Our story so far: I laid out the tiles in dry format for my tile rug to be set in the hardwood between my stove and the sink in my future kitchen at the old Methodist church.

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My tile rug prompted You-Can-Call-Me-Al to poke around the subfloor where it would eventually be tiled between the stove and sink. He determined that the 126-year-old subfloor wasn’t up to the task of supporting the tiles which could mean they would flex when someone walked on them and then crack. This meant I had to make another trip to Home Depot, No. 4 just for that week.

I was now what you’d call a regular at the local Home Depot, the nearest Big Box home improvement store. Before this project, I would have told you Big Box clerks were flunkies who weren’t well informed, but that’s not true: The clerks at this particular Home Depot were awesome. The cashiers always tracked down someone to help me load whatever I bought (which I’ve repeatedly mentioned was invariably heavy). One of the flooring guys once saved me after seeing only my behind sticking out of a pallet of tile on the floor. The paint mixer and I were on a first name basis. But it was the guys in the lumber department who I really appreciated. Tyler would give me a list of wood and/or screws to buy, and they would help me find it and usually load it onto a cart.

On this trip, Tyler told me to buy three-quarter-inch plywood with a cement board underlayment. The helpful clerks in the lumber department (I had two this day!) told me it didn’t exist. I had long since given up on trying to translate, so I called Tyler and handed my phone to one of the clerks. Turns out, I needed two things: Half-inch plywood and quarter-inch cement board.

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Tomorrow: The work gets harder. Read about it here.

Our story so far: We were seven months into renovating the old Methodist church into our home.

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Chapter 31

We juggled enough projects as summer inched on that something different occurred in a steady rhythm every day.

 

The carpet guy measured the balcony. The railings guy measured the balcony, too. The glass guy measured for our shower door. Because the quartz guys finally installed the curbs on the shower! And while the glass guy was there, he measured for new screens for the entryway windows and new glass for the sanctuary windows. Trim Guy measured for trim. A couple different painters eyed the walls to prepare estimates.

To help all these contractors find our place, we installed temporary house numbers on the church. Do churches ever have house numbers? Maybe the church sign was evidence enough of a worshiping congregation, but as residents we needed something more definitive. I wanted to build the permanent sign, but my idea required using a saw, and Tyler said he had more important things to do than cut circles of wood, so I found what I wanted on Etsy, thanks to Zach and Sheena at the WoodsCollective.

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Tomorrow: A clear sign we needed good signage. Read about it here.

Our story so far: We made decisions that affected the look of the entire church we were turning into a home: Wall paint and trim. 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 usable.

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While he was in the bedroom making a feature wall, Tyler used up some of the miscellaneous beadboard we salvaged in the church to finish the wall of the closet so it would coordinate with the original beadboard in the room. It wasn’t an exact match, but it was an easy decision—it was free. Once trimmed with chair rail and painted with the rest, it would look dynamite.

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Tomorrow: We juggle a number of projects as Chapter 31 opens. Read it here.

Our story so far: One of our contractors working at the old Methodist church connected us with Trim Guy, who showed up just in time to avert a marital spat and was willing to help us choose trim.

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Tyler and Trim Guy talked about the differences between primed fiberboard and Gesso-coated pine while I flipped through a book that looked like it could be a shapes primer for toddlers. It was filled with backbands, bar rails, base caps, bases, brick mould, casings, casing blocks, chair rails, crowns, crown backers, dentil moulds (dentil moulds?! Shouldn’t those be part of a dentist’s offerings?), jambs, mantel mould, mulls, panel moulds, rope moulding, specialty millwork, stops, and tongue & vee groove. That would be everything from B to V. Every bit of it came in different sizes and thicknesses.

Uff-da.

No wonder I didn’t know what to write down.

Fortunately, Trim Guy read hand signals. I talked with my hands a lot and pointed around the room, and he figured out what we needed, including flexible matching trim we could use around the round top of our front door in the entryway. How clever! Who knew such a thing existed? Trim Guy knew, and he knew what it was called. He proceeded to walk the entire church making measurements.

Then he sent us a quote.

Which looked a lot like Sanskrit. Except for the bottom line. Which was infinitely understandable.

Here’s what I mean about the foreign language. One of the lines on the quote read this way:

520   LF   18136-OG-B 4-1/4” CASING FIRST FLOOR   1.520   790.40

How do you even know if you’re getting the stuff you want?

The bottom line was an eye-popper. The first digit was a 5. Like so many other construction materials, we weren’t just buying “trim,” we were buying casing and fascia and crown moulding and base board and chair rails and something called “pop,” and every piece had a price, and it was priced by the foot. (And that didn’t count the two boxes of nails in which we’d probably be investing, too.)

Naturally, when we were enjoying tequila and jotting dream numbers on a piece of notebook paper in the fall when we first saw the church, we didn’t budget for trim. And even if had, we probably wouldn’t have budgeted $5,000.

But we had to have trim. And Big Box basic maple trim wouldn’t do the job in the vision we had for the church.

So we squirmed and harrumphed and eventually called Trim Guy to place an order for 2216-CB fascia  and 24136-A-CR crown and a bunch of other indiscernible stuff, whatever it was.

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Tomorrow: Fortunately, not every bit of detail is going to cost us an arm and a leg. See it here.

Our story so far: At the urging of my friends, I invested in a half-dozen paint samples to try on the walls of our great room, the former worship space of the church we were renovating into a home.

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One of the samples I chose for the trim—Casual Khaki—turned out not to be just similar to the trim color already in the church, it was exactly the same shade of creamy beige.

I’m still not sure if that was serendipity or if my subconscious was simply a copycat, but I liked it. And so did Tyler when he saw it in the early morning light.

For my medium gray, I narrowed my choices down to Loft Space and Silver Bullet. Loft Space was the early contender, but it wasn’t quite right.

I continued to over-analyze, and I found a picture on Behr’s blog of a room that had different colors on the trim and wainscoting. Well, we had bead-board wainscoting around the entire perimeter of the great room and master bedroom. Maybe we needed a third color, too. Maybe this was the answer.

I needed to finalize some decisions soon because Tyler had decided he wanted to hire a painter. He didn’t trust me to cut in the wall lines to ceiling and he didn’t have time to do it himself. A pro would be enlisted.

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Thursday: You think paint is hard to choose? Try trim! Read about it here.

Our story so far: As we approached the painting phase of our church renovation, I’d settled on creamy beige for the trim and medium gray for the walls. All the trim. And all the walls. And then my paint chips met hard reality in the great room of the church. 

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As my friends and I chatted over the options in form of tiny chips in the natural afternoon light, I also realized every choice would look different in morning light. And under cloudy skies. And in artificial light (which I already learned from the Lighting Savant came in various shades of kelvin).

Did I really want to paint the whole house in the same colors? The trim in the sanctuary of the church was originally creamy beige. Did I really want that everywhere? Did I really want medium gray walls?

My resolve was dissolving.

My friends urged me to get some paint samples and paint big swatches of the colors on the trim and walls of the church and look at them at all times of day. They departed and an hour later, I was at the nearby Big Box store choosing paint samples in a half-dozen colors. And that evening, when all was quiet and Tyler had already gone to bed, I burned the last half hour of natural summer daylight painting those samples on trim and walls all around the great room.

Some of my artwork.

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Today’s headline is a quote from James Cash Penney, the founder of J.C. Penney stores.

Tomorrow: Vacillation leads to a breakthrough. Read about it here.