‘We don’t want to go’ – Haldimand family needs miracle to stay in dream home — historic church and cemetery

Andresa Sisson’s family just celebrated their first Easter inside a former Anglican church they turned into their dream home.

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They pray it will not be their last holiday on the banks of the Grand River.

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The shuttered place of worship in the hamlet of York in Haldimand County had sat empty for more than a decade before Sisson and her partner, Tao Drayton, bought it in 2021, with plans to relocate their family of six from Toronto to rural Ontario.

Numerous cost overruns and bureaucratic delays later, they have run out of cash and recently made the “awful” decision to reluctantly put the property back on the market.

“We don’t want to go,” Sisson told The Spectator in a phone interview.

“This is exactly where we want to be. We love it here.”

The couple bought the 133-year-old church for $375,000, swayed by the building’s 20-foot ceiling, spacious sanctuary and unique character.

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They budgeted a further $300,000 for renovations but quickly discovered the job was far more complicated than expected.

“The belfry was leaning over the church, and the roof needed a lot of patching,” said Sisson, who found a steeplejack — an expert at repairing bell towers — in Glasgow, Scotland, to advise on how to bolster the dangerously tottering belfry.

Issues getting the plumbing system approved saw tradespeople who had been lined up leave for other jobs, and rising construction prices caused further grievance.

“And we didn’t come in with bags of money,” Sisson said.

The couple financed the project through a private lender because “no banks would touch this place when we first got it,” she added.

But the taps have run dry.

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“Our time is up with (the lender),” Sisson said. “They have other things in mind for their money and asked us to start the sale process.”

Sisson said a bank was poised to give the couple a mortgage in January, but the deal fell through “at the last second.”

“They balked at the cemetery,” she said, referring to a two-acre burial ground that came with the church.

Renovations are on hold while Sisson asks the municipality to sever the cemetery from the main lot in hopes of swaying the bank.

But even if Haldimand expedites the process to avoid having Sisson and Drayton abandon the cemetery — whose roughly 800 gravesites would then become the municipality’s responsibility to maintain — getting the severance “is still months away,” Sisson said.

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In the meantime, the couple is praying for an Easter miracle in the form of an angel investor — another $650,000 would be the dream, Sisson said — to resurrect their hopes of staying.

“Ideally, we get this bridge financing for a year,” Sisson said.

“In that time we finish our reno, we sever the cemetery, and then be able to just go to a regular bank and get a regular mortgage.”

Drayton has found work in the area and Sisson discovered a passion for managing the cemetery, which dates to 1787. She oversees plot sales and interments, and has had the fencing repaired and long-neglected monuments restored.

“I have all these plans and I don’t want to stop,” said Sisson, who would continue running the cemetery should the new owners not want to go through the Bereavement Authority of Ontario’s months-long vetting process.

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“We still have those commitments to the families. So I’d like to be able to honor that,” Sisson said.

She and Drayton welcomed relatives for Easter in between showing the house to prospective buyers.

The 3.6-acre property at 3 Nelles St. E. is priced at $799,900.

Sunlight streams through stained-glass windows, illuminating the original wooden ceilings and modern furnishings inside the three-bedroom, two-bathroom house.

“There’s still some bigger things” to finish, Sisson said, noting some flooring has not been installed and one of the rooms is still only studded.

“It’s not turnkey ready,” she said. “But it’s functional, and it feels wonderful.”

The Re/Max listing touts the home’s “character and charm,” calling the property “irreplaceable.”

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Sisson agrees, saying a return to townhouse living in Toronto “would feel like getting back into a clown car.”

“We don’t want to go back to the city, (but) we certainly wouldn’t have the money to buy something new here (in Haldimand),” she said.

After years commuting to a construction site, the family moved in full-time in October. Sisson said the place immediately felt like home.

“It’s ours. There’s nothing about it that doesn’t feel completely personal and completely us,” she said.

“It’s just hard. If this was a flip and we didn’t care about it, it wouldn’t be as bitter a pill.”

As it stands, a family that breathed new life into a boarded-up church faces the prospect of abandoning their dream of rural living.

“It’s up for sale right now, we have people looking at it,” Sisson said.

“But if we can get some kind of private financing that would save us, I would hold out for that. Because we absolutely don’t want to leave. I just want to get a dog and continue our happy life here.”

JP Antonacci is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter based at the Hamilton Spectator. The initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.

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