Like that is the coolest house in the whole town.

Never in my wildest dreams would I think that like someday it could be our house.

I am Stacey and this is our house, a hundred year old school.

Come on, let me give you a tour.

I'm Stacey Grissom and I'm 36 years old.

My husband Sean and I bought an old school in Franklin, Indiana for $175,000 and turned it into our home.

What is it?

A toy case.

Yeah.

It's the first piece of furniture we've got in the schoolhouse.

We decided to look for an old and unique home because we both love historic stuff, finding old things and fixing them up and making them better, whether that's like a piece of furniture that we found on the street in New York or an old school like this.

We found out the school was for sale just the regular way through a realtor.

I've been telling him, I'm like, I want something weird.

I want something old.

And if it needs a little bit of work, that's totally okay.

So I was the third employee of a company called BarkBox.

I worked there for 10 years and then they went public in 2021.

That was how we initially paid for the schoolhouse.

We faced so many challenges and continue to face so many challenges throughout this whole process.

We knew going into this, this was going to be like a lifelong project.

The projects will never end and the problems will constantly pop up.

That part is daunting and also like it was part of the appeal, weirdly.

But if it hadn't been for my dad's advice on everything, there is no way we could have done this.

I mean, he's worked in commercial real estate in the area for his whole career.

When we bought the school, it had been converted into two apartments by the family that was living here before, and it needed a new roof.

The water getting in was damaging a lot of the floor, so that just meant that we needed to gut everything, do the structural repairs of the floor, and then start to rebuild basically a new house within the shell of this hundred-year-old building.

A lot of the work that we did on the schoolhouse, putting on a new roof and getting new windows We hired out that stuff and then it's only since we've been home the last like year and a half where it's been us doing it.

So funding the renovation was definitely a concern, but we also knew that we were really scrappy in the way that we're going to build our own kitchen and do a lot of work ourselves over the years.

We knew we wanted to have a big kitchen, but we knew we couldn't afford a custom cabinet kitchen, so we figured out that you can actually buy Ikea bases for the cabinets, and then you can buy nicer fronts for the cabinets.

In terms of the renovation being fully complete, I don't know if it will ever be, but again that was like part of the appeal of buying it, like there's nothing that makes me happier than waking up on a Saturday and being like, I have a project to do.

So this room is the entry room.

There were four classrooms upstairs.

Our school also had two pail rooms, so they would keep their coats and their pails of lunches in these two rooms.

So this room is one of the four classrooms that was upstairs, and we converted the classroom into our kitchen, and we built the kitchen ourselves.

This was the room that had the most work because when we bought the school, there were actually walls right here where they like divided it off, and so this like section was kind of just abandoned.

You could actually see through the masonry over here.

The floors had rotted out, like you would have fallen through if you would have walked on it, so it was just a ton of work to get this room stable, get the new roof on, get it to stop leaking.

So another one of the classrooms is actually right over here through this wall, so I'll go over there right now.

So here's another one of the original classrooms.

We actually have this giant turkey painting in here because our school closed in 1936, and then from 1936 until the mid-1950s, it was a barn, and there were actually turkeys in the living room where we're standing right now.

We have, you know, this painting in here.

We've got some like turkey pillows, and then we've made sweatshirts and crests and designed a bunch of stuff.

So now I'll take you to another one of the original classrooms, and that classroom is now all of our kids' bedrooms, which is pretty.

You want to help?

You want to help give it to her?

This is our daughter Margo's room.

Clearly, we're still having some issues with our windows, so things are never done in this schoolhouse.

You like to kiss the babies.

So in here is our kids' bathroom.

There were no actual bathrooms in this building when the school was a school.

And this door is another one of the doors that I refinished, and it was actually one of the original school doors.

So this room in here is our bedroom, but it was one of the other four classrooms upstairs.

This little section of wall was actually like what the classroom was painted when this was a classroom.

We color matched it to it.

But then if you come through here, in our bathroom, we pulled the greens from a different classroom.

This is the other more modern spot that we've got in the school.

Okay, are you done brushing?

I'm starting to get excited about like planning out what we want to do in the basement.

We want to have some spaces for like all of the cousins to like come down and stay here.

For now, the basement is a workshop space.

It's where the contractors have all of their stuff and a little bit of a skating rink for me and the kids.

I never thought that this incredible building would be our home.

I still like wake up some days and I'm like, I can't believe that we get to live here.

In the U.S., we don't have castles.

We have municipal buildings, and we have libraries, and we have banks and churches and firehouses.

They deserve to still be here.

I don't know, so many of the schools, they're not here anymore, and I'm just glad that this little one is.