Tag: Home Improvement

Rock and a fortress

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: Five months into the renovation of a 126-year-old Methodist church into our home, spring arrived.

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Chapter 24

Our church renovation project was beginning to look like the list of traditional gifts one should give one’s spouse for wedding anniversaries. We’d put the paper year behind us when we dumped a ton of it during the demolition phase. We’d observed the precious metals years by replumbing and rewiring the church. And wood? Tyler and crew handled innumerable two-by-fours in building walls and ceilings. We’d skipped over the crystal and china years to land squarely in the stone years.

heavy equipment
Pouring liquid stone.

Sheetrock, for example. It was the brand name for our drywall. Sheetrock. And what’s concrete anyway? Concrete, of which we’d poured yards for the foundation walls of our garage and would pour many yards more, was a substance created from gravel and cement that dries rock hard. Speaking of gravel, Tyler spent two days using his cousin’s dump truck to haul load after load of gravel from a nearby gravel pit for the base of the garage foundation.

One can’t build one’s home solidly, as we aspired to do, without stone. What’s more solid than stone? It was bricks, after all, that stymied the huffing, puffing Big Bad Wolf. Our church structure was built on a sixteen-inch-thick foundation of field stones.

Now, as we executed the interior design of Church Sweet Home, stone in some form or another played an important role. First decisions to make were about the fireplace.

Somehow, we managed to neglect the fireplace in our Tequila Budget. Might have been the tequila we were drinking at the time, but we were probably more drunk with excitement in those first heady days of dreaming about buying a church.

Of course, we were going to have a fireplace. It wasn’t one of those bad-news budget-breakers like redoing all the heating and cooling ductwork. And it wasn’t one of those great ideas we added to the project midstream like the balcony. Nope, we just forgot about the centerpiece of our great room when we were planning our great room. Duh.

Unfortunately for the budget, a fireplace isn’t like register covers (another one of those things we neglected to think of when we were figuring our figures). A fireplace costs big bucks, and we weren’t likely to find the gigantic one we wanted on Craig’s List.

So the Tequila Budget took another hit when we shopped for a fireplace.

Maybe we’d burn it at some point.

In the fireplace.

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Tomorrow: It’s only the genuine article for us. Maybe not natural, but genuine. Read about it here.

Caution: Entering construction zone

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: While the drywallers were working inside the old Methodist church we were transforming into our home, we went to work on the garage.

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The next day, the building inspector dropped by so we could prove we really dug four-feet-deep footings (apparently some people prevaricate regarding this detail, which is why the inspector makes an appearance before the cement mixer does).

A cement mixer rumbled into our yard to pour eighteen yards of concrete into the trenches. Astute readers are probably aware that though people use the terms cement and concrete interchangeably, cement is actually an ingredient of concrete. Now we employed an experienced concrete finisher and his crew to fill in the basement windows with concrete block and build wooden forms for the concrete walls of the cement pad. A few days later, the cement mixer dropped by again and left behind eight-and-a-half yards of cement.

garage windows blocked in
There goes the natural light! Here’s a shot of the basement windows covered with concrete block.
garage wooden forms
Wooden forms for the concrete walls.
garage concrete walls
The finished concrete walls took on the wood grain from the forms.

 

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Tomorrow: It wouldn’t be spring if there were no mud. Read about it here.

Sometimes, the more you get to know a person, the more attractive they become

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: To make way for a garage, my husband Tyler jackhammered away part of the back stairway on the 126-year-old Methodist church we were turning into our home.

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After the surgery on the stairway, it was time to dig footings for the garage. I soon learned my husband had a skill of which I wasn’t aware.

In the case of our garage, footings meant a hundred feet of frost walls four feet deep. A concrete pad wasn’t enough since our garage would be attached to a structure with an existing basement. To dig these deep trenches, Tyler rented a mini excavator and hired a guy (a friend of a friend) who could manipulate the excavator with precision. The trenches—three sides of the garage—were completed in a day.

garage trench
Now that’s a trench.

