Before I move along to the east side of the fireplace, let’s make a quick stop in front of the fireplace.
(Feel like you’re joining the conversation mid-stream? I’m sharing how the back wall of my great room in the converted 127-year-old church turned out. Check out this post to read about the pantry and this post to read about the left side of the fireplace.)
I wanted to create a little conversation area in front of the fireplace, but Tyler and I struggled to find the right chairs. They needed to be comfortable and low profile in order to clear the spiral stair on the left side of the hearth. Oh, and the right color—not too gray and not too splashy.
This photo makes the chair look beige, but it’s more caramelly than that.
We ended up choosing custom back-tufted caramel-colored leather chairs. And they swivel! Which is perfect for a guest who might want to warm up by the fire and then turn to enjoy the conversation.
We ordered them before Thanksgiving, and they weren’t delivered until February. It pained me to entertain at Christmas without them, but when they finally arrived, they were perfect.
The nailhead detail coordinates with the dark navy storage ottomans we found at another furniture store. Beside stashing our granddaughter’s random toys and books inside between her visits, the ottomans perform as footrests and drink rests, as needed.
You can see a peek of the right side of the fireplace cabinetry.
The whole setting is arranged on the faux bear rug Tyler found online (no bears were killed in the making of this rug—read about it here).
(I’ll share another picture of the right side of the fireplace later this week.)
From the beginning, Tyler imagined bookshelves on either side of our floor-to-ceiling fireplace in our Church Sweet Home. I imagined he was thinking of something along the lines of a study in a Sherlock Holmes novel.
The shelves we ended up with are more open and airy than an English detective’s. As with the room in general, they are not symetrical on each side of the fireplace.
Here’s a reminder of how the back wall of the great room looked after we finished the floor.Today, I’m showing off the shelves on the left side. This spot is obscured to some extent by our spiral stairway.
Shelving, looking from the fireplace.The cabinets along the bottom hide all sorts of stereo equipment. There’s a front-throwing subwoofer (an audiophile understands this terminology) in a screen-covered cabinet on the bottom left there, and a huge standing speaker inside that screen-covered cabinet flanking the fireplace.
Shelves from pantry side.I’ve decorated the shelves in Joanna Gaines style, including some Methodist hymnals (bottom left), the wooden bowl created by my dad (middle right) and a couple of functional miniature cannons that have been in Tyler’s family for some years.
Finishing the back wall is no longer a mystery! I’ll share the right side of the fireplace later this week.
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Today’s headline is a quote put into Sherlock Holmes’ mouth by Sir Author Conan Doyle in A Study in Scarlet.
If you were to do a deep dive into the computer files on my computer desktop for all things related to our church conversion project, you’d find among the first documents I created one called “House wish list.” It’s dated shortly after the congregation accepted our purchase offer on the church but more than a month before we actually took ownership. At this point in the project, we had walked through the church three times but we were just dreaming and planning because we couldn’t do any work yet.
On the two-page list are items like “method for displaying china,” “walk-in closet” and “ginormous *expletive* TV screen” (excuse my French). Check, check and check. We worked all those things into the design for our Church Sweet Home.
Also on the list for the kitchen? “Pantry area with lots of storage.”
In one of the early floor plans, our pantry was a walk-in closet sharing space from what is now our walk-in-clothes closet, but we had to scrap that idea when we found the amazingly priced display kitchen. We designed our kitchen around the cabinets that came with the display kitchen, and that meant putting our refrigerator into the pantry space. The display kitchen also failed to leave room for a microwave.
We plowed ahead knowing we would figure something out.
This picture was taken shortly after we took ownership of the church before we demoed much of anything. The closet on the left became our back door to the garage. The area on the right is the spot that would someday become our pantry. In the area on the right, you can see the step-up of the altar area and the end of the communion rail, both of which were torn out during demo.
At some point, I saw a picture of a bank of shallow floor-to-ceiling cabinets in a kitchen, and I figured we could turn the northwest corner of the great room into our pantry using some version of this concept. When we moved into the church, a pair of beat-up wicker cabinets served as the pantry.
A pair of wicker cabinets under the spiral stairway comprised our pantry when we moved into the church last fall.
After Christmas, Tyler took up the project of building cabinets for the pantry and the back wall of the great room. Note: That’s about 25 linear feet of cabinets which is to say a lot of cabinetry (“go big or go home,” remember?). After much shopping, he determined he could buy ready-to-assemble cabinets for about $10,000 not including counter tops.
