Most of us remember her as Ike Godsy’s prim spouse up on Walton’s Mountain. But the actress Ronnie Claire Edwards is also something of a character herself, and she recently bought a Dallas Catholic Church and converted it into a living space.

From the Dallas Morning News:

“This was never intended as a habitat – except by God and Catholics,” says Ronnie Claire Edwards of her offbeat residence in Old East Dallas.

She is enumerating the considerable flaws, setbacks and frustrations associated with turning a 1910 Catholic church “that probably hadn’t been inspected in 50 years” into a proper domicile, albeit one with uncommon flair. St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, a red-brick Romanesque building designed by Frank J. Woerner, an early Dallas architect, was a modern marvel in its day, equipped with steam heat and electrical lighting. But by the time its last congregation left for the suburbs, it was a major fixer-upper.

It had one sink, in a moldering kitchen behind the sacristy. The sink’s drain had no pipes connected to it, possibly because it was used as a sacrarium, in which holy water merely splashed to the ground below, not to be mixed with wastewater. The building had no toilet, ever, but the church’s 20 pictorial stained-glass windows were intact.

“See, I thought you bought a building and just moved in,” says Edwards, an actor whose face and voice are recognizable to fans of the TV show The Waltons. “Well, it took a year to be able to move in.”

Visit the link for details and pictures of the church that are, to put it mildly, dramatic.