Rachel Schmidt was living the so-called American dream in the suburbs — a single-family home with a yard and lots of space for her growing family — but it wasn’t her dream.

“It was 2011,” says Schmidt. “We owned a house in Woodbury that my husband had purchased before we met. And so when we got married, I moved into that house.”

It was a move made with conditions.

“I had said from the beginning, ‘I don’t fit in in the suburbs,’ ” Schmidt says.

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“It was the kind of house where you might pull into the wrong driveway by mistake, thinking it’s your house,” says Schmidt.

The couple agreed:

“We wanted to raise our kids in the city,” Schmidt says.

In 2011, however, the housing market was still in recovery and it was not an ideal time to sell. Still …

“We love going to open houses and we love old houses,” Schmidt says. “We like to go through them just for fun.”

This is how the couple found themselves walking through an old house for sale in St. Paul.

“We weren’t really thinking about buying,” says Schmidt. “But we walked into this house and we totally fell in love.”

Schmidt laughs.

“It’s kind of funny,” she says, “because it was covered in old carpet and old wallpaper and smelled like mothballs. But both of us just had a great feeling when we walked in the door. We talked about it and thought about it and eventually decided we couldn’t miss out.”

A HOUSE IN THE CITY

The setting of the house in the city was appealing to Schmidt’s husband, Tim, who is a native of South Dakota and thus at home in wide-open spaces.

“That was the one thing about Woodbury that made my husband nervous about leaving,” Schmidt says. “Our house backed up to a little creek and it was pretty private. He loves being outside — mowing the lawn, digging in the dirt, that’s his thing. City houses on city lots — they’re usually so small.”

Not this property.

“It’s on more than half an acre — it’s more space than we know what to do with — and, while it’s on Cleveland in South Highland, it’s right across from the river boulevard and it faces the river.”

The house was roomy inside as well.

“We liked the space the house in Woodbury provided,” she says. “Obviously, older homes tend to be closed off, with smaller rooms that are sometimes challenging to fit modern-day furniture in. But when we walked into this house, we noticed that the rooms are big, the bedrooms are all big, there’s decent closet space and the kitchen is huge. Later on, we found out the reason: It was church housing.

“The house,” she says, “was built in the 1930s for a pastor who preached across the river in Minneapolis. His name was Henry Prince and his wife was Loretta Prince. So the house was built big enough to hold church functions there. It was made to hold a few more people and that suits our family really well.”

The two-story colonial, which is believed to have been built in 1939, is more than 2,400 square feet, with four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a fireplace. It also came with some interesting accessories.

“There’s a room over the top of the tuck-under garage that has library bookshelves and, from what we have been told, was made to be the pastor’s study,” Schmidt says. “It was a good place for him to practice his sermons, with nobody above or below him. And it stayed a study for a long time. One of the really interesting and cool things about the house is that as each owner bought the house, books were left behind by the previous owners. So when we bought the house, we wrote the books into the purchase agreement, asking to ‘Please leave as many books as you want.’ ”

Fortunately, many books were left behind.

“You can trace people’s interests over time — gardening and Colonial America; a set of DIY home improvement books from the ’40s; a bunch of barbershop quartet music; a ton of history …

“The couple we ended up buying the house from — Harlan and Ria — he was a Harvard grad who flew in the Air Force during World War II and met his wife in Germany during the reconstruction, when he was put in charge of a town; she was a German war bride and he later was named an honorary citizen (of Aschersleben, Germany). So there are a lot of books about Germany. He was also a history and travel buff, so we have their itineraries that they left in books — old Sodor travel books, old maps.”

LET THE RENO BEGIN

“We pretty much moved in right away,” says Schmidt. “The only thing we did at first was tear up the carpeting.”

After that, they paused.

“We started planning,” she says. “We had pictures and picture boards and Pinterest boards. … We wanted to put together a whole vision of where we wanted the house to go. We didn’t want it to look piecemeal.”

Finally, they decided “we wanted to do the kitchen first because it was such a hub,” she says.

The best-laid plans, though …

“One day, the toilet started leaking through the kitchen ceiling,” says Schmidt. “We said, ‘OK, guess we’re doing the upstairs bathroom first.’ So that became our first adventure. We started that the following summer. It was gutted to the studs.”

They didn’t remove any original history.

