Tag: Converted Church

Merchant Wednesday: House numbers (plus a look at the entryway)

Monica Lee2 Comments

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?).

front door
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.

entryway exterior after
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.

house numbers after

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.

You can shop their offerings on Etsy at TheWoodsCollective.

OK, back to our entryway tour. Here’s how our entryway behind the door looks now.

open door
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.

entryway stairs before
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.
entryway stairs after
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.

newell post cross cut
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 …

entryway exit before
Go now in peace

… but I like our new light fixture now.

entryway exit after
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?”

entryway mirror after
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.

Generosity is the spirit of Christmas

Monica Lee2 Comments

Back in the 1980s, the annual Christmas bazaar held here at the old Methodist church was the place to be and be seen. Members of the church spent all year creating handmade goods to sell, and on the designated Saturday, people lined up outside the church down the street waiting for the bazaar to open so they could get their hands on these one-of-a-kind treasures.

One of those treasures has now returned to the old Methodist church, thanks to the generosity of a patron who wanted me to have a house-warming gift.

table cloth

My benefactor’s mother bought a hand-embroidered felt Christmas tree skirt, only she requested it not be cut for a skirt so she could use it as a tablecloth.

table cloth close

Embroidered families of teddy bears and toys of all sorts decorate the Christmas green background. White fringe adorns the edge. The detail is impressive; the characters are outlined in hand-sewn sequins.

table cloth closer up

What with all the cutting and sewing and bedazzling, it surely must have taken weeks to complete. The artist did not take the time to embroider her name (though maybe one of my readers might know who completed it).

For being more than thirty years old, it is in impressively good condition, and I am fortunate that my benefactor took such good care of it and it found its way home to me.

It decorates my sofa table this year with other meaningful and historically significant holiday decorations, sitting as it does beneath the treasured Christmas card tree I received many years ago now from a former boss and a small ceramic manger scene my grandmother gave me.

Thank you, Tammy!

Decorating the church for Christmas

Monica Lee7 Comments

More than a year ago, when we were trying to convince our loved ones we weren’t crazy for wanting to live in a church, I told my stepdaughter she should get on board because she would love the 18-foot Christmas tree we would put in the great room.

Well, it’s Christmastime, and we’re wanting to make good on our promises, but as it turns out 18-foot Christmas trees aren’t sold off the shelf at Home Depot. Or anywhere else for that matter.

Early last week, I stopped at Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Meijer’s, Hobby Lobby, Michael’s, Pier 1, Kohl’s and Bed, Bath & Beyond looking for a big enough artificial Christmas tree suitable for our Church Sweet Home. Nope, na da, no, nix, nope, nope, nope, no.

Most people buy six-foot Christmas trees. Sometimes 7.5 or 8 feet tall. I found a 9-foot pencil tree at Home Depot. That was the biggest. But not quite big enough. We’d ruled out the 18-foot model; it turns out 12-feet tall (plus a star topper) would do in the corner where the ceilings were lower.

So once again, Tyler turned to the internet. We found a 12-foot Christmas tree on Wayfair that could be delivered in two days. And I had a coupon. Click, click, click, and we were the proud new owners of a Christmas tree with 7,480 tips that came in five parts.

If you thought finding a 12-foot tree was the hard part, you’d be wrong.

Try assembling a 12-foot Christmas tree. It took both of us three hours to fluff all those wiry tips. And we summoned You-Can-Call-Me-Al, who was staining our entryway steps, to stack Part VI on Part III of the tree (Part V was light enough for me to stack from the top of a 10-foot ladder). Fortunately, all the of lights worked when we were done.

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I also needed the ladder to decorate the tree. But I got my workout in going up and down those rungs. Tyler helped hang 100 feet of ribbon, and I used four boxes of large silver ornaments, 18 white poinsettia blossoms, two feathery angels, one white peacock and every last white, silver, gold, blue and aquamarine ornament we owned or I could scavenge.

christmas tree decorated

christmas giftsAt the foot of the tree, all my Christmas gifts are wrapped in snowflake-accented craft paper with white ribbon. Instead of bows, I’m recycling a box of Christmas ornaments we unearthed when we demoed the church.

garland

wreath 1I also hung dozens of feet of lighted flocked garland at the feet of our balcony railing. Really happy with the effect. We hung wreaths in front of all the double windows in the great room. Like the tree, the garland and wreaths are accented with silver, gold and aquamarine Christmas ornaments. I’m just a little bit obsessed with flocking and glitter this year.

wreaths

Just when I thought I was finished decorating for Christmas, a new friend stopped by with one more Christmas decoration that, in a way, originated in our church. I’ll try share that with you later this week.

 

 

Merchant Wednesday: Good Bones furniture

Monica Lee2 Comments

As we have reinvested in home furnishings and decorations to style our Church Sweet Home, we’ve run across a number of amazing artists and vendors. Sometimes the vendor is a big-box-type store but more often it’s an online retailer or a local vendor. On Wednesdays here on Church Sweet Home, I will share our latest find and reveal who provided it to help other interested home designers.

