A couple ditched NYC to renovate a $175,000 schoolhouse in their Indiana hometown. It's over 100 years old, but will soon be a spacious, modern 4-bed family house.

The couple, who are originally from Franklin, Indiana, spent 10 years living and working in New York City when all of a sudden they started to feel a longing to return home.

Grissom, 34, and Sean Wilson, 33, are high school sweethearts, having grown up just three minutes from each other, she told Insider. "We actually went to elementary school together in this tiny old rural school," Grissom said. "But I didn't really talk to him because he was a year younger than me. I was friends with his sisters and we didn't really start talking until high school."

After getting together in high school, the pair tied the knot in 2015. Grissom, who works for BarkBox, and Wilson, a medical fellow, went on to have two children together – Arlo, who is nearly 2, and Margot, who is 6 months old.

"I always loved the town we grew up in, but as a 20-something, you're like, 'I will never move back to my hometown,'" she said. "And then the older I got, I was like, 'Maybe our parents were kind of smart. This town's pretty awesome.'"

"Things just shifted in our mind when we were in New York City during the pandemic," Grissom said. "It was just sirens all the time and it was a very tough place to live."

It wasn't just that – Grissom said her husband was working at a hospital in the Bronx, one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods with COVID-19 at the time. "That moment in our lives kind of just reset a lot of things," she said. "It just got me thinking, 'What are you doing? What is the point of life? And it's the people you should be around, the people that you love."

Her and Wilson's parents still live in Franklin but in recent years, even their siblings who had moved elsewhere started to return to the town. After the couple welcomed their son Arlo in April 2021, they decided to get serious about their own plans to move home.

"It was very serendipitous," she said.

Grissom said her friend knew that she and Wilson were looking for a home with a bit of character and history. So after a few weeks of looking at listings, she said she got an email from him saying that he'd found something, but warned her that it might be a bit "too quirky" for the couple's liking.

"The subject line of his email was 'Don't judge me,'" she said. "I opened it and I was like, 'Oh my God, I got chills down my spine.'"

Grissom said she immediately called her mom to say that the schoolhouse close to where she used to run cross country in high school was on the market and she had a good feeling about it.

For Grissom, there was never a shred of doubt in her mind that the old schoolhouse would be a perfect fit for her and her husband's growing family.

Once she'd got wind of the listing, the couple got her parents to visit the property in person. Using FaceTime to see as much of the house as they could, Wilson and Grissom went for it and put in an offer.

"I was kind of freaking out a little bit," Grissom said. "But also I really wanted something weird."

What helped with nerves was having her dad, who runs a commercial real estate business, tell her that turning the schoolhouse into a functional family home was possible. "My dad, who knows what he's doing and knows how to restore things and work with contractors, he was like, 'We can do this,'" she said.

Between 1914 and 1934, the property ran as a schoolhouse for local children, Grissom said. She'd done her research on the property, digging through old newspaper archives and visiting local museums with Wilson.

In the years after the schoolhouse closed, the property was used as a barn. "We actually talked to the 91-year-old woman whose parents used it as a barn," Grissom said. "She was telling us all these stories and she was like, 'You want to know what was inside there?"

Not ghosts, she added with a laugh, but a whole lot of livestock. A former owner, who bought the property in 1956, told the couple that their living room had been used to keep the turkeys.

"They really had to clean up," Grissom added. "That was some gnarly stuff."

"I work in social media and content, I don't how to fix a roof," Grissom said. Given that, she said she and Wilson were more than happy to put their faith in experienced contractors, plumbers, and electricians to help them bring their vision for the house into reality.

Grissom declined to say how much the couple has spent on renovations so far, but did say that the transformation process hasn't come cheap.

"It's definitely a thing where we are not planning to go anywhere," she said. "This is the thing we are investing in with all of our savings."

"This is going to be our life's work," she added.

"A new roof and new windows are the two most expensive things that you can put on a house," Grissom said. "Those were the two daunting things."

