Our story so far: While the mechanicals were being installed in the old Methodist church we were turning into our home, my husband Tyler and I were buying things to outfit the house. Chapter 18 continues…
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Fans were a bone of contention in our house. Tyler loved the white noise and breeze created by ceiling fans, but I preferred the still air often accused of being more like that found in, say, a coffin. But I conceded the sanctuary probably needed fans in order to move air around the twenty-foot high space.
The church came with standard functional ceiling fans, but Tyler wanted bigger ones, more along the lines of jet engine turbines. The ones he found, I loved for the design. The blades were sleek. The finish was described as “distressed koa with tea stain finish” (koa is a large Hawaiian forest tree), and it closely matched the color of the beams we planned for the ceiling.
Here’s how the box says our fan will look.
With five 62-inch blades, one fan would move 8,200 cubic feet of air per minute. Tyler bought two. (Drawing on a little tenth-grade geometry, I figured the sanctuary had a volume of 16,400 cubic feet, so both fans together would move all the air in one minute; Tyler would be in heaven.)
As for a deal, he saved $100 off retail when he located one for sale online in an open box.
Both fans arrived within days of each other and, like our other deals, they went to the rental unit to await installation.
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Tomorrow: We find a pair of leaded glass windows. Read about it here.
Our story so far: The old Methodist church we were turning into a home came only with a toilet, not even a sink. To outfit the place, we planned four bathrooms, and that meant a lot of shopping for vanities.
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Earlier, long before we closed on the church, Tyler got an amazing deal on a modern-looking faucet I was trying to work into my vision for the powder room vanity, but I didn’t think it was tall enough for a vessel sink, and I wasn’t sure if I would have the time and energy to repurpose another piece of furniture for an undermount sink.
I was stymied.
In the way the universe delivers what one needs exactly when one needs it, Tyler and I visited a nearby plumbing wholesaler not long after we chose a plumber to select fixtures for the master bathroom.
All it needs is lighting.
On display was a white vanity, the ensemble complete from head to toe with the countertop, brand name faucet and even the mirror. It was distinctive in its indistinctiveness; it would look dynamite against an accent wall, maybe an accent wall of reclaimed wood from a church, for instance. And it was on sale, for 70 percent off. I pulled Tyler’s tape measure out of his jacket pocket.
“It’s 37 inches wide,” I said. “Didn’t we just build the powder room to be 37 inches wide?”
Sure enough, we did.
While we were there, we bought power-flushing toilets for all three bathrooms.
Our story so far: We looked for deals as we outfitted the old Methodist church we were turning into a home.
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I suppose it’s called a vanity because one admires oneself in a vanity mirror. But Carly Simon might say a vanity earned its name because of its bad attitude. A vanity thinks the bathroom is all about it—it is, after all, the defining architectural design element and center of attention of a well-appointed lavatory.
I was a fan, however deadly the offense, nodding along with Al Pacino in “The Devil’s Advocate when he said “Vanity is my favorite sin.” From the lights and the mirrors to the cabinets and sinks, I couldn’t wait to find vanities for the four bathrooms in the church that sent messages like “Guests are valued here” and “This is special place.”
Special, naturally, came with a price. I coveted Robern medicine cabinets—sleek ones with built-in lighting, defoggers and stereo systems—but when I priced one in the four-figure range, the look on my face was anything but flattering.
Back to planet earth where people spend only twenty minutes in a day in front of the bathroom mirror. “Vanity can easily overtake wisdom,” musician Julian Casablancas once said. “It usually overtakes common sense.” I reminded myself that we weren’t building a house in a posh suburb or a gentrified downtown locale. We were restoring a century-old church in a small town. We could not be tempted by top-end accessories or we would never recoup our investment.
So then I got stressed out about our bathroom vanities. We needed four of them, three of them quickly. The basement vanity could be determined later, when we finished the basement (Phase, oh, Eight or so). But when we finally chose a plumber, he needed to know where to rough in the vanity faucets, and to determine that, we needed vanities.
