A former house of God is now the house of Tim Oleston.

He’s the new owner of the historic building at 1422 Milmine Rd. that used to be the Lakeville United Methodist Church.

Last month, Oleston purchased the building and the 0.33-acre parcel it sits on for $105,000. He plans to transform it into a home and live there with his girlfriend Laycee Schmidtke and their dog Lizzie.

“We met all the neighbors,” said Oleston, who works in marketing. “Everybody’s really friendly there. We really like the area.”

“It certainly lives up to the hype. People told us you go out there and people will smile and they will know your name and they’ll look out for you. Folks really have (done that) and we really appreciate it. It’s been nice,” he added.

Lakeville UMC, dedicated in 1856, closed last year. Its congregation was small, aging and no longer growing. Worship attendance had declined.

Despite an emotional, hard-fought, last-ditch effort by local members and residents to save the church, a determination was made that it was “no longer financially viable” to keep the doors open, according to a Dec. 5, 2016 e-mail from Rev. Elizabeth Hill, superintendent of the Blue Water District of the Detroit Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.

The final service was held on Nov. 27 and the property was put up for sale. The original asking price was $240,000.

This is the second church Oleston has purchased. The last one was a 19th-century United Methodist church in Cardiff, NY. He turned it into a recording studio, then made it his home for a while.

“I sold that to some acrobats. They do training there,” Oleston said.

To Oleston, there are two big advantages to living in an old church.

One is the “wide open spaces” that can be redesigned to suit individual needs, wants and tastes. In other places, Oleston explained, “You’re taking out walls and trying to create open spaces.”

“This building has nothing but open spaces,” he said. The trick is trying to “preserve the integrity of the space,” but yet “create storage for the things you need in order to live.”

“You need a few more closets as a household than you do as a church,” Oleston noted.

The other advantage is the fact that most churches are “built well” and “loved for a long time,” so “they don’t have a lot of neglect.”

“You can’t say that about many homes,” Oleston said.

Most of the renovation process will focus on the building’s interior, according to Oleston. The only plans they have for the exterior are to erect some fencing for their dog and do some landscaping.

Oleston is imbued with a strong passion for preserving, restoring and repurposing historic structures.

A native of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, Oleston invested in that community’s central business district by purchasing some old buildings along N. Wisconsin St. and converting them into five commercial units and one residential unit to help spur downtown revitalization. The project is called City Square Hub.

“All of them are buildings that were built before 1900,” Oleston said.

“It’s important to me to see people using the downtown and having sort of a sense of community there,” he noted. “That has been my focus for quite some time now. It’s been five years of just working on downtown projects.”

Oleston believes it’s important to preserve old buildings because “you can’t replicate them.”

“You can’t get those materials and the people with the skills to make those things happen (nowadays),” he said. “They work for aristocrats now. They don’t do structures downtown. They’re working on mansions by the lake or in West Palm Beach.”

As more and more people buy goods and services online, Oleston believes “strip malls are going to go away” and “the only remaining commodity is going to be the experience of going somewhere.”

“You can’t replicate the experience of going into a historic structure,” he said. “There’s no way to fake it. You can tell if it’s a Disney version or if it’s something authentic.”

“The only real estate we can be sure will have value 50 or 100 years from now are the buildings we can’t replicate,” Oleston added.