Tag: Memoir

A little progress each day adds up to big results

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: My husband and I purchased a 126-year-old Methodist church, demolished the interior and rebuilt it back into our dream home.

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Chapter 44

My sister, who followed my every move on Facebook with enthusiasm (like a good sister should), had been privy throughout the construction of the church to a string of secret pictures and previews. Frequently, she implored: “More pictures.” So I obliged. It was easy, thanks to Verizon and smart phones. When we talked, the church and our work was all I could prattle about.

But until October, she and her family hadn’t seen any of it in person. She and my brother-in-law were busy people, parents to three busy boys, and they lived seven or eight hours north of our little renovation project. Finally, a long weekend break—and the prospect of an operational bathroom and guest bed—offered the perfect opportunity for four of them—my oldest nephew was off to college—to pay us a little visit.

Sister came bearing more of Dad’s homegrown apples and an obscene amount of Halloween candy. And gushing. Lots of gushing. Music to my ears. Even the fifteen-year-old, who probably couldn’t care less about Auntie’s crazy church house, was complimentary. And my ten-year-old—a doll! He carved a Halloween jack-o-lantern to decorate my church sign.

But despite the string of pictures I’d shared with her, few of them were “before” shots. Nothing to brag about there. After seeing our work in all its semi-finished glory, she wanted to be reminded of how far we’d come, so I dragged her up to my office and took her down memory lane with a slide show on my computer. Printed photos? So last century. Check out these pixels of dust, paneling and old carpeting. This is what this place used to look like.

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Dear reader, I’m going to take this opportunity to remind you of how far we’ve come in a year. Tyler and I closed on the old church just shy of a year ago, and the changes have been immense. So for the next 10 days or so, I’m going to take a break from the memoir-in-progress and tell the story in before-and-after photos. Whenever possible, I’ll try to use the same perspective in the “after” shot as I did long ago in the “before.”

Let’s begin with a look at the church as you drive up:

church sept 2017
Before: This image was taken when the church was still for sale, in September 2017.
church oct 2018
This image was taken this morning as a light snow was falling.

Tomorrow: Front door. See it here.

Drawing is not what one sees but what one can make others see

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: A far-flung friend I made back in my corporate days paid us a visit at the old Methodist church we turned into our home, and she likened the trip to a mecca.

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piece of belfry
This piece of wood almost certainly was installed with the bell, presumably some 126 year ago. It was removed by Reroofer last fall when he repaired the flat roof on the belfry.

This friend who came from far away once worked with me on creative projects that sometimes required sketches to get her point across. When she made her pilgrimage to the church, she agreed to attend a local lecture by an inspiring junking couple who shared ideas on how to turn topless teapots into planters and old yard implements into décor. I hauled an old piece of the belfry—a curved piece of wood that had been part of the wheel to ring it—to the talk to get their advice on how we might repurpose it. One of their suggestions was as a headboard. Privately, I rejected this idea as unnecessary, but my friend took this bit of advice to bed with her; while sleeping in the guest room—right next to the belfry—she apparently dreamed a vision. The next morning, she presented me with a drawing of how we could turn this leftover piece of wood into a showplace headboard for the upstairs guest room. She even had an idea for incorporating a little bell into the headboard in tribute to the big bell in our belfry.

sketch of headboard
Imagine the sweet dreams this headboard might inspire.

Inspired! The headboard we used up there was the one made for a king bed; it would need to be replaced. I filed her idea away for use later, when we had the time to work on such creative projects. It was not the first concept in the church that began as a sketch and flowered into something real and beautiful.

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Today’s headline is a quote from 19th century French artist Edgar Degas.

Tomorrow: Sister pays a visit as Chapter 44 opens. Read about it here.

Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We moved into the old Methodist church we had turned into a home and welcomed a few guests.

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Despite the minor inconveniences, visitors still came. A far-flung friend I made back in my corporate days paid us a visit, and she likened the church to a mecca (Mecca, for those interested in the origin of words, is the city where Muhammad was born; many Muslims believe it’s important to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at some point in their lives). My stories about the renovation stoked her curiosity, and she felt she had to see the church in person.

