You can’t live in a silo, y’know
posted in Miscellaneous, OmegaMom, Reader Input |Miss Cellania asked about “weird people” I have known. Alas, my mind immediately went blank. All I could think about, rather than people, were the various odd living spaces I’ve either considered or lived in.
Shortly before I moved out of Chicago, I was wisting for the country life. I was also wisting for a cheaper rental (though, looking back, I could slap myself upside the haid, because I had a lovely one-bedroom rental with built-in bookcases flanking a defunct fireplace, a balcony, hardwood floors, and lots of closet space for the amazing price of $365 per month, all in a place that was walking distance from the beach and lots of nice restaurants).
Anyway, yearning for a different place to live, I scoured the classifieds in the Chicago Reader week in and week out. Most were retreads of what I was in–three flats, small brick apartment buildings, some swanky stuff on or near the Magnificent Mile.
But one day, I read an ad that piqued my curiosity.
They were renting a silo. A real live, honest-to-goodness, grain silo. Four floors, one room per floor, hardwood floors.
They also had a refurbished barn for rent.
It was way the hell and gone north of the city, but it sounded just too cool for words, so I called the owner up and set up an appointment to view the silo.
It looked great from the outside, but once you were in it, it was quite the letdown. I had had visions of a spiraling staircase on the inside of the walls, circling up the interior, with each room using the most of the space (like this). Alas, the guy who had done the work was…um…lacking in imagination. Or dumb. Or just plain weird. Y’see, he had built this weird boxlike structure down the middle of the silo with the stairs there. It ate up all the space. What was left was, oh, four feet of space surrounding the stairwell. And the stairwell was no great shakes, either; it was rickety and poorly built and looked like the slightest bit of wind coming through the cracks in the silo would have it all come tumbling down.
My heart was broken and I abandoned my silo dreams.
Years later, when I went back to college for the final time in the Bay Area, I knew I needed an inexpensive place to live. So, once again, I found myself scouring the rental ads. Interestingly enough, in the East Bay, there were lots of little cottages to rent–inexpensively, too. But each time I called, the ad had been out for a day already, and the place was rented (no doubt to other penniless, hungry students).
One day, I found an ad the day it was posted. I called the guy up. I went to take a look.
And ohmigosh, it was just darling. It was a tiny little 10×20 cottage in the back of a house at the bottom of the San Leandro hills. It had a wall full of French windows, a teeny-tiny galley kitchen, an itty bitty bathroom with a shower stall, and exposed rafters painted white. I was sunk.
The most interesting thing? It started life as a chicken coop. Yes. I lived for two years in a former chicken coop–and I loved it. There was an avocado tree right outside those French windows…there was a boxed flower bed at the foot of the itty bitty porch, which I filled with California poppies…there was a bottle-brush tree beside the porch…It was wonderful. Best of all, I could pop into my car, drive up the hill five minutes, and be able to hike around the San Leandro Reservoir.
These days, of course, we live in a log cabin in the piney forest–a dream for many folks. We almost bought an octagonal house, instead (apparently, they were all the rage for vacation homes in this area for a while). But I still yearn for a yurt, or an earthship, or something equally offbeat, miss my darling cottage, and daydream about what that silo could really have been like, if the owners had just tried a bit harder.
Technorati: Silo, yurts, earthships, non-standard housing
