the old tobacco farmhouse livable, he decided he needed more space. So he built a 24-by-36-foot two-story addition; the main floor was the family room and above it was the master bedroom. (He deconstructed the Swedish wood stove and moved it to heat the addition.) And then he built a three-car garage on the other side of the farmhouse.

When I say “he built it,” I’m being literal. He would frame one wall and invite a buddy or a relative over to help him stand it up. People who know Tyler won’t be surprised he paid his buddies in beer. A lot of beer.

The entire project took just less than two years to construct. Five years after he and his wife bought it, they moved to Minnesota. They sold the old tobacco farm for ten times what they’d paid to purchase it.

Ironically, Tyler’s old tobacco farmhouse transformation was big enough to house a whole congregation—let’s call it cathedral big. We drove by it not long ago, and there’s cross, a flag and a rustic sign out front that reads “Eternal Light Fellowship/Faith Hope Family/ Sunday Worship 10:30 a.m.”

# # #

Tomorrow: Chapter 8 opens with a moment of gratitude. Read it here.