After the tour and my many comments about how much work this required and how we figured out that problem, she marveled, “How did you avoid killing each other?”

This was one of my concerns early on. Home construction projects have been known to end marital commitments.

“I guess I’m more flexible than some wives, and Tyler has better taste than some husbands,” I said.

As more than one of our contractors will attest, we raised our voices with each other more than once as we worked on various aspects of remodeling. Usually, one of us was just tired and cranky (sometimes both of us). But rarely did we disagree vehemently on the goals we wanted to achieve. Tyler was, among other things, an excellent salesman who could get me to see things his way, and I had figured out how to appeal to Tyler’s better instincts when the situation required. If he won the argument, well, then the results were probably better anyway.

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Today’s headline is a quote from Oliver Goldsmith, not to be confused with The Six Million Dollar Man‘s boss Oscar Goldman, you children of the ’70s. Goldsmith was an 18th century Irish novelist and poet.

Tomorrow: This friend gets inspired. Read about it here.

Not white-picket-fence perfect

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: After we moved into the old Methodist church that became our home, we entertained a few early guests without the benefit of vanity mirrors or door handles or even some doors.

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Thankfully, our early guests tolerated these not-quite-finished touches. We did manage to install one finishing touch which, if it didn’t make things cozier, certainly made the guest bedroom safer: Railings.

back railing before
Here’s how the back stairwell looked when we took ownership of the church.

When we purchased the church, the back stair was protected with not a railing, but a picket fence. Perhaps a clever reuse of suburban nostalgia, but it was not pretty. We couldn’t get rid of it fast enough, and during construction, we navigated the back stair without any railing at all.

back railing after
The new back railing was airy and sleek.

To replace the fence, we relied on the same fabricator who did our balcony railing. The railing in the guest room was similar but without the basket spindles. Additionally, they made a coordinating handrail, also in basic black, for the stairway.

We also installed a short railing next to the two steps leading to the balcony to prevent anyone from getting out of bed and falling into the steps.

bed railing
A little two-foot railing defines the two steps down onto the balcony.

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Tomorrow: Marriage advice. Read it here.

Hitches in our hospitality

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We had come a loooong way in renovating the old Methodist church into a home, but our early guests tolerated a few inconveniences in the midst of finishing the project.

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None of the bathroom doors had locks. The pocket doors on the powder room and guest bath didn’t even have handles yet. And while the toilet, shower and sink were all operational in the guest bath, the tub remained dry. We still didn’t have the proper faucet to turn the big basin into an oasis. And vanity mirrors? Oh, those were waiting for vanity lighting which was waiting for proper wiring and then cosmetic surgery to the drywall. My mother, who gamely got ready the first morning she visited without any mirrors, was inordinately grateful when I lent her the makeup mirror from the master bath (an act I should have performed sooner).

Also awkward for guests: Our beautiful French doors leading to our bedroom lacked window coverings, revealing our bed (and whoever was in it) to the hall. A guest using the back stairs walked right by these doors on their way to or from their own sleeping quarters.

french doors with no window covering
The doors have panache. But not so much privacy.

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Tomorrow: Little finishing touch that works. Read about it here.

Neighborhood ruckus

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We moved into the old Methodist church and tried to make it a cozy home.

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Imagining how awesome you’ll be at making sure your guests are comfy and cozy and actually executing your theories, as it turns out, are two different things.

Oh, sure, we had a nice bed. And we even found a nice place to put it. But when we entertained our first overnight guests in the church, we didn’t even have a door for the guest room. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

Our first overnight guests were Tyler’s mom and her mate. They were excited to see our work, and we were excited to show it off, so they paid us a visit a few days after we moved in. They were very forgiving of our semi unfinished spaces and the plethora of boxes we had everywhere, but we managed to pull together real dishes for dinner and we had the guest bed assembled for sleeping.

The next morning, we inquired as to how they slept, and we listened carefully to learn how we could make the guest experience better.

“Oh, well, I’m such a light sleeper anyway,” Tyler’s mother began.

Uh-oh.