I had a good idea of what I wanted for the master vanity, thanks to hours on Pinterest. I wanted double sinks along a 130-inch expanse (go big or go home, remember). Custom or semi-custom cabinets would probably be required in order to get matching cabinets for each sink.
Here’s a rendition of our master bath vanity. (On HGTV, you get high-end graphics to prophesy the renovation plans; on Church Sweet Home, you get chicken scratch on legal pads.)
After pricing custom cabinets (with price tags similarly deflating as luxury medicine cabinets), we decided to purchase standard-dimension cabinets online. Tyler had the skills to install them, and we could incorporate those little drawers that were of little use in the display kitchen. Positioned lower in a bathroom vanity, they could house all kinds of little hygiene odds and ends. At first, I wanted light-colored upper cabinets (to go with the drawers) and navy blue lowers, but after incorporating navy blue into my beverage bar design, we went with dark brown lowers.
After committing to new cabinets for the master bath, we sought to find ways to save money on vanities for the powder room and upstairs bathroom.
Our story so far: My husband, an expert at stalking Craig’s List for another man’s trash, found a display kitchen that would fit our space in the old Methodist church just right if we could find appliances in the right sizes and finish.
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Tyler went to work without delay looking for a 36-inch-wide used range. We’d decided we wanted a new refrigerator, but we could live with a used stove. Craig’s List came through for us right away. Tyler found a “luxury” Jenn-Air six-burner convection oven in stainless steel (our finish of choice). And it was only eight years old.
As with the castle door deal, we drove ninety minutes south, this time in lightly falling snow. We arrived at an enormous house set among several blocks of bungalows. The seller told us he added a second story when he remodeled his entire house, and now he was replacing his luxury stove with a countertop cook-top and set of double ovens.
Though he looks like a car that got stripped while parked in the ghetto, our stove takes a chill while awaiting reassembly in our rental unit (a stove is a he, right?).
We removed the door, knobs and burners for transport, and the seller and two young men who looked like they’d rather be playing Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto helped us load the range into our beat-up pickup truck. We drove straight to the rental unit we’d secured a few days earlier (because our five-thousand-square-foot church wasn’t big enough, I guess), and our new appliance became the first resident—on a short-term basis, we hoped.
Stove, check.
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Tomorrow: Early-morning dumpster diving yields rewards. Read about it here.
Our story so far: We scored an amazing Craig’s List deal on a display kitchen that, with a little improvisation, would fit perfectly in the church we were converting into a home.
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Never used. And half price!
And we wheedled the sellers out of the stainless steel two-drawer dishwasher on display with the cabinets for half price. It was a two-drawer dishwasher designed for empty nesters; one could wash a few dishes in one drawer (which saved precious water) or a lot of dishes in both drawers. We also bought the bar stools around the island for $75 each. We were thrilled.
Comfy. And affordable!
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Tomorrow: Kitchen appliance Number Two, check. Read about it here.
Our story so far: Tyler located a display model kitchen on Craig’s List that matched the style we were looking for inside the church we were turning into our home.
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The Craig’s List kitchen wasn’t perfect, but it was darn close. And the price? We were buying the whole kit and caboodle for about 25 percent of the retail cost of the cabinets alone. Coincidentally, the remodeling firm had just sold a different display kitchen to another woman who was renovating a church into a home. It was a trend.
But what would we have to jerry-rig?
A few things.
We needed another six inches in width, which we could get with a bigger stove and vent. And those drawers were nonfunctional.
We’d need to find a 36-inch wide stove in order to fill the back wall of our kitchen space which was six inches wider than the display. But we already had an extra wide stove vent we could switch out with the display vent.
These glass-fronted doors could flank the stove vent, in place of the little drawers and bookshelves.
And the little drawers in the upper cabinets—supremely bad design. Even I, a 5-foot-10 woman, could not see inside the top drawers. Those would have to be replaced, but I had an idea we could reuse the little drawers in the master bath vanity. To fill the spaces next to the stove, we could use the glass-fronted doors on the hutch at the end of the island.
