Our story so far: We closed the real estate deal on an old Methodist church, and embarked on weeks of interior demolition to turn it into our house.

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Near the end of demolition, progress was being measured inch by inch. Tyler pulled up the carpeting in the main sanctuary, cut it into four big hunks, and it was all we—Tyler, the hired man St. Johnny and I—could do to haul/drag each dusty, unwieldy piece to the dumpster. Then, what we were left with was about five thousand carpet staples stretching out to infinity across the floor’s horizon, each one securing a piece of carpet padding to the Douglas fir hardwood flooring.

I spent hours pulling staples, and carefully feeling the floor with my fingertips to make sure I got all of them. It wouldn’t do to have any staples or nails in the flooring when we were ready to sand and restore the hardwood to glory.

About six weeks into the project, we’d cleared the second floor. Gone were closets under the eaves, the walls, a sweeping swath of the choir loft ceiling and the carpeting. We were down to the studs as they say in the business. The only thing left was a gas heat stove in the corner, which could not be removed until after the plumber went to work and disconnected the gas line.

I longed to sweep (and I never longed to clean anything as more than one roommate can attest), but Tyler put me to work on other tasks; he didn’t want any more dust in the air and he knew there were weeks of dust ahead of us. Still, the area that would someday soon be a bathroom, a bedroom and my office looked great. Finally, we’d uncovered the blank slate for which we were looking.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 12 opens with an ode to public utilities. Read about it here.

Our story so far: If we couldn’t repurpose the things we found in our old church during demolition, there were three ways to get rid of items we had no use for: Throw them away, give them away, sell them.

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During demo, I made several trips to Goodwill and Habitat for Humanity’s Restore. Some furniture, light fixtures and even Christmas trees were our trash, but some other man’s treasure.

On an early trip to the Restore (which accepts construction materials and operational appliances and resells them for Habitat for Humanity’s housing program), I tried to talk the manager into taking the built-in cabinet and accordion room divider that had been between the sanctuary and the overflow space.

 

Tyler and the hired man St. Johnny loaded them into our pickup and secured them for the 20-mile journey to a new life, and I was assigned transportation responsibilities.

I pulled up to the drop-off just as a garbage truck pulled into the lot to empty the store’s dumpster. While the truck’s beep-beep-beep created background music, the Restore manager eyed my goods.

“The bad news is, we’re not interested,” he said. To be fair, the accordion divider had seen better days and the built-in was designed for, well, a church. “The good news is, I can try to talk to the trash guy into taking them. I’ll help you move them from your truck to his.”

The garbage man agreed. It being a couple of weeks before Christmas, I hurriedly dug ten bucks in cash out of my purse and thanked the dump truck driver profusely. I was sorry to be further filling a landfill, but grateful for serendipity.

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Tomorrow: I find a couple of motley manger families living in the Christmas closet. Click here to read it.

Our story so far: The demolition phase of our church renovation included unearthing interesting treasures and repairing the belfry roof.

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Chapter 11

The dirty part of demolition began to wear us down. There’s a reason home improvement television devotes five minutes or less of every show to the demolition process and usually punctuates it with crazy demolition antics. The work is necessary, but most of the time, it’s just plain dirty work: Dust, sawdust, insulation dust and construction waste served with a side of tedium.

Tyler was supervisor and handler of power tools. St. Johnny, the hired man, did any work that required kneeling or heavy lifting, skills neither Tyler nor I relished exercising. I was assigned to menial, monotonous jobs like removing nails from trim and flooring.

One of our goals was to recycle as much of the church as possible. Those pieces of trim and flooring would live new lives as trim or repaired floor or accent walls in the remodeled interior. But one can’t safely saw pieces of wood riddled with nails. Oh, those church builders of yore loved their nails! A single piece of hardwood flooring might have thirty nails (plus a few carpeting staples thrown in for good measure). Tyler invested in a new Air Locker gun, a device powered with compressed air that niftily forced nails out from the bottom. He also dug a strange but effective device from one of his tool boxes that looked like it once was used by an iron welder from the Old West to move coals; I used this to yank stubborn nails from boards that could not be coaxed out by the Air Locker gun. I spent many hours using these amazing tools and acquired a bad case of tennis elbow but I became an expert. A few tips:

• Wear work boots. Those nails are being forced out with highly compressed air pack a punch when they hit your feet.
• Wear eye protection. Those nails fly everywhere.
• Wear gloves. Recycled wood has splinters.
• Admire the sparks: Yes, sometimes there are sparks.
• Organize your recycled wood by type. In a five-thousand-square-foot structure, you’re gonna recycle a lot of wood. Separate the trim, the baseboards and the flooring, or you’re never gonna find the wood you want when you’re ready to reuse it.

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Tomorrow: Wanted: One dumpster. Cheap. To read it, click here.

Our story so far: We began the demolition phase at the 126-year-old Methodist church we acquired to turn into our house.

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Churches have saints, and our saint was St. John.

Even Jesus couldn’t do everything by himself. He gathered twelve apostles, among the first was John, one of the sons of Zebedee. Our St. John was a follower, too, an excellent follower of Tyler’s orders.

The third time we visited the church, after making an offer on it but two months before we actually closed the deal, Tyler and I visited the local grocery store. It was really just a glorified convenience store that had made a name for itself selling bacon-wrapped beef tenderloins, but hey, we could get sugar or a can of soup or, heck, a beer in a pinch. Tyler quizzed the cashier as we departed.

“Do you know anyone looking for work?”

She gave him a bewildered look. Maybe she thought he was asking something nefarious.

“I’m renovating a building, and I need some help.”

“Help? Like what kind of help?”

“You know carrying things, moving things around, demolition. That kind of thing.”

“Hmm, I don’t know.” She made a show of looking like she was thinking about various fellows who would be willing to carry things.

“Well, if you think of anyone, would you give them my number?”

“Sure,” she said, taking Tyler’s name and number on a slip of paper. “Maybe I know someone.”

I chided Tyler as we left the store. “Why do you think the cashier is the only person in town who knows people who do manual labor?” I asked.

“She’s the only person in town I talked to!”

“No one is ever going to call you. She threw that piece of paper away as soon as we left the store.”

“Well, maybe so, but it can’t hurt to ask.”

Lo and behold, a guy called Tyler a few days later. Introduced himself as Johnny and said he heard Tyler needed some help on a building project.

“See!” Tyler told me later.

At the time, we were hoping to close on the church in a matter of days. We didn’t know it would take weeks. So he told Johnny to give him a call in three or four days. Every single time, Johnny followed through. He called three or four days later, and Tyler filled him in on the latest delay.

We couldn’t be so lucky, I thought, to find a guy in the very town we were buying a property who would be willing to be Tyler’s hired man.

But sure enough, Johnny showed up in his work clothes on Day Two, and boy, could he work. And best of all, he was the most cheerful order taker I’d ever seen.

“Move that.” “Take that over there.” “Help me pick this up.” “Take that apart.”

Whatever Tyler asked, Johnny carried out.

While carrying loads of garbage, I lowered my voice and told Johnny I hoped it was OK, taking Tyler’s orders (I’m not implying I was irked to be taking orders, please don’t misunderstand).

“No, we get along great,” Johnny chirped. “We’re on the same wavelength.”

If Johnny wasn’t a saint, he was an angel.

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Tomorrow: Check out our first before-and-after pictures. Read it here.