Grain-bin home offers unique comfort and style

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN CYNTHIA MARTENS
Through the windows of their home, the expansive curve of the prairie horizon is quietly repeated in the subtle arc of the interior walls.

And they wouldn’t have it any other way.

The home of Allen and Kay Liefer of rural Walton sits on 150 acres once owned by the railroad. If it looks like a large grain bin, that’s because they brought a new grain bin onto their property and turned it into a home by 1989.

“This was something we talked about back and forth for seven years,” Kay said. “We finally decided to do it. Now, I feel confined in the majority of other conventional homes.”

The circular home is 45 feet in diameter, with a two-story combination great room and breakfast room that open into a kitchen featuring a butcher-block counter-top island in the center.

The kitchen is connected to an entry room with washer and dryer facilities and a deep freezer.

The main level includes a master bedroom with a large his-and-her artistic-marble shower containing two shower heads and no door. Next to two sinks in the bedroom is a walk-in closet, also without any door.

“Most women freak out about no door on the closet,” Kay said. “I guess they don’t want people looking in.”

The master bathroom connects to the entry to serve as a guest bathroom when needed.

A stairway leads to the upstairs open walkway and loft overlooking the great room. Consuming the other half of the house space-above the master-bedroom area and entry-the upstairs includes an open office, a guest bedroom and a bathroom with a shower and Jacuzzi tub.

Through the ceiling of the office, Allen can access an attic space.

“You can crawl through there, and there’s room at the top,” he said. “It’s not a whole lot.”

The area of the home is about 2,400 square feet, with 1,600 square feet on the bottom level.

“I don’t know if this is a house for a family,” Allen said. “It’s not large enough, and it wasn’t designed for a family.”

It was originally designed by the Liefers to suit the lifestyle of a couple with grown children.

Married since 1990, the Liefers have seven children from former marriages, 18 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Allen was originally involved in the grain-bin business and retired after health problems.

“Then I started the baler-twine and net-wrap business,” he said. “I retired and sold that to my son.”

Kay is on the board of the Peabody Main Street Association and owns and manages two businesses in that community.

“I own GMLS Industries, and we manufacture grain bins and aeration floors for grain bins and also buildings made out of steel,” Kay said.

About three years ago, she began her second business, Balancing Pathways.

“That’s in the natural-health field,” Kay said. “I have a machine that does bio feedback body scanning.”

Preserving their view from all directions, they eventually purchased about 850 more acres surrounding their homestead.

The original property includes a two-acre pond stocked with crappie, bass and blue gill. They decided to erect their home down in a valley next to that large pond.

Why build a home out of a new grain bin?

“Because we manufacture grain bins,” Kay said. “It was just that simple. We took the basic shape of the building and just worked with it. It looks round on the outside, and the round walls are still there behind the Sheetrock.”

Choosing to forego a basement, Allen leveled dirt and fashioned a ring of steel in the soil.

“This house is different in many ways,” he said.

“First, there’s about 3 to 4 inches of styrofoam on the ground and sand. In that sand is a whole bunch of plastic pipe, so this whole floor can be heated through the (great room) fireplace. That’s radiant heat. Then, we put the concrete over the top and built the grain bin.”

Carpenter Butch Ashcraft of Newton took the Liefers’ ideas and added his own personal touch to the project.

“He’s a very good carpenter,” Allen said. “He was looking for a little bit of a challenge. Not many people would even consider attempting to build something like this.”

Two avoid bending the Sheetrock into curves echoing the round grain bin, workers created large sections of flat walls that break up the curves slightly.

“There aren’t many 90-degree angles in this house,” Kay said about a design that includes a parabolic curve in the second-floor plan.

Before beginning their project, Allen and Kay amassed old barn wood from several sources, including wood from Kay’s great-grandfather’s homestead in Missouri. The supports and beams for the second floor came out of her great-grandfather’s ancestral barn that was falling down.

The loft wall visible from the great room is all old wood festooned with decorative items, such as a fox pelt, a beaver pelt, an old sliding barn door with original hinges and track and an antique hay-loft pulley.

The original heating plan was to rely on the large dry-stack stone fireplace and a heat-sink system to warm the home in the winter-from the floor up.

“This is all enclosed with water,” Allen said. “There’s about 300 gallons of water that surrounds our fireplace, and that’s why you see all the creosote build up on the inside here, because it never gets hot enough to burn clean.

“In cold weather, it’s beautiful. In the winter, we can walk around here with no shoes on. It stops cold drafts and everything else.”

During the fall and spring, the couple now relies on an all-electric ground-source heat pump and in the summer, an air-conditioning system.

“The walls have blown-in insulation,” Allen said. “The walls are from 6 inches, because of the curve, to 10 inches of insulation. There’s also about a foot thick of insulation on top.”

The floors on the first floor are either ceramic tile, carpeting or linoleum. The flooring on the second floor is planks of old hay-loft wood about 12 inches wide.

“When you start doing this type of project, you can’t imagine how much wood you have to have,” Allen said.

When completed, the original home cost the couple about $70,000.

“Now, it’s priceless” Allen said about the current value.

Ready to offer advice to others who want to take on extreme-home projects, Allen said the sky’s the limit.

“You can build a house out of any unit you want to, whether it’s an old barn, a shed, a log cabin or a grain bin,” he said.

“But you have to think it through, you have to have a little imagination, and you don’t give a damn what somebody thinks. Because when we started this, most people said they would have nothing to do with something like this. But now, after they see it and it’s finished, hot damn, pretty good deal.”

If she could redo the project, Kay said she would have an attached garage instead of bringing in a separate one-car unit that has no access from the inside.

“There are a few things I don’t like, but what I like far outweighs what I don’t like,” she said.

“I love the windows letting all the light come in with no curtains. From almost any area of the house, you can look out a window and see the outdoors. I like the outdoors, and I like nature, and I like the way we designed the house. We laid it out the way we really feel comfortable.”

If Allen could go back in time, he said he would probably use stucco on the exterior corrugated-steel walls instead of rough cedar.

“There’s a gap between the steel and the boards,” Allen said. “Little mice run in there, which I don’t like to have. And it’s hard to keep it attached. I think with stucco, you just smear that on, and it might even have been a little more aesthetically attractive.”

Would he tackle his extreme home over again if given the chance?

“Yes,” Allen said. “It’s out in the country, and it’s quiet. We’re out here with all the wildlife. The coyotes sing at night, and we see deer quail and geese. It’s the best place I’ve ever lived.”

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