As a kid I knew Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant off by heart, including the monologue (long story), but I never intended to actually end up living in a church myself. In 2002 I was looking for a cheap fixer-upper in Vancouver’s somewhat sketchy downtown eastside, back when prices were really low here, and suddenly a rundown little wooden church came on the market. On a lark I made an appointment to see it, and two days later I ended up owning it, something I’ve regretted more than once. Everyone who sees it tells me he/she has always wanted to live in a church, and while I obviously understand that fantasy, I must say that the job of making a church livable is not for everyone. Even without changing the basic structure, footprint, roofline or even any of the rooms/doors/walls, it’s more work than your average house renovation. For one thing, houses are built upwards for a reason – smaller foundation, smaller roof, and heat travels up. For another, they contain storage! Cupboards! A little church, on the other hand, has none of those things because it’s effectively a barn. The place is livable now, but the decor is entirely haphazard still –  you think decorating in a small space is hard? Try having all your stuff in one big room! It’s a bit premature to publicly post photos of the place, but I’m doing it anyway because I need to get a head start on renting the space out during the 3 weeks of Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics, as a way of paying off some of the restoration. Apologies for using this blog as craigslist – there will be a better post later, when things are more complete. Above is the church when I moved in, when the star and cross were still on the roof, nailed straight into the shingles and creating serious leaks. Jesus may have been a carpenter, but the church volunteers sure 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 pool table and some 1970s green pews. Notice the wainscotting the whole way down the room, and the jade trim.

Above is the same room in 2006, a few weeks after the floors were finished. 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.

Photos above and below show the front area, inside what was the tiny original church. That church was perpendicular to the main part of the later church, and even though it’s now all one room, you can tell that they were once at right angles because the ceiling trusses and floorboards run in a different direction. You can see this in the photo below, the one with the ceiling fans. The older part of the church, above, houses the front entrance, office (you can see a temporary desk set up while a wall-mounted desk is being made), and to the right are the master bedroom and bathroom. Above, the front doors are obscured by a hanging room divider made from British army snow camouflage netting. This will be replaced by a tall white rolling wardrobe that will double as a privacy pony wall, an item that becomes necessary when your front doors are at street level. There’s more info on each photo in the Flickr page – click on 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. There were other pews from the 60s but they 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.

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 is heartening 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 one of its churches and its altar paraphernalia has been removed, the building automatically becomes a civilian, non-religious structure. There’s actually a long tradition of ex-churches being used for other purposes going back many centuries. 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 I will spare you.

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, 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 there was most likely 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 sort of a T.

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 refer to as “Anglican” now. The stain or paint was cheap. A crew of boys and I spend a month up on scaffolds scraping it off (and that was just in the main part of the church – the earlier 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’s poem about it is 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 very 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, the natural tannins have warmed it up significantly 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 bad for the roof, not to mention the problem of their dicey wiring and hot inefficient bulbs.

Vancouver’s East End used to be the city’s downtown centre, and it’s still walking distance from Vancouver’s current downtown (and to the downtown stadium and the Olympic athletes’ village). The neighbourhood is called Strathcona now, and it’s a hidden little oasis of character houses just east of Main Street. It’s very close to all transportation and skytrain, a 5 minute bike ride downtown, 10 minutes to Granville Island. There are very cool restaurants within 6 blocks (Campagnolo, Au Petit Chavignol). 2 full bathrooms, 2 half bathrooms. 2 bedrooms, master with king downstairs, guest bedroom upstairs with queen bed and adjoining half bath and a beautiful tiled shower room at bottom of stairs. That’s the end of the rental guide part of this post.

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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: 2010, 2010 Olympics, Alice's Restaurant, Anglican, Canada, Chinese church, church, conversion, converted church, daycare, Downtown Eastside, East End, ex-church, Good Shepherd Mission, house rental, John of Pistoia, Michaelangelo, Michelangelo, mission, mission school, Olympics, rental, rentals, Sistine Ceiling, Sistine Chapel, sonnet, Strathcona, Van, Van East, Vancouver, Wayson Choy

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