A millennial couple bought a $175,000 schoolhouse sight unseen. They love it now, but aren’t sure they’d do it again.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.'”

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.”

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. 

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.'”

“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.