Old House, New Home> With love and paint stripper, Van Buren couple overhaul town’s former parish rectory

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When Chuck and Cher Gagnon took on the task of restoring the 73-year-old, 10-room house they purchased at the top of Church Street, they not only created a new home for themselves, they also preserved a piece of Van Buren history and a monument of the community’s deep Catholic roots.

Last month — after a 15-month restoration project that required, among other things, 60 gallons of paint stripper and 229 panels of sheetrock — the Gagnons moved into what once was the parish rectory of St. Remi.

The Gagnons’ work on the house has generated so much interest in the community that they agreed to hold an open house last month, two days before they actually moved in. About 150 people were led on tours of the house that day; many others stopped by before and since.

“I just think that they were happy to see their former rectory restored,” Cher Gagnon said of the droves of people who have clamored for a glimpse of what must be one of the most talked-about home-improvement projects the town has seen. “One woman came three times,” twice returning with others in tow, she said.

St. Remi’s has some personal significance to the couple. Chuck Gagnon grew up as a parishioner of St. Remi’s and attended Mass here until he moved away to work in Lewiston. After he returned 17 years ago, he and Cher were married in the St. Remi church.

Gagnon recalled feeling awed by the priests he encountered at church and at school, where many of them taught. Once he became so nervous at the prospect of performing in a school Christmas gala at the St. Remi parish hall that he prayed for snow, and got it — and the performance was canceled.

“I used to walk in here on pins and needles,” Gagnon said, reminiscing about visiting the rectory as a schoolboy. “Now that I own the place, it’s a completely different feeling. It’s just a regular house. Now I think about those days and wonder what I was scared of.”

The rectory once served as the home for the Marist priests who have tended to the community’s spiritual needs since the order’s arrival here in 1884, about a century after the first French-Catholic families settled what now is Van Buren.

The property purchased last year by the Gagnons once composed St. Remi Parish, founded in 1911 as a mission of the larger St. Bruno Parish at the other end of town. The church’s foundation was laid that year, and for the first few years, Masses were held in the basement.

St. Remi was improved and added to over the next decade. The mission was designated a parish on the completion of its sturdy, brick rectory in 1922, and for the next half-century, served the faithful of Van Buren’s Keegan neighborhood.

The declining population and a shortage of priests, however, led to St. Remi’s reverting to mission status in 1971. Six years later, the rectory was vacated by the last priest occupying the rectory.

The rectory was used for office work and the occasional parish dinner until it was completely vacated a little over a decade ago. Church services continued until 1991, when St. Remi was closed and merged with St. Bruno.

After the consolidation, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland put the property — consisting of the former church, parish hall, rectory and the land they sit on — up for sale.

Gagnon admitted he has always been intrigued by the rectory, but at first, he and his wife were put off by the initial asking price of $80,000 — and the fact that the property was marketed as a package.

When the price tag was negotiated down to $12,500 — a figure much more to their liking — the Gagnons began the purchase process. While not crazy about the idea of owning a church and parish hall, the buildings were part of the deal. The property officially changed hands in January 1994.

The Gagnons haven’t decided what they will do with the church — or the 19 stained-glass windows, bearing identifying labels in the parish’s native French, that grace it. They expect that converting the church to secular use will require a hefty infusion of cash.

Renovating the rectory was a labor of love from the start for Gagnon, who could see the building’s potential long before it became obvious. Among the work that had to be done to make the house habitable again was replacing the roof and realigning the floors, which had sagged in places over the years.

“We worked in here for 15 months before we could move in,” Gagnon said of the rectory. “It was left empty and it wasn’t heated and it was starting to go to pot.”

The floor job required 13 floor jacks, which after they were placed under beams at strategic intervals, were turned a bit every other day.

“I didn’t want to crack the walls anymore than they already were,” Gagnon said. “The hardest part was getting the floors level, and the roof was scary. The rest of it was to me a relaxing thing. I loved doing it.”

“He was in his glory,” Cher Gagnon said. But to her, the first few months were “discouraging. I didn’t get excited until he got to the bare wood,” referring to perhaps the home’s most striking feature — the woodwork that includes two staircases and molding.

The warmth and beauty of the wood were hidden by layer upon layer of paint and did not begin to emerge until Gagnon went to work on them with the stripper. As paint gave way to wood, Cher told her husband: “Now I see what you saw.”

The couple tried to keep the woodwork as close to the original as they could, numbering each piece as it was taken down for refinishing. They had one clue to work by — the molding around one door that had not been painted over. Almost everything else had been.

Decorating was largely Cher Gagnon’s job. Shades of green are the thread that binds the rooms together.

The color scheme was driven partly by the furniture the couple had acquired for their previous home — a three-story structure on Main Street in Van Buren. Even after the move, there was furniture to spare.

The home consists of a formal living room with chandelier; a large kitchen with an eating island and wood cabinets; three bathrooms, including a housekeeper’s room and bathroom upstairs from the kitchen; and an elegant upstairs landing leading to the bedrooms, including a huge master bedroom, decorated with an antique baby carriage and doll.

Gagnon’s interior-decorating signature is the ceilings. Each room’s ceiling is accented with the wallpaper pattern or border used in it. The paper was applied in a variety of patterns around the light fixture in each room.

“Ceilings are my thing,” said Gagnon with a laugh. “We fix our floors to look nice and then we walk on them.” Ceilings, he added, are the untapped potential in most homes.

Now the work is all done, and the Gagnons finally have time to enjoy their new home. But for Chuck Gagnon, the end of the project brought a little bit of sadness.

“This was 15 months of fun,” he said. “When I was done, I felt lost.”

But there are always the church and the parish hall to work on next.