The little church building at the bottom of Ramsey Hill in St. Paul looks like a stone castle. It was built in 1890 by Cast Gilbert, the architect of the Minnesota State Capital and the U. S. Supreme Court Building in Washington D. C. It is built out of Kasota stone, has a beautiful curved two story front stair case, and turrets. The building had been abandoned, and my dad rehabbed it in1980, as an office building. My adventure involves this building.
Thursday night at 10:00 p.m. my dad panicked when he heard what the overnight temperature was going to be. He asked me to go with him to the building to protect it from the predicted sub zero temperatures. I had never done that before in my life. My dad has only had to do it a few times since 1980, but whenever he hears it will be minus 15 degrees he panics. The problem with an old stone building is that it is not as well insulated as newer buildings. The goal was to prevent the water pipes from bursting. It was really cold outside when we left our house to go to the building.
The first thing we did when we got to the building was to go to the each of the three bathrooms and run the water to make sure the pipes had not already frozen. Every faucet worked just fine with good water pressure. The next thing we did was to go to the thermostats and turn up the heat to 70 degrees. We then went to the utility room in the lower level where there are some exposed pipes to check for broken pipes. There were none. Then, after that, we opened the doors to all the bathrooms so heat from the halls could get into the bathrooms all night to help keep the pipes from freezing.
It was even colder when we left the building, and it was a relief that everything was fine. We locked the building, and left for home pretty confident there would not be any problems over night. I was sure that my dad was going to sleep well because of the extra effort we made to protect the building.
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