This article is part of our Design special section on retrofits.
As children growing up in Franklin, Ind., Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson remembered passing the old Union Joint schoolhouse on their way to cross-country meets. “It’s this very weird building and it just pops up as you’re driving by,” said Grissom, a freelance marketing consultant, about the crenelated brick pile that emerged from the cornfields.
Former elementary school friends, Grissom, now 37, and Wilson, who is 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 were living in New York City and had recently had their first child. Spurred by the pandemic to return to Franklin and fearless about renovating, Grissom began searching for a historic home that needed improvements.
Just then, the 9,000-square foot schoolhouse, which dated to 1914, went on the market. Grissom sent her parents to check it out, and the couple followed the tour on FaceTime, noting extensive water damage and the need for many improvements. They bought the building sight unseen for $175,000 anyway.
“It had a bit of a colorful life,” Grissom said, and that life had taken its toll. The school, which served first through eighth graders across 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 those apartments when Grissom and Wilson came on the scene. Their renovation involved turning the building into a single-family home with four bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms.
“We knew we were choosing one of the hardest paths that you could choose to a house, but we were also kind of daydream-y,” Grissom said. She has chronicled the strenuous process of fixing the building up on Instagram, at Schoolhouse Homestead.
Over the next three years, the couple gutted and rebuilt the interior within the existing brick structure as they moved from Manhattan to Philadelphia, while Wilson finished his residency, to the homes of both sets of parents in Franklin. Supply-chain hiccups delayed the replacement of the roof by six months. After two failed attempts to install new windows, the contractor disappeared. “We were living with our parents and imposing toddlers on them every morning,” Grissom said (they currently have three children, ranging from 5 years to 4 months). The family finally moved into their new home in September 2024.
In designing the interior, the couple wanted to honor the building’s past as both a school and a barn. They tried to salvage the original floors, doors and trim, though the barn phase did not make that easy. The worker refinishing the living room’s floorboards asked Grissom if a previous owner kept cats. “No, it was turkeys,” she said.
Yet they are not bitter about what the poultry did. Grissom’s painting of a turkey hangs on an exposed brick wall in the room where the creatures wandered.
Elsewhere, plaster fragments (now displayed in a shadow box) hinted at original paint colors and served as the inspiration for custom colors — a deeply saturated green in the foyer, powder blue in a bedroom that was once a classroom.
Creating a sense of whimsy was important. “The building deserves it because it was built around kids,” Grissom said. She set the school’s name in a mosaic on the foyer’s floor and hung vintage posters teaching anatomy and botany. The kitchen dining table came from a library, as did a card catalog cabinet now used for storage.
There are chalkboards, too, of course, in the foyer and kitchen. In the basement rec room, swings dangle from the ceiling and an area is consecrated to roller skating.
And the work continues. The couple plan to build a library with salvaged wood, install a guest apartment in the basement and add more living room storage.
Their three acres called for improvements, as well. “Mostly we’ve been doing things in the yard to make it fun for the kids,” Grissom said. They built a playground, strung a zip line in the trees and added a tiny gnome village. An orchard of persimmon and pawpaw trees is emerging, and milkweed will be planted to attract monarch butterflies, with the flowers to be used for syrup.
The labor has been satisfying on a number of levels, Grissom said. If she and Wilson hadn’t bought the schoolhouse, it might have been torn down and its substantial remains carted to a landfill. As a friend once told her, the greenest building is the one that already exists.
“I think adaptive reuse is important in that way,” she said. “But also I think the world needs a little bit more whimsy and quirk.”