Today I’m sharing the designer who built our new coffee table.

old Sunday School room table
Interesting table. Very yellow.

Since the first time we toured the church more than a year ago, I thought the short Sunday school room table the congregation left behind might make a nice coffee table. It had been painted neon yellow, though, so it required some love to fit into my design scheme.

Even as a Sunday school table, it appeared to have a long history. It looked like it had once been a grand dining room table with a lot of leafs. Only the leafs were long gone and the table legs had been shortened to third-grade height.

stripping it
That’s the paint, reliquifying with the stripper.

First, we brought it to the dip stripper with a pair of doors to have the paint removed, but she discovered the top had been recovered with some sort of linoleum. We pried it off, and I tried stripping it myself. Very messy. I removed most of the yellow paint (and some other colors, too), but not all of it. I invested in some fusion paint.

And then I lost my mojo.

I kept procrastinating on the project until Tyler got so tired of waiting, he started shopping. And he found the most amazing coffee table offered by Michelle Herriges on Facebook Marketplace. (Lesson: Sometimes it pays to procrastinate.)

coffee table far off
Now that’s a coffee table with distinction.

It’s made of a metal stand that looks like it’s from a quarry and a top made of a number of different types of wood. The top is smooth and polished, but she’s rustic enough to rest your feet on, too.

coffeetable close up
A little rustic patina there.
cash register side table
The button on the top opens the drawer.

We drove an hour north to Eagle, Wisconsin, to pick it up, but the trip afforded us a look into Michelle’s studio, where she had a number of finished projects and a whole bunch of inspiration pieces (pieces of “good bones” that just needed a new reason to be). Rooting around among her treasures, Tyler spotted what she called a “cash register side table” made from the pop-out drawer of an old cash register. The drawer still pops out! We loved it, so we bought that, too.

One-of-a-kind pieces made by an artist. Can’t beat that.

Click here for Michelle Herriges’ Facebook page.

 

 

A Christmas decoration for all year round

Monica Lee1 Comment

It’s the culmination scene at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” After seeing how the world falls to pieces without him, the angel restores George Bailey’s life. Zuzu’s petals are in his pocket, to his relief; his daughter exists. He runs through the snowy streets of Bedford Falls, greeting all the buildings by name. He bursts through the front door of his house to find the bank examiner and local sheriff, whom he greets with a smile and a “Isn’t it wonderful—I’m going to jail!” He happily leaps up the stairs, accidentally yanking out, kissing and carefully replacing the railing post ball on the stair post—for the third time. And he chuckles before he’s reunited with his beatific children and his wife, who’s summoned the whole town to turn out to help address his financial woes.

He really had a wonderful life, that George Bailey.

And a nice railing post ball. Kissable!

Now we have a nice post ball, too.

spiral ball

leaves-on-spiral-ball.jpgWhen the stairway was installed, the hollow center poll just had a cover. If someone removed the cover, they could drop something down the post, never to retrieve it 12 feet down. But now, we have a distinctive ball made of overlapping iron leaves.

The proprietress of the spiral stair manufacturer found the one-of-a-kind feature for us online (she’s as big a fan of eBay as Tyler). A deal at $45. Described as “antique, architectural salvage newell fence post finial,” it’s 10 inches wide and dates to the early 1900s. We won the auction and handed it off to the spiral team to paint it, which was a bit of a trick given the spaces between the leaves. They managed to paint both the inside and the outside to match our spiral and railings.

Ta, da! The ball on top really sets off the spiral. So pretty, I could kiss it.

spiral ball far off
Bonus: You get to see some of my Christmas decorations, too.

A sweet day for Church Sweet Home

Monica Lee2 Comments

Guess what today is.

Church Sweet Home turns 127 years old today.

Imagine life 127 years ago!

A Republican from Indiana was president of the United States (yes, that would be Benjamin Harrison, an attorney perhaps best known for the McKinley Tariff and the Sherman Antitrust Act).

Horsepower had real meaning then because horses were a common form of transportation for most people; some also had the privilege of traveling by rail.

News came by word of mouth, Western Union telegrams and newspapers. No radio. No TV. No internet.

Author Laura Ingalls Wilder was 24 and had been married to Almanzo Wilder for six years in 1891.

The Wrigley Company had been founded earlier in the year and was about to launch a new product: Chewing gum.

The U.S. flag had only 44 stars. Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states.

Functional airplanes hadn’t yet been invented, in-home refrigerators were decades away and American women did not yet have the right to vote.

That was the year our church, now residence, was built. After many years of meeting in people’s homes, the Methodists secured a piece of property in September 1891. Here’s what happened next, according to one newspaper account:

On Nov. 29, 1891, the first church was dedicated by Rev. Smith, who planned the building and worked with his son for nine weeks to complete it. On the day of dedications, the following was received: cash $39; two stoves; one pulpit; two chairs and some lamps donated by the J.M. Carey family.

Library 1
This image of the church, taken I’m guessing between 1894 and 1920 (I can’t figure out that number: 19917), hangs in the local library.