The tongue of our island stuck out about thirteen inches too far.
The tongue of the island was a bit too long for our space. We would need to have that shortened so it wouldn’t stick out from beneath our balcony. We decided to invest in having the countertop professionally disassembled, moved and reassembled. The countertop experts could shorten the tongue and smooth the other rough edges as part of the move.
The wine rack would have to go on the other end of the counter. (Man, that granite has a polish to it, dontcha think?)
And we’d have to flip the lower cabinets on either side of the sink so the wine rack would be on the side nearest the beverage bar.
We’d also have to invest in a new matching cabinet above the refrigerator and a few doors for the island so we could use it for storage. While we were adding, we could get coordinating cabinets for the beverage bar.
Even with the changes, we were scoring a budget-saving deal on a high quality kitchen.
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Tomorrow: Kitchen appliance Number One, check. Read about it here.
Our story so far: While building inside the 126-year-old Methodist church we were renovating into a home, we were also buying—as often as possible, from Craig’s List and other discount outlets.
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Tyler, the Craig’s List stalker, found a set of kitchen cabinets on sale. They appeared to be custom-painted cabinets in the perfect color of cream we had tried and failed at least once to locate.
He placed a call to the seller and found out someone had already expressed an interest. We were second in line, but if you’ve ever interacted with Craig’s List sellers, you know that could mean you’re second in line behind a serious buyer, so you’ll never hear from the seller, or it could mean you’re second in line but the seller has already told four people that, or it could mean the seller is too meek to tell you it’s already sold, or it could mean the seller is just plain cruel and they’re not really selling anything.
In any case, we wrote it off. “Another one will come up,” Tyler said. He was nothing if not confident.
Lo and behold, the seller called about a week later. “Still interested?”
“You bet. We’ll be there tomorrow.”
Tyler and I spent the next couple hours studying the ad and measuring the space where we intended to put the kitchen, down to the half inch.
We drove the next morning to the seller’s location, the showroom of a remodeling company only an hour away from the church. The kitchen had only ever been on display, never in actual use. It came complete with the kitchen sink and thousands of dollars worth of granite countertop. The ad offered the countertop for free as long as we moved it at our own risk and expense.
Our dream kitchen in the showroom.Here you can see the triple sink in the granite countertop.
The granite countertop looked brownish black in the pictures. I had my heart set on a light-colored Quartz countertop, but if we could get a dark granite countertop for free? Well, call me fickle then. I would be in love with dark granite.
When we saw it in person and ran our hands across the grayish-black countertop (even better), fantasized about washing dishes in the triple sink (or whatever one does with a triple sink), and opened and soft-closed the dovetail-jointed drawers, our hearts melted.
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Tomorrow: What’s it gonna take to make this kitchen work inside the church? Read about it here.
Our story so far: We built walls and hired a plumber as we made progress renovating a 126-year-old Methodist church into our home.
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Chapter 17
How does a member of the construction crew who doesn’t know anything about construction contribute during a renovation project of this magnitude?
Three ways: Odd jobs, errands and laundry.
Laundry probably doesn’t need much explanation. The clothes we wore were often dusty and sweaty by the end of a day, and someone had to wash them. That someone was me.
As for an odd job, I was uniquely suited to measure for the faux beam order Tyler wanted to place. Uniquely suited because I still had my own, natural-born knees and was light enough to climb the scaffolding in the great room.
The scaffolding looked a lot more appealing from the bottom, I’m not gonna lie.
Fifteen feet off the ground I realized I’d forgotten the tape measure. I was seated on the platform, sweating and nauseated, and now I had to put my hands in the air to catch a moving tape measure.
I did not catch it. Tyler had good enough aim to land it on the platform. But I still had to measure for the beams. Above. My. Head.
Let’ just say we got the measurements down to the foot, not the inch. And I got back on the ground in one piece.
Odd jobs also included communications. Print this quote. Find this business card. Track down this phone number. Respond to the salesman working up a quote about his proposed shower base color.
