Why Would a Broadway Actor Choose to Live in Philadelphia?

One would be remiss not to mention the game room’s pièce de résistance: the coffee table. Mr. McClure made it from a submarine door that figured prominently in the plot of “Lost,” a favorite series in the Lakis-McClure household.

The couple was fortunate enough to be in California when “Lost” wrapped, and there was an auction of items from the show. “So for our one-year wedding anniversary we bought the door, and I drove it across the country,” Mr. McClure said.

He and Ms. Lakis did the rehab work on the house themselves, one room at a time, with help and tutorials from Mr. McClure’s father, Bob, a contractor, and his high school industrial-arts teacher, Jim Africano, who was best man at his wedding, in 2009.

The renovation, which wrapped in the fall of 2019, took nine years. But don’t blame Mr. McClure and Ms. Lakis for the dilatory pace. They’re very handy and very task oriented. It’s just that in between swapping out lath and plaster for Sheetrock, installing a pressed-tin ceiling surrounded by light in the dining room and getting rid of the aforementioned birds and bees, they were on tour, sometimes for as long as two years at a stretch. Or Mr. McClure had a job on Broadway. Or they were having a baby, Sadie, who just turned 2.

Everything in its own time. Not long after buying the house, the couple came upon four century-old windows in a Lancaster, Pa., architectural salvage shop. Wouldn’t it be cute, they thought, to make a wall cupboard and front it with those windows? They brought their find home, where it sat for six years.

Somewhere between the end of his Broadway run in “Beetlejuice” (late September of 2019) and the start of the world-premiere run of “Mrs. Doubtfire” in Seattle (two months later), Mr. McClure finally built the cupboard. It now holds, among other treasures, an “Avenue Q”- themed tea set that the he and Ms. Lakis made at a crafts shop while on tour with the show.

source: nytimes.com