Our story so far: My husband and I got up early one Saturday in June to “eat our vegetables first.” We figured we could sand floors on the second floor of the old church for four hours, then enjoy the rest of the day. But we were stymied by a long breakfast and quickly rising temperatures.

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The center of the floor was in pretty good shape after the previous sandings, but the edges were thick with mastic. No sooner would I install a new sanding disk on my edger than it would be gummed up with glue, unable to remove any more layers. Up to retrieve another disk, then down on my knees to install it and proceed a few more inches along the edge of the floor.

No sound can be heard above the buzz of one sander let alone two. So there was no music, no conversation, only attention to detail.

I took as few breaks as possible, besides the disk replacement, with the intention of finishing the edges upstairs and then tackling the Hall of History and the mud room on the main floor before having to return the sanders. But I ran out of sanding disks before I got downstairs. And Tyler ran out of energy.

Still, we had to drag the sanders down the stairs, blow clean the devices, hoist them into the truck and haul them back to the rental desk by 11:30. All in the searing high-noon heat and humidity. The pancakes and eggs we had during our extra-long breakfast break provided just enough fuel to meet our deadline. As we climbed back into the truck, Tyler said, “where to for lunch?”

Tyler had no shame, apparently, but we looked a fright. Sweaty, covered in sawdust, my hair all askew from wearing a ventilator and ear muffs all morning.

“I’m not going anywhere for lunch,” I said. “I’m going home to take a shower!”

Tyler obliged my vanity, and I indulged in the best shower of my entire life.

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Tomorrow: Mexican with a side of aspirin. Read about it here.

Our story so far: We had 2,200 square feet of hardwood to refinish in the 126-year-old Methodist church we were turning into our dream home.

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We’d pretty much agreed, Tyler and I, that we’d do something other than work on the church on weekends—shopping, chores, socializing, resting—but the pressure of finishing the floors began to eat away at our best intentions. We couldn’t install cabinets until we finished the floors, and we couldn’t install countertops until we had cabinets, and we couldn’t have sinks until we had countertops, and we couldn’t have running water until we had sinks.

So one Saturday morning in June, I agreed to sand floors for four hours. If we returned the sander within four hours, we paid less than using it all day. It seemed a good way to get an unappealing chore out of the way first and then enjoy the rest of the day. Plus, we figured to be done before the hottest temperatures of the day, predicted to be in the nineties.

So we got out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and rewarded ourselves with breakfast out. Only the diner we settled on was a cook short and experiencing problems with its electronic ordering system. A thirty-minute treat turned into seventy-five minutes of Chinese water torture. So we didn’t get the sanders rented and into service until eight o’clock.

We donned ventilators, safety glasses and ear protection. Tyler used the orbital sander on the second floor, and I used the edger. The sander had so much power and I so little core strength, I could only control it by leaving one knee on the ground and using the other leg and both arms to propel it in the direction I wanted it to go. I probably looked like some sort of middle-aged spider trying to control a panicked fly.

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Tomorrow: Which has higher priority? Hunger or vanity? Read about the dilemma here.

Our story so far: The first step in sanding hardwood floors in the church we were turning into our home required a drum sander and 24-grit sandpaper.

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Have you ever seen 24-grit sandpaper? I hadn’t. I’d only used the relatively even sheets of sandpaper to smooth edges and surfaces on furniture I painted. How cute. Twenty-four-grit sandpaper is the wicked sumo wrestler of finishing materials—it looked like it had gravel on it and if you got in its way, you’d be flattened.

At this point, I used a floor edger to sand right up to the walls in the sanctuary; this step required the operator to kneel, and since I still had my natural joints, I was elected. Then someone (usually Tyler, but sometimes St. Johnny) used the orbital sander with 60-grit sandpaper going with the grain.

On ordinary wood floors, one might be finished sanding. But we didn’t have ordinary wood floors; we had 126-year-old wood floors. Over the course of a century, the floor had settled everywhere except where the beams in the basement supported the structure. This left narrow grooves in the sanctuary floor that remained untouched by the stand-up sanders. Seated on a rolling flat cart low to the floor, Tyler used a belt sander and a hand-held oscillating sander to smooth out those grooves.

Final pass was with an orbital sander and 80-grit sandpaper.

Of course, vacuuming was required after each sanding step.