My role that day was errand girl. I went to Subway to get lunch for the workers. But I worked harder the next day when I used pruning snips, an implement similar to a manual hedge trimmer, to clip a hundred years of pine roots obstructing the trenches. The excavator had cut through a lot of roots, but it wouldn’t do to have any obstructions when we were ready to pour concrete. So I squatted in the mud to cut roots two feet below the surface of the yard, and then I moved rebar out of the borrowed flatbed trailer to the yard. As I’ve mentioned, rebar is heavy, at least for old ladies, so I opted to move carry two pieces at a time and walk more rather than try to try to lift ten pieces at a time.

That was my contribution to the garage.

garage rebar
Tyler, excavating. (That’s my neat pile of rebar there in the foreground.)

Meanwhile, as long as we had possession of it, Tyler was using the excavator to dig up bushes. Running an excavator is like playing a video game; the controls affect both the excavator itself and the operation of the scoop, depending on how you turn them. He maybe couldn’t have dug a precise trench but with a bit of practice to activate his muscle memory, he was digging up arborvitae roots like a pro in no time. Tyler first learned to operate a back hoe when he was trying to save money by digging his own septic system for his old tobacco farm decades ago. Necessity is the mother of invention (or something like that).

Tyler and I had been married nearly ten years, but I was learning new things about him all the time during this church renovation. I didn’t know he knew how to run an excavator until I saw him, sweaty and concentrating, behind the controls. Such a skill just doesn’t come up in everyday conversation. Fortunately for our budget, my Renaissance Man was saving us money in every phase of this undertaking.

Tomorrow: More heavy stuff—concrete. Read about it here.

Cutting out a few steps is harder work than skipping a few steps

Monica Lee1 Comment

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.

jackhammered steps
Back steps, post demolition.

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.

Visitors from afar

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: The drywallers began work on the 126-year-old Methodist church we were turning into our dream home.

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Just as walls were taking shape, my parents who lived in Minnesota came for a visit.

I almost always brought home A’s from school, but better than any report card was showing my parents around the church. Finally, they could see in three-dimensions all we had been describing, lo, these many months.

The day after walking through our future home the first time, I asked my parents what they thought.

“Well,” my mother said, “we think you’ve come a long way in five months. But you have a long way to go.”

My 70something father is an avid woodworker, and he had contributed beautiful built-in bookshelves to both of my last two houses (alas, the bookcases are still there, even if I’m not) so naturally, he lent a hand to the church reconstruction project while he was here.

column
This is one of the balcony columns that required special attention. Doesn’t Dad do nice work?

Tyler wanted something tougher than drywall wrapping the two pillars holding up the balcony. Those posts will be in a high-traffic area near bar stools that may get backed into the posts on exuberant occasion. Dad agreed to wrap the pillars with vinyl board (think of the material in PVC pipes, only flat). He and I traipsed around Home Depot together to find the right stuff and delivered it to the church, where Dad spent one morning measuring twice and cutting once to make our pillars look as clean and nearly finished as our walls.

The three of us, Mom and Dad and I, also paid a visit to the impressive showroom where I found the Lighting Savant (and lot of distinctive light fixtures). Mom and Dad needed some advice and some pendant fixtures for their kitchen. They found both—the Lighting Savant was just as helpful to them as he had been to me.

A successful visit all the way around.

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Tomorrow: Tyler gets busy outside. Read about it here.

The slate is clean, the future awaits, awake

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: The subcontractors for our drywall job at the 126-year-old Methodist church found it distasteful, so the A Team, the men who had so skillfully finished our sanctuary ceiling, got handed the ball.

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The A Team began (on Day Three) in the master bath so our tiler, You-Can-Call-Me-Al, could put down his saw and pick up his spatula again and get back to tiling.

drywall mid job
Drywall, mid job.

The drywall concealed all our sins: Crooked pipes, ugly studs, awkwardly stapled insulation plus dirt and sawdust. White sheets occasionally interrupted with “5/8” CP LITE-WEIGHT FIRE-RATED” print covered everything. Even before mudding the seams, the new drywall made actual rooms out our wooden studs. People warned us our rooms would feel smaller, but I didn’t feel that way at all. Our rooms finally felt like rooms.