Also, opening mail. Nearly every day, some guy from FedEx, UPS or USPS stopped by with a package, which would have to be opened to determine the contents and then, if required urgently, delivered to the church. And someone had to crush cardboard boxes (or they’d never all fit in the recycling bin).
One day, the guy from Brown left an enormous box on our front step. By the time I got the door open, Brown was already in his truck.
“Hey, the box is open!”
“You can accept or reject. What do you want to do?”
“Um, I’m pretty sure these are one-of-a-kind leaded glass windows. They’re fragile.”
“Accept or reject? The box opened when I picked it up.”
“Did you drop it?”
“Accept or reject, that’s all I can do.”
“I guess I’ll have to see when I open them.”
Brown drove off.
Disgusted, I carefully dragged the enormous package into the rental house, and called Tyler to inform him.
“Well, open them to find out if they’re broken.”
The box was labeled fragile but it should have been labeled “one-of-a-kind leaded glass windows inside–do not drop, ram, tip or stack haphazardly.” We paid $118 for shipping what was essentially decorative trash when we received it.
Twenty minutes and five layers of cardboard, plastic, foam, bubble wrap and tape later, I still couldn’t get a good enough look at the windows Tyler had found on Craig’s List to determine if they were broken. (Two days later, Tyler dove deeper and determined they were. One of a kind and broken.)
And errands. I got very good at errands. If I could work Starbucks into the route, I did it. Drop off another load of scrap metal? Yes. Find a glass retailer who could do replacement glass for the light fixtures? Sure, I’ll bring him the light fixtures to see if he could do it. Need some tile samples for the shower? Home Depot, here I come.
Meanwhile, Tyler was calling the HVAC guys to get an ETA (again), building walls for the refrigerator and the pot filler behind the stove, directing St. Johnny to pick up the yard, burning brush and checking over the plumber’s work.
We made a good team.
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Chapter 18: We weren’t only building. We were buying, too. Read it here.
Our story so far: We stood knee-deep in mechanicals at the old Methodist church we were turning into a home. I nicknamed our plumber Glimfeather because he was a night owl who was impressively productive after dark. But he made frequent appearances during the day, too.
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One day when I happened by the church on the way to the post office, I witnessed the strange dance plumbers and HVAC guys must do often on custom projects.
Because the structure in which he was working was a 126-year-old church, Glimfeather was having to figure out how to vent the kitchen sink drain; it had something to do with drain clogs (or preventing them, I didn’t understand the details). The sink was situated in the middle of our kitchen island in the middle of our sanctuary (Tyler took issue with my choice of the word “middle” as the sink was closer to one side than the other of the sanctuary, but suffice it to say, it was not on the edge of it). This meant it was draining and venting into the middle of our basement, and Glimfeather needed to figure where to run the pipes while avoiding the beams which supported, well, pretty much the entire structure.
Meanwhile, the HVAC guy was replacing the ductwork, much of which ran along the ceiling of the basement. His work, which included more modern, streamlined ducts than had been in the church originally (or, at least since it was heated with gas forced air), required all new routing to accommodate the new rooms we constructed.
But the kitchen sink drain threatened to muck it all up.
Where the plumber and the HVAC guy danced: You can see how the drain pipe intersects with the path of the duct.
So Tyler, Glimfeather and the HVAC guy problem-solved out loud, tossing out several alternatives that each created their own problems. Tyler was adamant about maintaining the sanctity of his beams while Glimfeather was ruffled about the angle of his pipes. The HVAC guy mostly nodded and shrugged.
I literally bit my tongue because A) I knew nothing about sink vents or drains, B) I knew nothing about cold-air returns and C) no one was looking at me for direction; they were looking at Tyler. All I could think about was how stupid I had been to dream about a sink in the middle of the kitchen island and how badly I didn’t want to lose this brilliant concept. And also? I didn’t want such low ceilings in the basement that I felt claustrophobic.
Finally, the HVAC guy suggested maybe his fabricator could create a custom piece of ductwork to accommodate the drain.
Key word: Custom.
