Our story so far: In the midst of the framing and mechanicals phase of renovating the 126-year-old church into our home, we tackled showers. And it was like having a cold shower—a real wake-up call. The first quote was a doozy.

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We would have to make some compromises. We started by eliminating custom showers on the second-floor and in the basement; we could go with fiberglass surrounds for those showers—only our guests would be using them anyway. We also relegated the basement shower to Phase Eight when we tackled that level; we needed to get the main floor habitable first.

So Tyler went back to the acrylic shower guy and got a quote on the master bathroom shower only: Still $8,728 plus plumbing and fixtures.

Uff-da.

We had two insurmountable hurdles for this shower. It was extra-large so we couldn’t go with a standard insert. And we wanted to maintain an openness in the bathroom that demanded two glass walls. “Extra large” and especially “extra large glass” were pricey.

OK, let’s get another quote, this time for tile. We approached a well-known area remodeler who sent a knowledgeable and efficient estimator to the church. He asked informed questions, performed detailed measurements amidst our dusty church and returned a professional, detailed quote: $12,500. Plus fixtures and plumbing.

Oh, boy.

Well, unless we left out a toilet and sinks, such a beautiful shower was still more than we budgeted for a master bath in the Tequila Budget.

This was a problem.

While shopping for cabinets elsewhere in the church, Tyler spied a do-it-yourself shower option that wouldn’t require us to tile. The material for the shower walls came in full sheets that could be cut to size.

Price for this do-it-yourself option? $7,414 plus plumbing and fixtures.

Well, we were getting warmer, I guess.

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Tomorrow: Serendipity in the form of a gentleman pays us a visit. Read about it here.

Our story so far: Consumed with all things related to HVAC, plumbing and electrical, we were deep into the mechanicals phase of renovating the 126-year-old Methodist church we hoped to turn into our dream home.

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Chapter 19

Few people go through life without hearing the old maxim, “When God closes a door, he always opens a window.” It’s the line a friend uses to impart hope in the face of loss, which appears on the scene in every life occasionally.

This was the case in the old Methodist church, too, literally if not metaphorically. We were going to seal off one of the doorways. Instead of opening a window, though, we were creating a new doorway.

The doorway on the outs was the side entry to the main floor. While we were keeping the exterior entrance which opened to the basement, the three steps up into the main floor were going to become part of our master bedroom which allowed us to incorporate another window into the boudoir. Tyler would have to weave in a new oak floor over the steps, but we salvaged flooring from the other side of the room where we were installing the master shower. When he poked around into the stairway above the departing entrance, he discovered where the stair stringer was cracked, which explained why that stairway was uneven. It would have to be replaced in the reconstruction process.

Just inside that entrance, one could see a peculiar row of nail holes in the beadboard. It didn’t take much imagination to realize those holes were for coat hooks, where generations of Sunday School kids probably hung their jackets. I hoped to keep that beadboard and add more along the new wall where the door was removed; I weighed whether to use of wood putty in the holes or keep that little tribute to what the room used to be.

Meanwhile, we were going to build a door in the north wall of the church to the garage in an area Tyler called the mudroom. But since it was February, and the garage wasn’t going to be built for months, this door would be just a little spray paint and imagination for a while.

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Tomorrow: As in our renovation project, February brought closing and opening doors in real life, too. Read about it here.

Our story so far: Among the finds we made while shopping to outfit the old Methodist church we were turning into a home was a pair of leaded glass windows to decorate the interior balcony.

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Meanwhile, Tyler found another set of leaded glass windows on eBay. Unfortunately, they didn’t survive transport; they arrived in the open package Brown left on our doorstep.

The second set of leaded glass windows were intended to replace the etched glass transoms on the front of the church. One of those windows had a crack in it. The eBay windows were exactly the right dimensions and, coincidentally, they were salvaged from a church in Michigan twenty years ago. The seller never put them to use so she put them on auction. Tyler secured a great deal and we paid $118 to have them shipped and insured, but we kicked ourselves for not driving to Michigan to pick them up ourselves. When they arrived on our front doorstep, nine panes in the two windows were cracked.

We had them insured, but Brown insisted on collecting the windows before paying the insurance. What? To throw them away? We wanted the insurance to pay for repairs.

After wrangling with Brown via email, the shipping behemoth agreed to let us keep the windows and send us a check. Now we had to find an artisan to make repairs on a pair of decades-old windows.

Which we added to our long to-do list. But we had another open window distracting us.

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Coming up: Chapter 19 opens with the truth of a maxim. Read about it here.

Our story so far: From fans to faucets, we were accumulating pieces and parts to install in the old Methodist church we were turning into a home.

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One Saturday while junking, we found a pair of leaded glass windows we couldn’t do without. Every other antique store we’d happened across sold stained glass windows in all kinds of strange rectangles, decorated with gaudy oranges and red glass, and almost always as singles. Nothing was quite right.

We were looking for a matched pair we could install on either side of the balcony doorway. In this way, they would be interior windows and we wouldn’t have to worry about weather-proofing leaded glass. The windows would add decoration to the balcony wall while adding natural light from the second story to the sanctuary.

“Our” windows were on display in an a well-curated antique shop less than ten miles from the church. The leaded glass seemed so much classier to me than so many stained glass windows we had seen; they fit our aesthetic perfectly.

The next weekend, Tyler built a frame for transport from waste lumber accumulated at the church. When we picked up the windows, he sealed the custom-built frame on the sidewalk in front of the store, and then we added them to our collection in the rental unit to await installation with so many other pieces we had collected.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 18 closes with a pair of windows that didn’t travel as well. Read about them here.

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.

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.

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.

Boom. Powder room, done.

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Tomorrow: A fanatic for fans. Read about it here.

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.

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.

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Tomorrow: Vanity Number Two. Read about it here.

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.

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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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.

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Tomorrow: Kitchen appliance Number Two, check. Read about it here.