A millennial couple bought a $175,000 schoolhouse sight unseen. They love it now, but aren't sure they'd do it again.
Roy Ritchie/Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
- Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson bought a $175,000 schoolhouse in the small town they grew up in.
- The couple, who are high school sweethearts, lived in New York before deciding to return to Indiana.
- They fell in love with the property over FaceTime and bought it without ever seeing it in person.
For years, Stacie Grissom could never picture her and her husband moving from New York City back to their Indiana hometown.
The couple — both originally from Franklin, about 30 miles south of downtown Indianapolis — had spent 10 years living and working in NYC. Then, all of a sudden, they started to feel a longing to return home.
Grissom, 36, told Business Insider that she and Sean Wilson, 35, are high school sweethearts who grew up just three minutes apart.
"We actually went to elementary school together in this tiny old rural school," Grissom said. "But I didn't really talk to him because he was a year younger than me. I was friends with his sisters, and we didn't really start talking until high school."
The pair got together in high school and went on to tie the knot in 2015. Grissom, who used to work at dog-subscription service BarkBox, and Wilson, an orthopedic surgeon, now have two children together — Arlo, who is 3, and Margot, who is nearly 2.
"I always loved the town we grew up in, but as a 20-something, you're like, 'I will never move back to my hometown,'" she said. "And then the older I got, I was like, 'Maybe our parents were kind of smart. This town's pretty awesome.'
John Moore/Getty Images
"Things just shifted in our mind when we were in New York City during the pandemic," Grissom said. "It was just sirens all the time, and it was a very tough place to live."
It wasn't just that — Grissom said her husband was working at a hospital in the Bronx, one of the neighborhoods hardest-hit with COVID-19 patients at the time.
"That moment in our lives kind of just reset a lot of things," she said. "It just got me thinking, 'What are you doing? What is the point of life? And it's the people you should be around, the people that you love."
The couple's parents still live in Franklin. In recent years, siblings who had moved elsewhere also started to return to the town.
After the couple welcomed Arlo in April 2021, they decided to get serious about moving home.
"It was very serendipitous," she said.
Kate Wilson
Grissom said her real-estate agent friend knew that she and Wilson were looking for a home with character and history.
After a few weeks of looking at listings, she said he emailed her that he'd found something but warned her that it might be a bit "too quirky."
"The subject line of his email was 'Don't judge me,'" she said. "I opened it and I was like, 'Oh my God.' I got chills down my spine."
Grissom said she immediately called her mom to say that the schoolhouse close to where she used to run cross country in high school was on the market — and she had a good feeling about it.
Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
Grissom never doubted that the old schoolhouse would be a perfect fit for their family.
Once she'd got wind of the listing, the couple asked her parents to visit the property in person.
After using FaceTime to see as much of the house as they could, Wilson and Grissom put in an offer.
"I was kind of freaking out a little bit," Grissom said. "But also, I really wanted something weird."
What helped with nerves was her dad's expertise in running a commercial real estate business. He told her that turning the schoolhouse into a functional family home was possible.
"My dad, who knows what he's doing and knows how to restore things and work with contractors — he was like, 'We can do this,'" she said.
Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
Between 1914 and 1934, the property was a schoolhouse for local children, Grissom said. She researched its history, digging through old newspaper archives and visiting local museums with Wilson.
In the years after the schoolhouse closed, the property was used as a barn.
"We actually talked to the 91-year-old woman whose parents used it as a barn," Grissom said. "She was telling us all these stories, and she was like, 'You want to know what was inside there?'"
Not ghosts, Grissom said the woman added with a laugh, but a lot of livestock. A former owner, who bought the property in 1956, told the couple that what is now their living room had been used to keep the turkeys.
"They really had to clean up," Grissom added. "That was some gnarly stuff."
Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
"I work in social media and content. I don't how to fix a roof," Grissom said.
She and Wilson put their faith in experienced contractors, plumbers, and electricians to help them make the schoolhouse a home.
For the most part, the people they worked with were incredibly talented, she added.
"There's such a fine line between the trades and the arts," Grissom said. "The guy Greg who did our tile, I was just like watching him, and I was like, 'You're an artist, man, you are.'"
Grissom declined to say how much the couple has spent on renovations but did say that the process hasn't come cheap.
"This is the thing we are investing in with all of our savings," she said. "This is going to be our life's work."
Roy Ritchie
Throughout the renovation, Grissom, Wilson, and their kids bounced between their parents' places.
Most nights, after putting the little ones to bed, the couple would head over to the schoolhouse to keep working on any projects that they could handle.
"We're definitely going to look back on this time and be like, 'We were so crazy,'" Grissom said. "My mother-in-law, she was like, 'Slow down, like, you don't have to do this every night.' We're like: 'But we do.'"
As Grissom became more involved with the renovation and documented its progress online, she started earning money from TikTok, YouTube, and various brand partnerships. The success led her to leave her job at BarkBox to post content about the schoolhouse full-time.
While the reception to her social-media presence has been overwhelmingly positive and allowed her to connect with people she now considers friends, they have read a few negative comments, which Grissom said was inevitable.
"You definitely have to be pretty confident in yourself," she said. "Everybody's got opinions. You get a lot of things, like, I hate that color. I hate that style. I hate the thing that you did. You did this wrong."
Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
"A new roof and new windows are the two most expensive things that you can put on a house," Grissom said. "Those were the two daunting things."
Although the couple hoped to be finished with renovation by November 2023, complications with the windows were part of the reason their move-in date was delayed by about nine months.
"Construction takes a lot longer than even we anticipated," she said. "Things were slower, and the windows are a huge part of it. So that staggered other things, like when we were able to get the floors finished, when we were able to finish the electrical."
Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
The building's original purpose led to certain quirks that Grissom said needed adjustment to make it work as a family home.
The rectangular structure originally consisted of four large classrooms, a middle section, and two smaller entry rooms where children would store their coats and pails back in the day.
"Those structures of rooms aren't necessarily conducive to an actual house that is good for living," Grissom said.
In light of that, they decided to convert two of the classrooms into the kitchen and living room and the other two into their master bedroom and kids' rooms.
Another big quirk was that the school didn't have bathrooms, so they had to install a new plumbing system, Grissom said.
"I actually did talk to a woman whose mom went to the school, and she was like, 'I remember my mom told me the kids went to the bathroom outside,'" she said. "She was like, 'It was a pit,' and I'm like, 'Wow, 100 kids and a pit toilet. Fascinating.'"
Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
"I've always had eclectic taste, collected antiques," Grissom, who is a big Wes Anderson fan, said.
Wilson has a similar style, so they shared a vision of their home as a modern space with homages to its public-school origins.
They installed black slate tile for the kitchen backsplash, which was where a chalkboard used to be. In another part of the house, they used tile from old school municipal buildings.
The couple also kept some of the school's original pine flooring, which thankfully remains in good condition.
The couple was happy to preserve their little slice of Franklin history, not just for themselves but for their neighbors.
"It is a giant building in the middle of farmland. It is a very striking thing," Grissom said. "It means a lot to the people in the community around it, and I think if it had been torn down, that would've been really sad for a lot of people."
Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
The main reason the schoolhouse avoided getting demolished, a fate that has befallen other older buildings in the area, is because its former owners were passionate about keeping it standing, Grisson said.
As she tells it, in 1956, a family of four bought the schoolhouse and converted it into two apartments. Grissom and Wilson ended up buying the property from one of the daughters of the former owner.
"It was very possible that even when we bought it, it would've been torn down. So we're just really, really thankful to the family that came before us that they kept it alive," she said. "If it weren't for them, it might not be here."
Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
The couple found what Grissom called a "weird clown doll" during the renovation, but have no idea of its origins.
Besides the doll and a few crickets in the basement, they haven't made many other discoveries. However, they have stumbled across some wild tales from people in the community and local museums.
"There were crazy stories," Grissom said.
One of the tales that stuck out came from a former owner who also attended the school as a child. She told Grissom and Wilson that she remembers two boys getting in trouble with the principal for setting up a live wire attached to an engine in the basement to the principal's door handle as a prank.
"I was just like, 'That would never happen today,'" Grissom said with a laugh.
Roy Ritchie
As much joy as the renovation and documenting it online has brought Grissom and Wilson, she said there were also really difficult moments.
"With renovations like this, it just kind of beats you down over time, and you don't allow yourself to get excited anymore," she said. "But definitely still very glad we did it."
While she doesn't have any regrets, she said she and Wilson probably wouldn't consider taking on a similar project in the future.
"Would we do it again? I don't know, I've got to recover from the PTSD of it first," Grissom joked.
Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
It's important to make sure you're working with the right people during a sensitive renovation, Grissom said.
She said she and Wilson had the most trouble when they made a few hiring mistakes. A piece of advice they'd give others renovating old houses is to check references carefully.
"If you don't already know someone you're hiring, if you don't know them personally, or you don't know someone who knows them personally, call references," she said.
If something feels off, she also recommends trusting your gut.
"You start to develop an instinct," she added. "It's so personal to you."
Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
Now that the schoolhouse is livable, Grissom said she and Wilson can start making smaller upgrades that will be less laborious, less time-consuming, and more fun.
One of the most exciting projects is their plan to convert the school's old boiler room that dates to the 1940s into an at-home cocktail cellar.
"Once we're like, 'OK, we've got to get our dressers and our beds in there, then we'll start building out the cocktail cellar," she said. "It's all moody. It's dark. It's got an engine in it."
"That's where I think it will be exciting," Grissom added. "It's more interesting to follow a little YouTube video episode about building a cocktail cellar, versus like, 'Look at the foundation that got poured.'"
Courtesy of Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson
"I'm hoping that we're going to be the gathering place for a lot of different events, whether it's family or stuff for our kids' school someday," she said.
In August, Grissom's dad visited the schoolhouse and asked whether the couple could host Christmas this year.
"I was like, 'Yeah, if Mom will let us,'" she said. "It's definitely the plan. I'm really excited."
Grissom also hopes that she and her husband's return to Indiana will one day inspire her own kids to realize the joys of living closer to home.
"They'll think it's super cool, and then they'll be like, 'My parents are totally uncool.' And then when they're like 20, they'll be like, 'Oh, maybe our parents knew something,'" she said.
She couldn't be more grateful to raise their children in a converted schoolhouse in their hometown.
"I am delighted that we found something so strange, because this exceeds all of the wildest dreams I ever had for a house," Grissom said.
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/XwCgp84
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