This article is part of our special design section on retrofitting.
As children growing up in Franklin, Indiana, Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson remembered passing the old Union Joint schoolhouse on the way to cross-country meets. “It’s this very strange building and it just pops up as you drive by,” Grissom, a freelance marketing consultant, said of the crenellated pile of bricks jutting out of the cornfields.
Former elementary school sweethearts Grissom, now 37, and Wilson, now a 36-year-old orthopedic surgeon, began dating in high school and later married. But the memory was still active in 2021, when the couple lived in New York City and had recently welcomed their first child. Inspired by the pandemic, Grissom returned to Franklin and wasn’t afraid to renovate. He began looking for a historic home that needed improvements.
That’s when the 9,000-square-foot 1914 schoolhouse came on the market. Grissom sent her parents to check it out, and the couple watched the tour on FaceTime and discovered that there was extensive water damage and a lot of improvements needed. They still bought the building sight unseen for $175,000.
“It was a pretty colorful life,” Grissom said, and that life had taken its toll. The school, which served students in first through eighth grades in four classrooms, had been closed since the 1930s and the building was taken over by a farmer who used it to house turkeys and store apples. In the 1950s, a former student and her husband bought the property and divided it into two apartments. The couple’s daughter was still living in one of these apartments when Grissom and Wilson came onto the scene. During the renovation, the building was converted into a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom single-family home.
“We knew we were choosing one of the most difficult paths you could take for a house, but we were also a little daydreaming,” Grissom said. She chronicled the arduous process of renovating the Schoolhouse Homestead building on Instagram.
Over the next three years, the couple gutted and rebuilt the interiors within the existing brick structure as they moved from Manhattan to Philadelphia to both parents’ homes in Franklin while Wilson completed his residency. Delivery bottlenecks delayed the replacement of the roof by six months. After two failed attempts to install new windows, the contractor disappeared. “We lived with our parents and forced toddlers on them every morning,” Grissom said (they currently have three children, ages 5 years to 4 months). The family finally moved into their new home in September 2024.
When designing the interior, the couple wanted to honor the building’s past as a school and barn. They tried to save the original floors, doors and trim, but the barn phase didn’t make that easy. The worker refinishing the living room floorboards asked Grissom if a previous owner had cats. “No, they were turkeys,” she said.
Yet they are not bitter about what the fowl did. Grissom’s painting of a turkey hangs on an exposed brick wall in the room where the creatures roamed.
Elsewhere, plaster fragments (now displayed in a shadow box) hinted at the original colors and served as inspiration for individual colors — a deep saturated green in the foyer, powder blue in a bedroom that was once a classroom.
It was important to create a sense of whimsy. “The building deserves it because it was built for children,” Grissom said. She painted the school’s name in a mosaic on the foyer floor and hung vintage posters of anatomy and botany lessons. The kitchen-dining table came from a library, as did a card catalog cabinet that now serves as storage.
Of course there are also blackboards in the foyer and kitchen. In the basement recreation room, swings hang from the ceiling and an area is dedicated to roller skating.
And the work continues. The couple plans to build a library out of reclaimed wood, create a guest apartment in the basement and add more storage space in the living room.
Their three acres also needed improvements. “Mostly we did things in the yard for the kids to enjoy,” Grissom said. They built a playground, attached a zip line in the trees, and added a small gnome village. An orchard of persimmon and papaya trees is created, and milkweed is planted to attract monarch butterflies and the flowers are used for syrup.
The work was satisfying in many ways, Grissom said. If she and Wilson had not purchased the schoolhouse, it might have been demolished and its considerable remains sent to a landfill. A friend once told her: The greenest building is the one that already exists.
“I think adaptive reuse is important in that regard,” she said. “But I also think the world needs a little more whimsy and quirkiness.”