Silver Plume, Colo., is a mining town that’s home to about 200 people and a church that was built in 1876. When Pat and Gail Buckley learned that the historic church they were married in had been bought, “we thought someone was going to come in and just gut it and level it,” Gail says. “I was actually devastated.”
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But the new owner, architectural engineer Kendra Paschall, plans to preserve the building’s exterior, including the massive hand-carved doors. Inside, HGTV’s “reZoned” shows, she is transforming the church into a two-bedroom, three-bath home, which already has a dining table and chairs made from the pews. “To be able to re-use the materials,” she says, “was a great opportunity.”
The series, which premiered last Sunday, visits unconventional homes that were previously used for another function. Upcoming shows offer a peek inside an old flour mill in Missouri; a one-time car dealership in Washington; and a former pants factory in Georgia.
The “reZoned” transformations are striking, particularly when compared to photographs of the buildings before they were salvaged. The 30-minute episodes are well-paced and appropriately divide screen time between home and owners, who often are as intriguing as their domiciles. But the series doesn’t tell us how much it costs to “tend” to old buildings. Nor does it share any of the hassles of obtaining permits, hiring contractors and living in a construction zone.
In addition to Paschall, the first episode includes a dilapidated train depot that was moved by the buyers from Granger, Texas, to Austin. “I loved it immediately. It would just be magical” to live in it, says Judy Levy, who, with her husband Francois, is converting it to a house for their family.
The Levys added dormers and a skylight for their third-floor master bedroom suite, and a narrow library is tucked into a loft above their children’s bedrooms. But the depot’s charms are in its original details, such as the chipped bead-board walls and cracked wood flooring. “It’s like a map of the history of this place,” Francois says.
In the San Francisco Bay area, Olle Lundberg and his wife, Mary Breuer, give a tour of an Icelandic ferry that they modified and live in at Pier 54. The five-bedroom, four-bath boat is 5,000 square feet and has a working engine room that is “the size of some people’s apartments,” Lundberg points out.
Even more grand than the ferry is the couple’s quest to buy it. After finding it in Iceland, they had to have the boat dry-docked and painted, and the engine was overhauled. “At the time, it seemed like a big adventure,” Breuer says. Then they had to hire a crew to sail the vessel across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Panama Canal and north to San Francisco.
“[People] look at me and say, `You talked your wife into this?'” Lundberg says, laughing. “This is everything I always wanted in a house.”
HGTV broadcasts “reZoned” on Sundays at 8:30 p.m., and repeats on Mondays at 12:30 a.m.
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Carmel Carrillo is assistant editor of Real Estate. You may contact her at [email protected], or write to her at baiduhai, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.