In completing the bathroom, the new Sheetrock sealed up our short-cut. The linen closet—an awkward eighteen-inch-square chunk of space between the mudroom, the walk-in-closet and the bathrooms—lost its status as a doorway and became what it was designed for: A closet.

After five days of hanging drywall in all the rooms on the main floor and second story, the A Team began taping the seams and mudding them, which finished all the edges nicely.

Our wall work was nothing on the scale of God’s and it was taking a lot longer than six days, but in the words of Genesis, we saw everything that we had made, and behold, it was very good.

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Today’s headline comes from “Upright Come,” a song by Patti Smith.

Tomorrow: VIP visitors. Read about them here.

Art is never finished, only abandoned

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: Five tons of drywall was delivered to the 126-year-old Methodist church we were turning into our dream home.

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Day Two of drywall was less efficient than simple delivery. Our drywaller had subcontracted our job to another team. When they arrived and discovered the job was at a 126-year-old, not-perfectly straight church, and it required five-eighth-inch-and-therefore-heavier drywall, the B Team promptly left.

church message sad saintThey left. The dour-faced workers got into their pickup truck and left the scene with nary a word.

I saw them driving away as I walked up to the church. Only I didn’t know they were our workers.

“Where are drywallers?” I asked Tyler, who was busying himself with one of the other thousand details requiring attention.

“They left.”

“Are they coming back?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Well, they didn’t come back.

After regrouping with Tyler and explaining what the B Team didn’t verbalize before departing, our drywaller agreed to use his A Team, the same men who’d had so skillfully finished our sanctuary ceiling, but it would take longer. Despite hearing echoes of “Two weeks! Two weeks!” in my ears, we readily agreed.

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Today’s headline is a quote often attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci and sometimes to Pablo Picasso. And the message in the church sign is a paraphrase from a sermon by Pope Francis.

Tomorrow: The walls made by drywall. Check it out here.

Happiness is free delivery

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: Spring arrives, and with it, a new phase in the more than five-month-long renovation of the 126-year-old Methodist church into our home: Drywall.

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Upon mentioning the advent of drywall, friends in Great Britain who coincidentally were renovating their kitchen remarked on the differences in English terminology. In Wisconsin, drywall came in panels made of gypsum plaster pressed between thick sheets of paper. In Great Britain, a dry wall was a wall of stones without mud in between them. Brits, my friend informed me, use either wet plaster brick or block external walls; plasterboard—the equivalent of drywall panels—is used on internal stud walls. I was reminded of the old days when I visited London frequently for work, stuffing my luggage in the boot (that is, the trunk) and dining on lunches of prawn sandwiches garnished with rocket (shrimp sandwiches with a side of arugula).

drywall delivery
The church gulps in sheet after sheet of drywall.

Day One of drywall was delivery day. Tyler removed windows on the first and second floors, and two fully equipped guys pulled five tons of drywall from a flatbed truck into the church in a couple of hours.

drywall stacks
This stack represents only about one ton of drywall.
drywall warning
Kudos to the guy (or gal) who developed this brand name: RockSteady. For a drywall stabilizing company. Clever.

We got rid of two thirty-yard dumpsters full of extra weight, and now we were replacing all it and then some. Drywall was so heavy, as a matter of fact, it was dangerous. The delivery guys wired stacks of four-by-twelve-foot sheets against the walls of the church with little warning clips: “Warning! DRYWALL IS HEAVY! Attempting to move may cause injury or death.”

Not that I needed another reminder of the weight of construction materials. There is a reason you don’t see old ladies with no upper body strength working in the construction industry. I struggled to lift pretty much everything. (Except insulation. That was easy to lift. Hard to manipulate.) Lumber was heavy. Five-gallon buckets of paint were heavy. Tile was really heavy. Sledgehammers? Solid-wood doors? Drywall? Rebar? Brick? Well-constructed cabinets? All of it reminded me how little strength I had ever, let alone now in my fifties. Before our construction project, I puffed up my chest when I was able to open a bottle of spaghetti sauce by myself. I wasn’t built for this.

