As kids my sister and I knew Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant off by heart, including the full monologue (long story), but I never meant to actually end up living in a church myself. In 2002 I was looking for a cheap fixer-upper in Vancouver’s sketchy downtown eastside (this is when prices were a lot lower here) and suddenly a rundown little wooden church came on the market. On a lark I made an appointment to see it, more for a friend’s benefit than for my own, and two days later I ended up owning it, something I’ve regretted more than once. Hundreds of people who’ve seen it have told me they’ve always wanted to live in a church. Obviously I understand that fantasy, but honestly, converting a church or non-house building into a house is not for everyone. It’s much worse than trying to fix up a house. Even without altering the basic structure, the footprint, the roofline or even any of the rooms/doors/walls, it’s much more work than your average house renovation. For one thing, houses are built vertically for a reason – smaller foundation, smaller drain tile trench, smaller roof, not to mention the fact that heat travels upwards. For another, houses contain storage! Cupboards! Internal walls to place storage units against! A little church, on the other hand, has none of those things. It’s effectively a chilly barn with a huge roof. My place is livable now, but it was an exhausting 7-year repair. As a result the decor was neglected and is an ongoing project –  and you think decorating in a small space is hard? Try having all your stuff visible in one big room. It immediately starts to look like a rec room or thrift shop.

Below is the church when I moved in. The pool table and plastic faux-Mississippi-steamboat fans were the first thing to go. At that point the star and cross were still on the roof, nailed straight into the shingles and creating substantial leaks. Jesus may have been a carpenter, but the church volunteers really weren’t.

I took the above photo during the realtor’s open house, the first day I saw the place, and this is pretty much how I inherited it, including some 1970s cheap green pews. Notice the dark ceiling, the dark wainscotting the whole way down the room, the dark red douglas fir floor, and the jade trim.

Above is the same room in 2006, a few weeks after the floors were sanded, bleached and sealed. In 2007 the altar area became a fireplace alcove with a super-efficient Danish wood stove, below:

The giant timber bamboo in the altar area, above, was brought inside as a party decoration when it was still green. A heavy snowfall had snapped the stems in the garden outside. After a month or two it turned this blond colour and somehow I never took it back outside, because without it the altar is too austere.

At first the church was just a little 40-person church built sideways to the street in the early 1930s. Only a few years later, in 1935, the side wall of the church was knocked out, replaced by an I-beam, and the church was extended down the length of the property. Now, even though the church seems as if it’s all one room, there are many signs of the fact that it is actually two churches joined together in a T. The ceiling trusses and floorboards run in a different direction in the two sections, for one thing (you can see this in the photo further below, the one with the ceiling fans), and for another, there are two altars, one on the east side, one on the south. Photos above and below show the front area, inside what was the tiny original church. This part of the church houses the front entrance, office (here you can see a temporary desk I set up while a wall-mounted desk was being made), and to the right are the master bedroom and bathroom. Above, the front doors used to be obscured by a hanging room divider made from British army snow camouflage netting. This has been replaced by a tall white rolling wardrobe that doubles as a privacy pony wall, an item that becomes necessary when your front doors are at street level. For more information on each photo, click on the image. Below, you can see one of the only two original pews remaining from the earliest days of the church – they’re made out of the same Douglas fir as the building and have crosses carved into the each side. The greenish pews from the 60s were cheap and had no redeeming features, so l I broke them up so that the heavy, old-growth Douglas fir could be re-used, including for an indoor swing that is yet to be installed.

Above is a view into the bedroom. The bed is inside the church’s original altar, a 5-sided cupola. The bed platform is a reconstruction of the original altar stage, which had been removed by a previous owner, and conveniently it fits a king size bed. And no, it doesn’t feel funny to sleep in the altar. After wondering if the place had been deconsecrated, I did some research and found that there is, in fact, no such thing as deconsecration. Deconsecration would essentially be the removal of a blessing, and apparently the removal of a blessing is the rough equivalent of a curse. It’s encouraging that Christian churches don’t remove blessings, not because I believe in blessings, but because the idea of removing them seems fishy. When a church sells its building and removes all the altar paraphernalia and the congregation, the place automatically becomes a secular structure. There’s actually a long tradition of ex-churches being used for other purposes going back millennia. Neighbourhood kids always ask if the place is haunted, but if it is, I’ve never noticed it. If it’s haunted, it’s haunted by the ghosts of the many cats and birds and rodents who died in the crawlspace, and whose skeletal remains, uncounted numbers of them, I had to remove. And a raccoon. I have photos of all of this in a file called “church horrors” but they’re too creepy to publish.

The worst of the projects are now completed, after the sanding of the ceiling, substitution of drywall for plaster, insulation of all walls, ceiling and roof, refinishing of floors, re-roofing, minor updating of the kitchen and general repair and maintenance. It just needs decor fine-tuning and more storage, which at this point almost amount to the same thing. For more photos of the process, see below or click on photos to go to the Flickr set.

