Short-term rental tenants can soon stay where rubber meets the abode.
A Chicago couple won $100,000 from an Airbnb contest to build a rental home out of old tires on their property south of Grand Rapid, Mich., Crain’s reported. The home will be listed in the OMG! category on Airbnb’s website.
In June, the short-term rental company opened the OMG! Fund contest to fund such non-traditional houses. Each of the 100 winning projects will get up to $100,000 to put toward the wacky ideas.
A few years ago, Kim Sullivan and Clayton Brown found a pile of about 1,000 old car tires that had been dumped on the 23-acres where their second home sits when it had been previously used as a junkyard. The couple had to come up with a creative idea to discard the tires because their local government’s recycling facility only allowed homeowners to drop off four tires per year.
“We would be long gone by the time we recycled all those tires (four at a time),” Sullivan told the outlet. “And to pay to have a company come and get them out is astronomically expensive.”
When Sullivan, who already rents out their second home on Airbnb when they aren’t staying there, got an email from the company about its OMG! Fund contest, inspiration struck.
“It sounded like it was right up their alley, in terms of being a crazy, unique structure, and we had done enough research in the past to know that it was possible, that there are types of construction where other houses (have used) tires to build the walls,” Sullivan told the outlet. “We did a bunch of research just trying to figure out the details of it and how it could be done.”
The tire house will be a split-level home with an outdoor deck on each level. The 1,000-square-foot structure will have two bedrooms, a bathroom and utility room on the main floor and an open kitchen and living area up a spiral staircase. The house will have a heating and cooling system that will regulate the temperature year-round.
The couple doesn’t work in building or development, but they feel confident in taking on this DIY project.
“We really hope to inspire people to be creative in their own lives, in their own homes and where they live their lives,” Sullivan told the outlet. “Just really thinking about reusing things and recycling and taking something that might look like a piece of junk and being able to turn it into something that’s really cool and unique.”
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New York
“Stranger Things” home under contract and headed to Airbnb
— Victoria Pruitt