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Tomorrow: Day Two of drywall doesn’t go so well. Read about that fiasco here.

Doors open to those bold enough to knock

Monica Lee5 Comments

Our story so far: After months of demolition, framing and mechanicals, spring arrived at the church we were turning into our home, and we looked forward to the next phase: Drywall, Paint & Flooring.

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The final task Tyler completed before the drywall was hung was to install the front doors. Remember? The doors for the man’s home that is his castle? We’d purchased them off Craig’s List months ago now, and they were stored in the basement, awaiting their final home. Initially, we thought we’d wait until everything else was finished, but Tyler thought it better to let the drywallers work around the castle doors, rather than pull apart their careful work later only to do it again.

The enormous arched door frame was so large, we couldn’t fit through the basement door, so it had been moved around the sanctuary fifteen times while various contractors worked around it. Now Tyler pulled off the exterior siding on the front entryway, and You-Can-Call-Me-Al helped him slide the door frame into place. Tyler’s hired man St. Johnny helped hang the heavy doors in the frame, and You-Can-Call-Me-Al performed the required cosmetic surgery so they swung smoothly.

All winter and early spring, the only evidence of any activity inside the church was the string of pickup trucks parked outside of it. Now, the whole world could see a hint of the transformation in store for the rest of the structure.

Our rustic castle doors with operational speakeasy portals were absolutely the perfect doors for the church. Even before we put back the siding and installed the exterior lights or even door handles, we earned compliments from friends and passing strangers on this exceeding public design choice.

They made me so happy.

front door before and after install

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Tomorrow: Drywall delivery day. Read about it here.

When you bring effort every single day, that’s where transformation happens

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: The building inspector approved the rough-in in our renovation of the old Methodist church into a home.

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As we neared the end of the Framing & Mechanicals phase of construction, Tyler was on box seven of nails for his air nailer. A box, you might recall, had a quantity of two-thousand nails.

And two-by-fours? He estimated we’d used at least one-hundred-and-fifty in constructing walls and ceilings inside the church. The Framing & Mechanicals phase had dragged on nearly twelve weeks, four weeks longer than demolition which had felt like it would never end. We were excited for the phase that signaled the most dramatic physical changes in the church.

Besides nails, lumber and lassitude, a measure of the effort we’d put into our construction project was Tyler’s belt.

During the first three months, he tightened his belt by about a notch a month. By Month Four, he had to bore a new notch in his belt, and that was apparently still not enough. One day, he had one hand on his air nailer and the other on a ceiling joist to hold it in place while he secured it. In front of an audience of St. Johnny, the carpenter helper, our electrician and an HVAC guy, Tyler’s pants fell to his ankles.

He ho-ho-hoed his way through a situation that would have mortified anyone else, but thank goodness he was wearing his new, snugly fitting underwear.

Another measure of our effort? Splinters and gloves.

Tyler picked wooden splinters out of his digits nearly every night as he sat on the couch decompressing from another long day. I wasn’t so rugged; I wore gloves.

Tyler had purchased a big box of cotton brown jersey gloves for me and his hired man to use. They were handy (get it? Handy gloves?) but too big for my slender (some might say bony) fingers. During the demolition phase, I’d run across a pair of work gloves that had belonged to the “DCE,” as evidenced by the Sharpie marker labeling. The only DCE this Lutheran had ever heard of was the Director of Christian Education, so I imagined the Methodist DCE had left them behind. They fit perfectly, so I commandeered them.

Four months and countless nails, pieces of wood and rolls of insulation later, the seams began splitting. I’d never worn out a pair of work gloves before. Before the church, I’d never even owned a pair of work gloves. I was never a gardener, and my hobby involved using writing utensils, not hammers. When more of my fingertips were bare than protected, I complained to the foreman that I needed a new pair of gloves “like these,” I said holding up my threadbare DCE gloves. Two days later, Tyler returned home from another trip to Home Depot with not one, not two but three pairs of work gloves eerily similar to my DCE gloves.

I would not be able to complain about my work gloves again.

old and new gloves
My old gloves went into the trash right after I took this picture.

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Tomorrow: Last-minute installation. Read about it here.