She also said they've found that window companies can often "spit out a price based on a formula," but they managed to find a company that allowed them to look at the project as a whole and work with them to get creative on cutting costs.

Speaking of windows, Grissom also said it's one of the most exciting elements of the renovation because of how glorious sunsets in the Midwest are.

"The Midwest is so flat, and I never thought that this was incredible when I was growing up," she said. "But seeing the sunset every single night and seeing a sunset across flat land, they're just always very epic so I'm really excited about these west windows that we have that we'll be able to see the Indiana sunset every day."

Since the original purpose of the building was as a schoolhouse, the structure had certain quirks that Grissom said needed adjustment in order for it to work as a home for her and Wilson's family.

For example, the rectangular structure originally consisted of four large classrooms, a middle sector, and two smaller entry rooms where children would store their coats and pails back in the day.

"Those structures of rooms aren't necessarily conducive to an actual house that is good for living," Grissom said. In light of that, they decided to convert two of the classrooms into the kitchen and living room and the other two into their master bedroom and kids' rooms.

"What's cool is I've always had eclectic taste, collected antiques," Grissom said, adding that she is a big Wes Anderson fan.

Since she and her husband are aligned on their style, they share a vision for their home being a modern space, but with nods back to its public-school origins using unique design choices.

Some quirky features they plan to include are tiles used in old school municipal buildings and black slate tile for the backsplash of the kitchen where a school chalkboard used to be. They're also keeping all of the original pine flooring of the school, which thankfully remains in good condition.

All in all, the couple is keen to preserve their little slice of Franklin history, not just for themselves but for their neighbors.

"It is a giant building in the middle of farmland. It is a very striking thing," Grissom said. "It means a lot to the people in the community around it and I think if it had been torn down that would've been really sad for a lot of people."

The main reason the schoolhouse avoided getting demolished, a fate that often occurs to older buildings in the area, according to Grissom, is because its former owners were passionate about keeping it standing.

As she tells it, in 1956, a family of four bought the schoolhouse and converted it into two apartments. Grissom and Wilson ended up buying the property from one of the daughters of the former owner.

"It was very possible that even when we bought it, it would've been torn down. So just really, really thankful to the family that came before us that they kept it alive," she said. "There's a lot of work to be done on it because it's a huge old building. But if it weren't for them, it might not be here."

Among photos of the schoolhouse renovation that Grissom sent to Insider was one of a "weird clown doll" that the couple came across during the renovation but have no idea of its origins yet.

Aside from the doll and a few crickets in the basement, however, they haven't had many other discoveries aside from stories they've heard from people in the community and local museums.

"There were crazy stories," she said. One of the tales that stuck out was told to her by a former owner who also attended the school in her youth. She told Grissom and Wilson that back in the day, she remembers two boys getting in trouble with the principal for setting up a live wire attached to an engine in the basement to the principal's door handle as a prank.

"I was just like, 'That would never happen today,'" Grissom said with a laugh. "So there's not relics that we've found yet from students, but there are a lot of stories."

As of now, Grissom says she and Wilson, who are temporarily based in Philadelphia, are "90% sure" they'll be able to move into the schoolhouse by November, and they can't wait to share the space with their own families.

"I'm hoping that we're going to be the gathering place for a lot of different events, whether it's family or stuff for our kids' school someday," she said.

And speaking of the kids, Grissom hopes that her and her husband's homecoming will one day inspire her own kids to realize the joys of sticking closer to home.

"They'll think it's super cool, and then they'll be like, 'my parents are totally uncool,' and then when they're like 20, they'll be like, 'oh, maybe our parents knew something,'" she said.

Overall though, she said she couldn't be more grateful at the prospect of raising her and Wilson's children in a schoolhouse in a town they love so much.

"I am delighted that we found something so strange because this exceeds all of the wildest dreams I ever had for a house," Grissom added.