She described how a car alarm woke her up in the middle of the night, and how it kept her awake for an hour.

Tyler and I exchanged puzzled looks. We hadn’t heard any car alarms. In fact, our room was so well insulated, we hardly heard any street traffic. Hmm.

She went on to say the car’s owner must have tried using a dremel tool to get inside his car. “Hum, hum, hum,” she re-enacted the sound.

Her mate nodded in agreement. He heard it, too.

How odd, Tyler and I said to each later. We were skeptical. We heard nothing. “Maybe the belfry lets in more noise than we know,” I suggested. “Maybe we need to sleep up there and see how noisy it really is.”

The next night, Tyler hogged the covers and I couldn’t get comfortable, so I crept upstairs to try the guest bed.

At two o’clock in the morning, I awoke to an alarm. As I got my bearings, I realized the sound was a cell phone. At first I thought Tyler was playing a trick on me to get me back to bed, so I got up to investigate. The sound was coming from the kitchen, which was right below the second-floor guest room. I tiptoed down the spiral stairway to find my old cell phone ringing and vibrating on the granite countertop.

I switched it off and realized my mother-in-law hadn’t heard a car alarm the previous night, she heard my phone alarm. And the dremel tool? It was the reverberation of the vibrate buzz. Tyler had pulled my old phone out of a box of cords he unpacked a few days before in order to find all his stereo parts, and we plugged it in to see if it still worked. In all the time it sat idle, it somehow confused a.m. with p.m., and it had been going off–for an hour–every night at 2 o’clock because long ago I had an alarm set to give my dog (who had been gone seven months) her afternoon epilepsy pill.

We never heard the phone go off, but without a door on the balcony to the guest room, the sound carried clearly up there. As Sergeant Sacker made famous in 1979’s When a Stranger Calls: “We’ve traced the call … it’s coming from inside the house!”

Turning off the phone fixed this problem, but our early guests endured other hardships and inconveniences.

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Tomorrow: Tough to tell who’s the fairest without a mirror. Read about it here.

Fire in the hearth kindles hygge, but the fire of creative energy fizzles out

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We’d chosen a couple of different rugs for various rooms in the old Methodist church we had renovated into a residence and were now decorating.

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The bear rug looked even better once Tyler got the fireplace going. One rainy day during garage construction, Tyler supervised a fireplace installer (i.e., he sat on the couch while the installer connected the gas and built the fake logs); most of the project—like punching holes through the bricks and snaking the venting through to the roof—had been completed during construction, only the last 10 percent was left. Within ninety minutes, we had a roaring fire in the fireplace (“I could have done it,” Tyler said, “but it would have taken me a lot longer”). With a click of a remote, we could watch the flames dance, giving off heat in the old church as the days grew shorter and the evening chillier. Sitting in front of the fire wearing wool socks and drinking hot tea—now that’s hygge. The timing of our move couldn’t have been better for taking advantage of the coziness factor. Almost exactly a year before, in fact, we had been living in our RV in Tyler’s cousin’s yard buying propane a hundred dollars at a time, we were going through it so fast, while we waited to close on the church.

hygge churchsweethome

So we had a rug for the fireplace, just not one for the sectional. And now I felt like I had to coordinate whatever we chose to go under the sectional with the rug in the dining corner, and the tile rug in the kitchen and the bear rug in front of the fireplace, and oh, yeah, we had carpeting on the balcony, too, and technically, the balcony was part of the great room, right?

This is when paralysis set in. I couldn’t decide. I just couldn’t. Tyler and I went furniture shopping one Saturday, and we visited a warehouse store, a discount store, a mass market store and at least three different antique shops. We were looking for the right chairs to set in front of the fireplace, and oh, if we could find a living room rug and a sofa table and a couple of end tables, well, all the better. Oh, and we could use about a half dozen lamps, too. Nothing was right, and we hadn’t spent a dime all day. The day’s shadows grew long. When my stomach started growling and Tyler’s happy hour flag began fluttering in his mind, we were wandering around the sprawling showroom of a regional furniture dealer. The salesman showed us a pair of chairs that we could special order in just about any color or fabric. I was ready to choose anything, just to tick something off the to-do list and Tyler was so tired, he just sat in one of the chairs admiring the swivel mechanism. The salesman, who had by now heard our spiel about furnishing an enormous space that was once a church sanctuary, suggested we might like to enlist the help of one of their interior designers. Would we like to meet him? Sure, why not, I said.