Below, this is how the main room looked after the uninsulated plaster walls were replaced with insulation and drywall, and then painted, but before the ceiling was stripped. You can still see the words “Glory to God” above the altar. The congregation had attached stick-on oak lettering in a bulbous, groovy 1970s font, and when the church moved out they took the letters off, pulling the paint and bits of plaster away with them and leaving this grey ghost lettering behind. The Scandinavian pendant lamps date from that era as well, and I’m pretty sure that at some point the church was very sing-along-with-Jesus and I’m betting on an electric organ and guitars.

Below you can see the main room from the front area, which was the original smaller church. You can see how the trusses run in the opposite direction in the old and new areas. As I said above, you don’t sense it right away, because you feel you’re in one large room, but the building’s two buildings joined in an L.

The ceiling doesn’t look nearly as dark in these photos as it actually was, thanks to my digital camera’s contrast control. It was a very dark brown, a colour I just call “Anglican” now. The stain or paint was cheap. A crew of boys and I spent a month up on scaffolds scraping it off (and that was just in the main part of the church – the older church ceiling in the foreground above was sanded a year later and took just as long). I know how Michaelangelo felt – working overhead does something very bad to your neck and to everything else, and I’m still recovering from the damage to my shoulder joints. Michelangelo wrote a verse letter to his friend John about how it felt to work overhead and it’s printed below. In the following photos you can see the process of scraping, sanding, and then bleaching the tongue-and-groove ceiling and the trusses.

At night, after the boys left, I’d bleach the newly sanded sections from the rolling scaffold, board by board with a brush. When bleaching wood, you have to be careful to avoid lap marks. The bleach is a two-part mix of different bleaches, and you have to work carefully and fast and you have to avoid letting it drip onto your face. Below you can see the ceiling when it was first bleached – it became so white it was almost green, and I thought I’d gone too far. Luckily, lots of natural tannin has come back since then, somehow coming back through the bleached wood fibres. My conclusion, at least with Douglas fir, is that it’s best to go too far, because the wood oxidizes darker for about year after sanding. My reason for bleaching the ceiling is that the extreme redness of the ceiling did nothing for objects in the room – a pinkish, bloody tone fell on everything, and somehow nothing worked beneath it. The honey blond colour of the ceiling now seems to complement everything.

Tthe cross and star, which I removed from the roof while re-roofing to the disappointment of many neighbours, had created holes and eventually massive leaks in the roof. They’d been nailed right through the ashphalt shingles. When I replaced the roof, I didn’t put these back up because it seemed inappropriate and also bad for the roof, not to mention the problem of their dicey wiring and hot inefficient bulbs.

A note on the neighbhourhood:

The church building is located in Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhood. Originally called the East End, it was once the city’s downtown centre. Now it’s a 10 minute walk from Vancouver’s current downtown. The neighbourhood is called Strathcona now (renamed after its elementary school, probably to shed the East End’s stigma), and it’s a hidden little oasis of character houses just east of Main Street.

Thank you:

This building could not have been saved without the work of Andrew Carlisle, Randy Schuks, Vladimir Moukhanov, Simon Whippy, my parents and aunt, and all my friends especially Jonathan, Geoffrey, Fiona, Brian, Sarah and many others.

_____________________________________

Sonnet from Michaelangelo to his friend John of Pistoia
on painting the Sistine Ceiling

I’ve got myself a goiter from this strain
As water gives the cats in Lombardy
Or maybe it is in some other country.
My belly’s pushed by force beneath my chin.

My beard toward Heaven, I feel the back of my brain
Upon my neck, I grow the breast of a Harpy;
My brush, continually above my face,
Makes it a splendid floor by dripping down.

My loins have penetrated to my paunch,
My rump’s a crupper, as a counterweight,
And pointless the unseeing steps I go.

In front of me my skin is stretched
While it folds up behind me and forms a knot,
And I am bent like a Syrian bow.

And judgement, hence, must grow,
Borne in the mind, peculiar and untrue;
You cannot shoot well when the gun’s askew.

John, come to the rescue
Of my dead painting now, and of my honour;
I’m not in a good place, and I’m no painter.

Michaelangelo
written between 1509 and 1512

Tags: Alice's Restaurant, Anglican, building conversion, Canada, Chinese church, church, conversion, converted building, converted church, daycare, Downtown Eastside, East End, ex-church, Good Shepherd Mission, John of Pistoia, Michaelangelo, Michelangelo, mission, mission school, Sistine Ceiling, Sistine Chapel, sonnet, Strathcona, Van, Van East, Vancouver, Wayson Choy

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 1:22 am and is filed under British Columbia, DIY, Ouno Design News, Vancouver, architecture, design, green, landscaping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.