Well, we didn’t have $10,000 to built cabinets for canned food and stereo equipment. The Tequila Budget was so far back in our rear view mirror we couldn’t see it anymore but that doesn’t mean we didn’t think about the bottom line.
After consulting with You-Can-Call-Me Al, Tyler determined he could build and paint custom cabinets for significantly less than $10,000. In the end, the pantry and the back wall of cabinets and shelving cost about $8,300 in labor and materials (including the counter tops, cabinet knobs and finishing trim). We got exactly what we were envisioning, so going the totally custom route was the right choice for us.
Our pantry, after.
My pantry now includes space for a mop and broom (in the cupboard on the end there), space for the microwave and all my cookbooks, and a whole lot of larder space for canned goods, paper towels, potato chips and all kinds of chocolate (must have space for chocolate).
Tyler and You-Can-Call-Me Al built these cabinets from scatch, and You-Can-Call-Me-Al figured out how to accommodate our semi-straight walls and undulating floors (it’s a 127-year-old church, remember). We chose the same military blue cabinet colors as we have in the beverage bar in the opposite corner of the great room. The counter top is butcher block stained the same color as our front entryway steps. You-Can-Call-Me-Al, who we initially hired to tile our shower, tiled the back splash in the same manner as the rest of the kitchen.
It’s a party line. One-ringy-dingy, two-ringy-dingy…
The corner at the end of the pantry remotely resembles a phone booth. It seemed to be the perfect place to mount an antique telephone.
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I’ll share pictures of the back wall of cabinets flanking the fireplace in the great room in Church Sweet Home posts next week. Stay tuned.
To continue the theme of mixing old and new around Church Sweet Home, here’s a look at the afghan storage device in my living room: An antique wooden ladder.
We found this beauty leaning against a roof outside an old antique shop in a village not too far from our house. “Shop” would be an understatement—it was more of an antique plantation with building after building filled with dusty treasures and junk. Need an old brass candlestick or bronze light fixture? This guy has hundreds of them, plus every other thing he’s salvaged in his eight decades on this planet.
In any case, he also had this 14-foot tall ladder. A quick spin around Pinterest will reveal how to use antique step ladders in creative ways, but few other homeowners would want a ladder so big. We, of course, have 20-foot ceilings in the church.
Tyler and I wire-brush scrubbed it clean of bird poop while leaving behind the paint splotches on the weathered wood. We hauled it into the church and discovered it was just a little too tall to lean against the side wall where we intended it, so we hauled back down to the basement where Tyler sawed a rung off the bottom. Perfection!
I’m thinking I might still hang some pictures inside the upper rungs, but for now, it’s just right for hanging extra afghans.
It took months, but we finally finished the tub surround.
There’s one bathtub in the chome, and it’s in the upstairs guest bathroom. The tub itself, a big soaker, was purchased early on. It was so big, we needed it in the room before we built the walls around it.
We finished the room around the tub including the shower, the vanity and the toilet. But the tub was just a basin for dust even four months after we moved in. Why? We went round and round with the tub faucet.
First we bought a beautiful waterfall faucet when we purchased all our other bathroom fixtures. When the plumber tried to install it, he pointed out it was a faucet for a bathroom sink; it would take hours to fill our tub with it. So the plumber ordered a tub faucet for us. When he inspected the parts, he realized it was missing the correct fittings. After much backing and forthing, he determined he could not even get the correct fittings. So Tyler looked in vain for a waterfall faucet online. We finally settled on a faucet with a shower sprayer. From Amazon. After nine months of screwing around, it was delivered the next day.
Once Glimfeather, our long-suffering plumber, got the faucet installed, we were ready to enclose the sides of the tub. You-Can-Call-Me-Al, our talented carpenter, built the sides with the same reclaimed wood we used for one wall in the guest powder room and for our headboard in the master bedroom.
Finally, we invited the stone guys to measure for the tub surround. I found a simple white quartz in the remnants pile out back of their operation, and the stone guys installed it over two days.
The bath tub in all its glory.
Tyler, who is the bigger fan of baths between the two of us, drew a bath the first chance he could. I retreated downstairs to look for leaks. None were found so we could both relax, he among bubbles and me on the dry main floor.
Our faucet, finally.
The faucet is not what we first chose, but it has functional beauty. I can wash my hair in the tub if I choose, and someday it will be handy to give a squirmy grandchild a bath.
A close-up look at our reclaimed wood.