Instead of walking about of the store with a couple of chairs neither of us really loved, we walked out with an appointment with Pierre (his name wasn’t really Pierre, but he reminded me of a creative spirit with distinctive taste and an air of serenity, like I imagined a guy named Pierre might have).

If Pierre couldn’t help us find a rug and ten other pieces of furniture and suggest artwork to hang on the walls, well, no one could. We were willing to give him a shot anyway.

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Tomorrow: Our poor first guests. Commiserate with them here.

Bearly

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: We covered our refinished wood floors in the old Methodist church with rugs of all shapes and sizes.

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My internet-shopping husband tried to get me to choose a rug for the “living corner” of the great room, too. He narrowed the search parameters to a particular size and color and still we could have paged through two million options. Nothing spoke to me. Then I began questioning the color. Then I wondered if I really wanted that size. Every choice looked right. Then they all looked wrong.

We’d already made one rug choice for the corner of the great room that contained the fireplace and sectional. Or rather, Tyler did. During one of his early morning shopping trips (some people shop the internet at night while consuming liquor—Tyler did his damage armed with coffee before anyone else got up), Tyler ordered a special rug.

A very large package of unknown origin (at least to me) arrived one day before we had even moved in. As Tyler unpacked it, he exclaimed, “Oh, it’s the bear rug! Check this out,” as he unfurled a huge, furry, strangely shaped mat.

Indeed, it looked a lot like a bear rug. Only it was made of polyester and didn’t have any teeth.

Early on, after we made an offer on the church but before we closed the deal, we toured a house on a Parade of Homes. I spotted a bear rug (a real one) in one of those million-dollar homes, and I told Tyler we had to have one of those in the church. It was the sort of unique textural piece that would be right at home in a former church in southern Wisconsin, I thought. What’s more cozy than curling up on a bear rug in front of the fireplace? Tyler remembered.

“How much did you spend on that?” I asked, loving that he remembered, that he agreed he should have one, that he shopped for it and bought it, knowing I would approve.

“Only two hundred bucks!”

So when we moved in, we rolled it out in front of the fireplace almost right away. It did look right at home. Only the robot vacuum cleaner, which would get tied up in it every time he vacuumed, protested.

bear rug
Can almost hear him roar, huh?

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Tomorrow: The fireplace. Read about it here.

Tacky gets upgraded with texture

Monica Lee3 Comments

Our story so far: Choosing the right rugs for our newly converted church proved to be challenging.

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For more than a month, our new dining room table sat on a bed of furniture blankets as we weighed our rug options. One evening, as Tyler forced me to adjudicate while he paged through literally hundreds of rug options on various online retailers’ websites, we struck upon a jute rug with formal navy striping. I liked the texture of the twine-like substance (ease of cleaning remained to be seen) and the simplicity of the design which was on the edges, not the center of the rug (what’s the point of a center design when the table covers it?). When the rug arrived, we wasted no time replacing the ugly furniture blankets. Classy replaced crass in about ten minutes.

dining room rug
Here’s a look at our dining “corner,” complete with new jute rug, in this picture taken from the balcony.

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Tomorrow: You think jute has texture. Wait until you see what we put in front of the fireplace. Check it out here.

I like to say I believe in ghosts so I don’t get haunted by one

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We interrupt our storytelling to wish our readers a happy Halloween!

church sign halloween
Because people ask, for the record, we’ve experienced no sign of any ghosts residing in the old Methodist church. If they’re there, they’re fat and happy (i.e., quiet).

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Today’s headline is a quote from “The X Factor” contestant Ella Henderson. The quote on the church sign is a popular internet meme, sometimes attributed to @lovemydogduck.

Tomorrow: Anything is better than what we first put the dining room table on. Read about it here.