“The bathroom the way it was, it was renovated probably in the ’70s,” she says. “There was nothing original for us to save. We don’t know what it looked like originally, so we remodeled it based on the age of the house and the materials that would have been common for them to use at the time. So there are subway tiles on the walls and hexagon tiles on the floor. We had a vanity custom made by a woodworker in the Twin Cities, modeled after an ice box.”

The renovation was both unique and thrifty.

“The cast iron, clawfoot slipper tub we got off Craigslist,” Schmidt says. “It had been refinished, but the owner never used it, she had just stored boxes in it. So my husband and some friends of ours hauled it out of her house and carried it up the stairs of ours. That made for quite a sight. All we had to do was dust it off, it was in perfect condition.”

It pairs nicely with the “rescue chandelier.”

“We have a number of chandeliers in the house — all rescue chandeliers,” she says. “They came out of a big house in Duluth they were tearing down. I grew up in Duluth and I was up there visiting my family for the weekend and saw these chandeliers in an antique store.”

DIY

That bathroom remodel was a turning point.

“We did a lot of research and we had actually hired a contractor,” says Schmidt. “We had decided it was bigger than what we wanted to take on on our own. We wanted to have someone else help us.”

It didn’t work out that way, though.

They gutted the bathroom before going on vacation, with the agreement that the work would be done while they were away.

“We got back and it had not been touched, nothing had been done,” Schmidt says. “We decided that, all right, if this is going to get done, we’re going to have to do it ourselves, we are going to have to be our own contractor.”

It wasn’t easy.

“We had a half bath on the main floor,” she says. “But no bathroom with a tub or a shower — not good when you have two little kids. It was a nightmare. So I took the kids and I went traveling — I went to South Dakota to visit my mother-in-law. Tim and I would talk and make decisions. Eventually, after we got back home, I’d bathe the kids at my sister’s and we’d shower at a neighbor’s house, our wonderful neighbor.”

It was a learning experience.

“Although we hired people,” says Schmidt, “we worked alongside them so we could learn during the process.”

The kids helped, too.

“The kids rigged up a pully system in the back yard, they put the cut tile pieces in a basket that they pullied up to the bathroom through a window,” Schmidt says.

TRANSFORMATION

Since 2011, the home on Cleveland Avenue has slowly been transformed as the Schmidt family grew and expanded — their kids are now 11, 6 and 2.

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September 19, 2020 Readers and Writers: 3 mysteries to solve your need for respite from politics “We tore up the carpet, tore down the wallpaper and worked on it room by room as we were able to with three kids running around,” says Schmidt.

The work has been both big and small, both inside and outside.

“We built the deck by hand, just the two of us, last summer,” Schmidt says. The back yard, where the couple holds a popular annual summer concert for family, friends and clients, also includes a pergola, a firepit patio with seating and a rock garden with a bubbling fountain.

It’s not just the house, either.

“We designed a three-car garage that looks more like a carriage house or a barn than a garage — I think the paint we used is even called ‘barn red,’” she says.

And inside? “We dressed it up a little bit,” says Schmidt. “It was a great house, but as church housing, it was functional and utilitarian: We added some trim work — we added some baseboards and crown molding.”

They gutted the kitchen, adding features like soapstone countertops to complement the original character.

“We kept the original cabinetry, which is beautiful, we just added onto it and painted it,” says Schmidt.

The original flooring, too, was a keeper.

“We found a Douglas fir floor under four layers of other flooring,” she says. “After applying gallons of adhesive remover and scraping, we got it cleaned off enough, then sanded it and applied a poly finish to it.”

The work continues.

“The next project is turning our former tuck-under garage into a home office,” she says. “And I drew up designs to turn the sunroom into a mudroom.”

A NEW PHASE

Back in 2011, Schmidt was an elementary school music teacher. Now she is a real-estate agent with the Odd Couple Team at Keller Williams Integrity Realty in St. Paul. While Tim continues his work running a small-business loan department at a bank, the couple recently started their own small business, Homegrown Renovation & Design Co., one that specializes in budget-conscious renovations that pay homage to the history of each home.

She still loves her own old house best, though.

“Now that I’m in real estate, I’ve been to thousands of houses,” Schmidt says. “But I’ve never walked into one and wished it were mine. I might wish mine was as clean, but even then I know it’s not real life, it’s staging.”

She thinks she knows why she’s still enchanted with the house on Cleveland Avenue.

“If you can be in love with a house,” Schmidt says, “we are with this one.”