Upon further reflection, I think the distinctive reclaimed wood we’ve been using in the chome was reclaimed to begin with. We found it in the basement during demolition; the tin ceiling was nailed to it. Because of all the various paint colors, it must have served some other purposes before it was pressed into service in the ceiling. So it’s been reclaimed twice. All we did to it was add a couple coats of clear polyurethane.
That was my refrain the past 18 months as Tyler and I have remodeled the old Methodist church into our home. Trim? Paint it. Cupboards? Painted. Antique finds? Sand it, and cover it with paint. Raw wood, weathered wood, finished wood, painted wood—I always think I can paint it.
But Tyler is not as much a fan of painted wood as I am. Sometimes he likes the warmth of stained wood. My father, a talented woodworker, thinks similarly, and he came through with two beautiful items that show off the wood—no paint.
I’m sharing these two projects today in honor of Dad’s birthday tomorrow. In his retirement, he has created a vast array of beautiful wood pieces, including many pieces of furniture, uncounted tiny kitchen table sets for toddlers, cribbage boards, turning puzzle boards and other cool and unique items. He’s quite creative and rather humble. But I’m calling attention to him and his work because he deserves it, especially on his birthday. (Happy Birthday, Dad!)
That a raw edge with some of the bark still attached.
The first piece was an end table Dad made for me for my birthday. You know how some people collect cool postage stamps or whale figurines? My dad appreciates wood. So when a tree fell down in his yard, he didn’t see garbage—he saw raw material.
Look at all those rings of growth! That was an old tree, just like the church.
The top of this end table is a slice of wood from that fallen tree, raw edges an all, and the stand was carefully created by Dad in his woodshop with various tools that make pieces of lumber into beautiful artifacts. The table now stands at attention between two loungers on my balcony, the perfect natural touch among my refined chairs.
Speaking of beautiful artifacts, Dad sent me this bowl he made “just because.” Well, it wasn’t only because he was thinking of me randomly. He made his first turned bowl for my mother and the second for my sister as a birthday gift so he didn’t want me to feel left out.
This bowl is made of 200 pieces of walnut and maple, carefully assembled, glued and planed (I think planed is the verb, maybe it’s turned) into this one-of-a-kind piece made just for me. (Thanks, Dad!)
I’ve now set this bowl in a place of honor in the new shelving at the back of our great room. That project is another story. I’ll share pictures of those shelves on another day.
I took this picture last week during a short walk between weather systems. It warmed up, it cooled down, it snowed, it rained, it froze; we covered a lot of bases in the cosmic game of climate change in one week.
But when the rain froze on the bushes alongside the driveway, I thought it was kind of pretty. Not fun to walk in–I later heard two hair-raising stories from relatives who fell on their slick driveways–so it was pretty and also pretty hazardous.
The next day, we woke up to this.
Turns out frozen water is not only grave in the right conditions but weighty, too. These huge branches from a tree fell on the neighbor’s driveway overnight. That clump of trees on the left borders the church property.
After consulting with the village fathers, we determined the branches came from a tree belonging to us. We got a little assistance shoving the detritus out of the way so our neighbors could proceed to work. We are now mourning the chainsaw that chewed its last piece of scenery last summer. It gave Tyler the best thirty years of its life, but when it quit, the small engine repair determined it could not be resurrected.
Among the meaningful and useful gifts I received for Christmas (or possibly my birthday—they’re two days apart so sometimes I forget) was this hanging key holder made for me by my dad. It’s a one-of-a-kind piece with a backstory, and I just love it.
The piano keys come from the piano once played by my grandmother, my mother’s mom. The upright grand piano, a magnificent musical instrument, was the centerpiece of the living room in my grandparent’s house in northwestern North Dakota. On days like today, when the wind is whipping subzero air across the Plains, you can imagine how folks back in the era before television might gather around the piano for indoor entertainment.
When my grandmother died, my mother got the piano. Dad built a trailer out of junk on my grandfather’s farm in order to transport the unbelievably heavy instrument from North Dakota to southern Minnesota, where we lived at the time. (The sound board of an upright grand hangs the piano strings vertically instead of horizontally like a grand piano does so the upright grand piano takes up a lot less space, but it’s still very heavy.) The piano survived the trip, and then another trip when my parents moved to Central Minnesota.
I, my sister and my little brother all learned to play piano on that instrument of my grandmother’s. Even now, I can imagine how the strips of ivory covering the white keys felt beneath my fingertips when I played Saint-SaĂ«ns’ Danse Macabre or piano arrangements of Beatles tunes.
