Our story so far: One can’t build one’s home solidly, as we aspired to do in the converted Methodist church, without stone. 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.

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Once again, Tyler did not purchase the 40-inch-wide fireplace when a 48-inch-wide one was available. This was the centerpiece of the biggest room on the house after all. After shopping the options, he ordered his enormous gas fireplace online to be delivered directly to the church. Oh, just wait. We planned to put a TV above the mantel. We wouldn’t be stingy with the size of that either.

The fireplace will be where the altar once was.

Close-up view.

In full, the chase of the fireplace would be seven feet wide. As we pondered the design, we considered putting it in the corner of the great room or along the east wall but ultimately sided with symmetry; the fireplace would be located where the altar once was, appropriate perhaps, given that the Pagans used altars to burn sacrifices. Though we toyed with shorter options, our “go big or go home” philosophy drove us to build the chase to the ceiling even though it was actually vented to the exterior chimney. Which meant we would be investing in two-hundred square feet of stone.

While shopping for rigid polyurethane foam beams, Tyler found faux stone in the same material. We ordered a sample, hoping to be as impressed as we were with the polyeurethane beams. It would be fun to heft actual stone to the top of the chase. But the faux stone was horrible. The edges weren’t as crisp as real stone would be, and one could see bubbles in the material. And unlike the beams, people would be able to walk right up to it and inspect its faux-ness. Back to the drawing board.

Faux stone. No way.

Natural stone, though, was substantially more expensive and would require the skills of a bricklayer.

Hmm.

Maybe we could afford manufactured stone, which is made of pigmented cement baked in molds. Though certainly not as light as high-density polymer, veneer stone weighs about half of its natural stone counterpart. Tyler had experience installing this type of product so while he would need help, he wouldn’t need an artisan mortar man.

Our lead drywaller suggested a stone vendor a half-hour away. One day when we needed a break from the dust and noise of the church, we paid this vendor a visit. Thank goodness for Google maps, which led us through multiple intersections into the back of an industrial park filled with nondescript buildings. The store barely had a sign, but inside we found a small showroom and an upright display of the brand of manufactured stone we had in mind. I began pulling samples off the display (samples of stone, even manufactured stone, you probably aren’t surprised to learn, are heavy), and we were impressed with how it mimicked the look of natural stone.

We selected a sedate gray ledge stone and held our breaths while the salesman did the math on our square footage.

His number sealed the deal. We found our fireplace veneer.

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Tomorrow: The mantel comes with a story. Read it here.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.