Custom, if you didn’t already know, means expensive in the renovation world. As you may recall, the new standard ductwork throughout the church was not in the Tequila Budget let alone custom ductwork.
But anything is possible if you’re willing to pay for it.
In retrospect, I was surprised the dance didn’t culminate in this sooner.
Of course, Tyler who sensed my agitation by the way I was pacing the basement silent but brooding, OK’ed the custom ductwork.
My kitchen design and basement airiness were saved.
For about the hundredth time, I was glad Tyler knew what he was doing and was able to linger at the church so he could referee these negotiations.
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Tomorrow: Is a table saw scarier when you’re hungry? Read about it here.
Our story so far: My husband Tyler and I bought a 126-year-old Methodist church to turn into our dream home.
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We had endured weeks of dirt, dust and debris during the demolition phase of the project, and when we began building walls, I realized we had weeks of sawdust ahead of us, but I believed we were done with the dirtiest of dust.
Until the plumber started work.
Following months of cat herding, Tyler collected bids from no fewer than six plumbers. When Plumber Number Six presented his hand-written bid with the flourish of enthusiasm for our project, it seemed our search was over. “I like him,” Tyler said to me as the potential plumber left the room to check on some detail or another. “You?”
I smiled and nodded. This prospect spoke with reassuring authority, asked questions that indicated he had a lot of experience, and his hand-written quote signaled we weren’t going to be paying for a lot of marketing. We wanted a well-plumbed house, not unsubstantiated flash.
Tyler closed the deal.
“You’re hired.”
As if to underscore the serendipity of our choice, Tyler’s hired man St. Johnny pointed out the plumber wore a burly cross necklace. Seemed like he would fit right in.
Plumber Number Six got to work almost immediately, and we learned quickly he was the night owl to Tyler’s morning lark. Tyler never met a 5:30 a.m. he didn’t like, but Glimfeather earned his nickname by proving he was most productive under bright construction spotlights at 10 p.m. (or, frequently, even later).
Glimfeather was the talking owl who helped the protagonists find a kidnapped prince in The Silver Chair, one of C.S. Lewis’s books in the Chronicles of Narnia. Like our plumber, Glimfeather was wise, spirited and most alert after dark. Exploring the progress the plumber made in the church the morning after his late-night work was often a little like Christmas morning.
Glimfeather’s first project was to jackhammer the basement floor and reroute the sewer pipe in the basement to accommodate our new bathrooms.
[On the left, the back entry to the basement when we purchased the church. On the right, the back entry after demo and the plumber’s excavation.]
Not only did the project create piles of concrete debris, the excavation of dirt was a little off-putting. I didn’t like thinking about the proximity of dirt beneath our foundation, but with holes in the floor, there was no denying it. And that sewer pipe that was supposedly in such good shape? We had a “Houston, we’ve got a problem” moment when Glimfeather pointed out the top of the pipe was so rusty it was disintegrating. So even the portion of pipe that wasn’t being moved had to be replaced.
At the same time, February forgot it was still winter for a few days, and a foot of snow melted under rainy skies. This time, instead of water coming in the front of the basement (where we had the gutters replaced), it seeped into the back in the furnace room. Muddy water everywhere. St. Johnny spent an entire day filling and emptying the shop vac over and over. And we moved the precious castle doors, which had found a temporary home on the floor of the basement, to higher ground.
Eventually the rain stopped, and a few nights later Glimfeather sealed the dirt and new sewer beneath new concrete, and he began constructing the maze of pipes that produce the modern luxury of running water.
The back entry of the church after the new concrete was poured.
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Today’s headline is a partial quote from Josh Fox, American film director, playwright, environmental activist and night owl. The full quote from a 2013 interview in the Daily Intelligencer: “I’m a night owl, and luckily my profession supports that. The best ideas come to me in the dead of night. My friends know I’m up, so they can call at three in the morning. Just don’t call me at, like,eight.” After doing it once, Tyler avoided calling Glimfeather at eight, too.
Tomorrow: How a plumber dances with an HVAC guy. Read about it here.
Church Sweet Home 