We grew up and moved out, and Mom and Dad no longer needed nor wanted a piano. I was married to a musician at the time, so I took it. My ex and I moved it twice, and when we parted ways, I kept the piano. Being a little, shall we say, unmoored at the time, I asked my sister to keep it for me at her house, which she obliged for a decade. My nephews played it a bit, but it stood mostly as a testiment to my grandmother and an enormous artifact of the childhoods of my sister and me.
Eventually, my sister decided she could no longer store it for me. Tyler and I were living in a camper at the time, so we couldn’t take it. During one of its moves, the sound board cracked so piano tuners could no longer find a true A, or whatever note the tune to. Browsing Craig’s List, it was apparent pianos like Grandma’s couldn’t be given away.
So we demolished it.
We kept the good parts and threw the rest away (kind of like we would later do with the church).
We retrieved some of the parts at some point last year, but my sister squirreled away some of the piano keys, which she turned over to Dad who made them into a beautiful and functional display. I was thrilled when I opened it at Christmas.
Tyler mounted it on the wall by the back door in the church. I smile inside every time I hang my keys there (and every time I know where to find my keys on the way out the door). It’s a great gift, and it found the perfect place in Church Sweet Home.
By the way, my keys? My keychain, the one I carry around everywhere I go, is the one that came with the church. It’s a cheap plastic one that says “Loaves and Fishes,” the name of the food pantry that was housed in the church before we purchased it. All the keys that came with it are obsolete because we changed the locks. But the fob has history. It belongs to the church. Just like the piano keys have history. And now they belong to the church, too.
The glut of holidays at the end of December had us ringing our church bell with regularity. Now that is it operational again, we welcome opportunities to use it.
We try to be respectful. It’s a bell in a former church, after all.
So far, no one has complained. At least to our faces.
We’ve been ringing to the bell once or twice or letting our guests do so whenever we have a tour of the church, which occurs with some regularity, maybe once a week. People are curious, and in some cases, our various contractors have enjoyed showing off their work here. So when we walk through the second floor, I will invariably yank on the bell pull to show off the unique feature of our home.
But for winter solstice–the shortest day of the year marking the beginning of winter–we ran the bell twelve times at sunset: 4:23 p.m. on December 21.
My birthday was December 23, so I rang it six times at noon (one for each decade and partial decade of my lifetime). We discussed ringing it once for every year, but that certainly would have ticked off the neighbors! (My father, who helps at funeral services with his local funeral home, also objected to ringing it once for every year because that’s what some churches do at funerals; since I’m not dead yet, we didn’t want to commemorate that).
Of course, we felt compelled to ring our bell on Christmas Eve (6 p.m.) and Christmas Day (9 a.m.), so we did then, too.
Our belfry was quiet for a few days until New Year’s Eve. If ever there were an appropriate time to ring our bell at midnight, this was it! I sort of rang a church bell one other time on New Year’s Eve. My priest threw a “Y2K be damned!” party on December 31, 1999, and he let me and my then-husband ring the bell at midnight. Only the bells on the cathedral were electronic and operated by pushing buttons (still, that was exciting if only because January 1, 2000 arrived without any fanfare beyond midnight bells).
Tyler and I planned a small get-together that disintegrated when one of our guests came down with the flu, so it was just Tyler and me celebrating the new year in the church. Then, as is his wont, he turned in early. So ringing the bell was up to me. My father joked with me earlier in the day that he wasn’t going to visit me in jail if I got arrested for disturbing the peace.
I stayed awake with reruns of “Friends.” At 11:55 p.m., I crept upstairs. It was a warm night (for December), and I opened the belfry window so I could hear the bell better.
Instead of ringing the bell a certain number of times, I decided to ring it for a certain amount of time–one minute.
About halfway through the minute, I could popping sounds I hadn’t heard on the other days we rang the bell. I thought for a moment I had broken it! But then I realized I was hearing fireworks through the open window. (See! I wasn’t the only awake in our little town. Whew!)
When I was done, I looked through the belfry window at the now quiet scene below. No police cruisers had assembled.
Someone down the street yelled “Happy New Year! And thanks Methodist Church bell ringer!” I was stunned–and thrilled–that I had an audience. So I yelled “You’re welcome!” And they yelled “That was awesome!”