And that was just the sanctuary floor. We had to do the whole thing all over again in the master suite (with maple flooring, which is much harder than pine), in the Hall of History and on the second floor. In total, we had about 2,200 square feet of hardwood to finish.

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Tomorrow: Sanding the second floor. Read about it here.

Our story so far: Sanding hardwood floors in the old Methodist church we were turning into our home was dirty work.

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Sanding hardwood is hard work. To the elbow grease, add a flurry of sawdust and you’ve got good reason to hire out the work.

But we didn’t. We hired out the duct work, we hired out the electrical, we hired out the plumbing, we hired out the drywall and we hired out the painting. Unlike those other tasks, sanding didn’t require any particular expertise, only numerous trips to the Big Box rental desk, attention to detail and a willingness to endure dust (a lot of dust). It’s the job you often see novices attempt on DIY Network’s “First Time Flippers”; viewers see about ninety seconds of effort, even though the rehabbers probably spent weeks doing the work. Though the investment in time is big, the investment in cash is small, and the return is potentially huge. Everyone likes the sound of “original wood floors.”

And so, we found ourselves sanding floors in the old church during cold days in February and hot days in June.

Fundamentally, sanding is granular demolition and despite labeling it the “flooring phase,” the truth of the matter was we were still demoing the flooring seven months after we purchased the old Methodist church to turn into our home. The layers of flooring and gunk covering the original wood floors were beginning to feel as if they would never end. During the official demo phase we peeled back the old carpeting and padding that was two decades old if it was a day. Then there were the thousands of carpet staples and hundreds of nails covering every square foot of the sanctuary.

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Tomorrow: Oh, you can’t sand yet. Look out for the tin! Check it out here.

Our story so far: Using reclaimed wood from the basement ceiling, Tyler constructed a unique accent wall for the powder room in the old Methodist church we were turning into our home.

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Then Tyler tackled the half-wall in the master bedroom where our king bed and the bank-safe night stands would ultimately be placed.

In our former house, we invested in an enormous bedroom set featuring a grand four-poster bed with marble accents that looked a little like a throne (we got a deal on the floor model). The whole set was so big, I didn’t move it once in the decade we lived there and we sold it when we moved because we figured we’d never have a bedroom big enough for it again. This left us without a headboard in the church for our king mattress, and I decided I wanted something non-standard: The whole wall would become our headboard.

During construction, Tyler and my stepson built a half wall, a la one featured in “The Downtown Loft Challenge” episode of “Fixer Upper,” in which Joanna Gaines created an accent wall with white oak planks and a narrow shelf. She set artwork, a few books and a candle on the shelf above the bed. Instead of white oak, we used the reclaimed basement ceiling boards—a mix of the white, gray and black ones—to decorate the lower half. During one of our antiquing trips last fall, Tyler and I found a set of old arched church windows without glass; that’s the artwork we would display on the shelf.

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Tomorrow: Another bedroom wall gets some love at Chapter 30 closes. See it here.

Our story so far: We were a bit overwhelmed with decisions and budget considerations while determining paint colors and trim for the old Methodist church we were turning into our home.

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Fortunately, we saved a lot of scrap trim and wood when we were taking the church apart during demolition, and at least some of it was not only useable and money-saving, we could recycle it in a beautiful way. And the best part: We were using what we had so it required very little decision-making and no paint.

When Tyler took apart the basement ceiling to save the tin plates, all of it was nailed in place with tongue-and-groove planks. The church builders of old may have used leftover pieces from elsewhere in the church or another location altogether because though it matched in shape, it came in a rainbow of painted and unpainted colors. We saved it and moved it around the basement and then the deteriorating tool shed out back and now finally, we could put it to use—as accent walls, the modern method of featuring one wall in a room for some aesthetic purpose. One of our ten design rules required putting an accent wall in every—or nearly every—room.

First up: The powder room.

Without sanding, treating or even cleaning the tongue-and-groove boards, Tyler nailed the shortest and most uniquely colored boards to the south wall, on which our sleek, pure white vanity and mirror set would stand out. When he was done, the rustic backdrop added miles of character to the 21-square-foot room, and it would require only a coat of polyurethane to finish it.

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Tomorrow: If you like this, you’ll love the accent wall Tyler built in the master bedroom. Check out it here.

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.