For more than a dozen decades, parishioners celebrated Christmas and Easter, baptized babies, married couples, buried the dead, sang, learned, prayed, cried and dined in this little church.

As a reader of this blog, you know the status of this building today: It’s our home, born of the structure left by the Methodist congregation when they vacated in 2016.

Happy birthday, Church Sweet Home. May you still be standing in 127 years.

sepia tone
2018

The circus arrives without warning

Monica Lee13 Comments

Announcements, announcements, announcements:
A horrible way to die,
A horrible way to die,
A horrible way to talk to death,
A horrible way to die.
Announcements, announcements, announcements.

I think I learned this cheerful song at summer camp, but it might have been the Girl Scouts who taught it, I’m not sure. I also learned “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” in Girl Scouts, and now I know it’s not a song about ears. Trustworthy, indeed.

In any case, I have a couple of announcements. You may be dismissed if you’re not interested in talking to death.

First of all, our open house. I have told more than one visitor to the church we hoped to host an open house for former members of the church, our contractors and our neighbors on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

snowy church
Not a snowpocalypse. Yet.
Well, it’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and we’re not hosting an open house. In fact, we’re hosting a blizzard. Heavy flakes began falling just before 1 o’clock, and I would have been sick if I had tempted people out in this weather to see our church home. So, God was watching over our little project today, too, just as He has been all along.

We just aren’t ready to show off yet. The garage isn’t sided. Our entryway is unfinished. We haven’t even chosen cabinets for the walls on either side of the fireplace let alone installed them. I’ve hung only a handful of pictures. Pieces of furniture and our showplace rug are on order and probably won’t even arrive for entertaining at Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, I’m only half decorated for the holiday; we’re trying to locate a 12-foot tree that won’t cost us an arm and a leg.

And, of course, you saw the basement. Uff-da.

We still hope to host an open house, but probably not until spring (after the mud—can you imagine? On my white carpeting?). I’ll keep you posted, faithful readers.

And that brings us to announcement No. 2.

Exactly 361 days ago, I began this blog the day we closed our deal to buy the 126-year-old Methodist church. I have posted something—sometimes just a picture of my clever church sign—every day since then. In the blogging world, we call that dedication. I’ve impressed even myself.

But ever since we’ve moved in, I feel like I’m dragging out the memoir part of the story. At one time, I thought the open house would be the end of the story. But now I think move-in day is the end. Fortunately, with hundreds of blog entries, I have a lot of raw material to work with, and I’m going to have to do the hard work of crafting a satisfying ending. (I’ve done it three times before; I can do it again.)

So the memoir-in-progress is done.

But the story isn’t.

Church Sweet Home—the blog—will continue. Only I’m not going to write it in past tense, and the posts won’t be serialized anymore. No more “our story so far” and “tomorrow” teasers. Each entry will stand alone. I’ll show you our new thresholds, and the Hall of History photos and all our cool antique finds, and anything else having to do with Church Sweet Home.

But probably not a new post every day. If you’ve gotten this far in the horrible-way-to-die announcements, you’re what we call an avid fan. Thank goodness for you—your kind words and encouragement is what kept me going—and Tyler, too, some days. It’s nice to know someone cares. But I think most of my friends, or acquaintances anyway (Facebook lumps everyone together into the title “friend”), have long since hidden my posts about every last development at Church Sweet Home. Since we’ve rested on our laurels six weeks ago, there isn’t new news every day.

I should really get back to my other blogs anyway. There’s my blog about life in general as a Minnesota Transplant, my author blog and my blog about organizing photos; they deserve some love, too. I’ll still try to write something every day (because I’m a writer like that), it just won’t always appear here (feel free to subscribe to my other blogs, though—I love readers).

That brings us to the end of our announcements today. You’re a trooper, and I appreciate you. You are hereby dismissed.

# # #

Today’s headline is a line from Erin Morgenstern’s “The Night Circus.” If you haven’t read it, you really should. It’s a magical story. Check out my book review here. In any case, here’s the full quote: “The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”

Some of the best ideas come when you’re on vacation

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: My sister and her family paid us a visit, and after she praised all our hard work, I took the opportunity to show her how far we’d come with a before-and-after picture show.

# # #

Shortly after my sister and her family departed, Tyler sat down and relaxed for the first time in months. We both had long honeydew lists: Thresholds, paint jobs, trim work, furniture painting, decorating, missing screws, missing door knobs, furniture buying and more. I typed up my wish list for Tyler to do, and it was three pages long. On one hand, we were living in a semi-finished space.

church sign shape usOn the other hand, we had earned a break.

We planned a brief business vacation tied to a family wedding in Nashville, so we decided to make it a road trip. All that sitting around took a toll on Tyler. “Oh, my aching back” became his refrain. It was as if his body knew it finally had a chance to break down so it did.

And then we both came down with colds it took days to shake.

And then Thanksgiving came. And went.

The universe was giving us a message: Take it easy. The work will still be there when you’re ready to take it up again.

# # #

Tomorrow: An announcement. Or two. Read them here.