It was awesome, in the original meaning of the word: filled with awe. Not everyone gets to ring a real church bell at midnight on New Year’s Eve. I literally rang in the new year! I closed the window, turned off all the lights and sneaked into bed beside my husband, who was now wide awake. “Happy new year!” we wished each other.
I have no plans to ring the bell for any upcoming holidays (Tyler’s birthday isn’t until August). If you hear it ring, it’s because we have guests, and I’m showing off.
Among the projects we raced to finish in time to show off to our guests at the holidays was the entryway to the church. We were, of course, able to move in months ago without having to finish the space (only the ceiling was done), but since it was the first impression (or second, if you took in the exterior of the church first), we wanted it to be finished.
Which meant a flurry of activity took place in late November and early December. You-Can-Call-Me Al, who had tiled our shower and kitchen back splash, tiled the ground-level entry floor. Then he built new wooden treads for the steps leading up into the sanctuary and stained them. St. Johnny spent hours sanding the sanctuary level landing; it was a bear, covered in decades of paint and mastic and gunk. We decided to keep it rustic, leaving some of the paint intact, and we stained over it. Finally, we had the walls, trim and interior doors painted, hung the new chandelier and had our wrought iron team install the railing.
The transformation of the space is significant.
But let’s begin with a look at how the front doors looked when we bought the church a year ago. I’ve shared this shot before, but it’s a good taste of all the “befores” of the church (and who doesn’t appreciate a good transformation story, especially at this time of year?).
The front door was functional, but it had been stripped of a lot of its charm when the congregation replaced the original French doors with industrial red ones. The red ones were certainly more sound than the French doors, which had been stored and were so rotted when we found them, we left them on the curb because we didn’t think we could restore them. Also, the tiny lights on either side of the door may have provided illumination, but they fell short in the distinctive category.
Here’s how our Church Sweet Home presents its entryway now.
Those magnificent castle doors are a lot more interesting, and the light fixtures flanking them say a lot more than simply, “Let there by light.” Tyler rubbed a coat of tung oil into the doors in December to deepen their beauty and rub out all the nicks and scratches they had endured during construction and move-in.
Which brings me to the secondary purpose of today’s post: To call out the artisans who created our beautiful house numbers. Zach and Sheena’s work at TheWoodsCollective was featured in an issue of HGTV Magazine, and when I saw it, I wanted it for our church.
This is exactly the type of custom feature perfect for an Etsy vendor because everyone appreciates choosing their own wood finish and number style, and every house requires different numbers.
OK, back to our entryway tour. Here’s how our entryway behind the door looks now.
Welcome! Come on in!
See that door bell button there on the right? When you push it, it rings like a church bell inside the church. It’s awesome!
Let’s take a look at some before and after photos.
When we purchased the church, the ceiling was flat across the top with tiles, the walls of the entryway were paneled, and the steps were carpeted. The railing was distinctive, but made of wood, which didn’t match the rest of the new railings we eventually installed inside.Here’s how the steps up into the sanctuary look now.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the entryway now is that newel post. Tyler found it on Craig’s List and sent me two hours south to retrieve it. It’s solid wood, salvaged from a mansion in Chicago, and very heavy. The guy who sold it to us had multiple storage units filled with various pieces of mansions and churches–doors, altars, stained glass windows, hutches, and more. When I got the post back here, Tyler cut a few inches from the bottom to make it fit, and it was not easy task to cut a 10-and-a-half-inch column of wood.
Ah, I remember well the sawdust era of construction.
The guys at the spiral stairs manufacturer, who built all our railings, painted the newel post to match our steel, and then built the railing to fit it.
The stairs down to the basement are not so grand as the “up” steps, at least for now. Tyler painted them a nice blue-gray. At least the carpet is gone.
Before
After
When we bought the church, I appreciated the message inside the front doors …
Go now in peace
… but I like our new light fixture now.
The black steel light fixture coordinates with our railing, and the ceiling beams are the same as we have inside the sanctuary.
And, though I don’t have a good before of this angle, here’s a look at our Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall. Tyler found this ornate mirror at an estate sale about a week after we decided to buy the church. Now, when you enter or leave the house, you can gaze as your reflection and ask, “Who’s the fairest of them all?”
These interior doors are original to the church (or at least when we purchased it). We put in the glass panels and repainted the wood, and they look good as new.
I had intended to put a half-circle marble shelf beneath the mirror, but it turns out there’s no way to secure it, so we are looking for a little table to go there.
There you go, our renovated entryway to Church Sweet Home. Now you can go in peace.
Church Sweet Home 