Home Sweet Church House
Should we buy a church?
I’ve been looking at real estate since forever. When I was a little girl, my parents bought a lot at the top of a hill. It was highest lot in all of LaPorte County. It was miles from Lake Michigan but on a clear day you could make out the Chicago skyline over the water.
My parents had built an A-frame in the 1960s in Motts Woods. They had not accounted for having any more children, so when I came along, there was no bedroom for baby Jennifer so they stuck a crib in a closet and made due. In 1978, they moved our family to the country into a model home that was just being built in a subdivision called Richmond Heights. It was a very nice middle class neighborhood with several prominent businessmen living nearby. I remember walking through the house before my parents purchased it and how excited my mom was when we got to the kitchen. There were cabinets covering three walls and all the doors were standing open. So much storage space and room for entertaining! Mom and Dad got to choose the wallpaper and carpet. It was a four bedroom palace.
We moved in right before my 5th birthday. Mom set up card tables in the garage and invited all the neighbors over for birthday cake. I can still picture her in her pink striped tank top serving ice cream to all the neighborhood kids who, in later years, became like family. We spent so many early mornings talking together at the bus stop and late nights playing kick the can. Everyone knew everyone else. There were about 10 houses in our neighborhood. We helped each other rake leaves and shovel driveways and change flat tires. We had neighborhood bonfires, shared 4th of July fireworks, hopped from house to house for Christmas parties. We grew up together. We played together, laughed together and mourned together. It really was a community.
But Dad had a dream to build again. He wanted to build a geodesic dome home. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons on the way home from church, he would just drive around places in the country where he thought he might want to build.
One day he saw a lot in a subdivision called Ridgeview. Now, this wasn’t a piece of property that was for sale. There was no for sale sign anywhere to be found. It was clearly a vacant lot, overgrown and covered in trees. Dad stopped the car and we all got out. I felt like we were trespassing, but Dad assured me that weren’t going to do anything wrong, just stopping to take a look. We walked through a dozen or so apple trees and crested the top of the hill. We could see forever. Dad started singing “a hundred miles, a hundred miles, oh I can see a hundred miles” in his clear, tenor voice. It only took a minute for Dad to know that this is where he wanted to build his dream house.
A few weeks later, Mom and Dad bought that lot. It was the highest piece of property in LaPorte County. In the 1980's there was no google. Dad went to the courthouse armed only with the location of the lot. He combed through the books and plat maps and searched through the card files until he found out who owned that little piece of property, talked around until he found out how where he lived, and walked up to his house and knocked on his door. Dad negotiated a price and bought that lot on the top of the hill.
Sadly, that house never got built but we sure did pick a lot of golden delicious apples from those trees and Mom taught me how to make apple crisp. I’m sure a lot of life lessons were learned peeling those apples together in the kitchen on Cathy Lynn Drive. One of the biggest lessons that I learned is that anything might be for sale for the right price if you aren’t afraid to do a little research. My Grandma Meyer used to say that when you wanted something, you had to ‘take your mouth with you’. In other words, ask for what you want.
Eventually, Mom and Dad sold that lot for a tidy little profit. Dad generously gifted my brothers and I each $10,000 from the sale of that lot. I have no idea what my brothers did with their money, but I used that $10,000 as a down payment on my first house at 19 years old. I fixed up and sold that cute little house a few years later for a nice profit. I was hooked and have been scoping out real estate ever since.
One day, while driving around Muncie looking for an investment property, I drove past a huge old church building. It was boarded up. The roof looked bad. The sidewalk and steps were crumbling. But the exterior bricks looked okay. It had a lot of character. I really wondered what it looked like inside. So, I wrote down the street name, used the lesson my dad had taught me, and went home to research. I found out that it had gone back to the city because of taxes that were owed. I took my mouth with me and sought out the right person to talk with, set up a showing for the next afternoon, and Bruce and I went to look at it.
A city truck pulled up and clean cut young guy hopped out, kicked the blankets off the steps that were left from whoever had slept there the previous night, and used his screw gun to remove the plywood that was boarding up the door. We climbed through the hole into the dark, and I pretended not to notice the smell and that I was stepping over a dead rat. What have I gotten myself into?
As we emerged into the sanctuary though, we were awed at the huge open spaces, dozens of beautiful church pews, and some of the stained glass still intact. We wound our way through and found a large church basement. But the place was a mess. A large hole in the roof had caused water to pour through, the floor was caved in, and many of the windows were broken. The neighborhood was pretty sketchy but even so, we started to dream about what we could use the spaces for, the gatherings that could happen in the basement, the ministry that could once again come out of these walls.
I wasn’t scared of the mess. I have purchased estate houses, hoarders homes, houses that looked like a bomb had gone off inside, and one that was burned out in a fire. I got Bruce on board. He said that it was my baby and that if I could figure out how to make it work, I could do it. In the end, even though I negotiated a great price and the city accepted my proposal (I made a very generous offer of $1 as long as they would wipe out the back taxes, repair the roof, fix the back parking lot and the sidewalks in front) we decided that the financial investment required to make the place into our home just wouldn’t make sense.
But we were now genuinely hooked on the idea of a church house.