6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In

A house is not always a home, but a broken down airliner is sometimes.
6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In

Let's face it, houses are boring and predictable. Ask a child what a house looks like, and they'll draw you the same square shape with a triangle on top that everyone thinks about when they hear the word "house." But there are some homes out there that break the mold and totally redefine what you're willing to believe people intentionally use to hang their proverbial hats. For example ...

The Repurposed Airliner

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Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images

For anyone who has ever had to endure a long-haul flight, one day spent on an aircraft is about 23 hours too many. But then there are some people who exist in a mirror universe and just can't get enough of being trapped in cramped quarters with nowhere else to go. That's why a man in Oregon decided to convert a Boeing 727 into a home.

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Airplanehome.com

The thing is, you could never, ever turn on your cellphone for some arbitrary reason.

Bruce Campbell (no, not that one) had a lot of unused land and apparently wanted to feel like he was sitting in the aftermath of a wilderness crash landing all the time. So, he purchased an old passenger airliner for the bargain price of $100,000 and went to work turning it into a house.

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

If this plane's a-rockin' ... let me know because it means I have to adjust the landing gear.

While a hundred grand may not seem too steep for a whole plane, Campbell's expenses quickly piled up as he had to spend an additional $60,000 or so to move it from the airport to a staging site and then to his property. Add another $21,600 necessary for removing the wings and tail, and his initial expenditure had almost doubled.

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Via Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

And then there's that sweet living room decor.

Still, it's a bargain if your goal is to spend the rest of your life inside an aluminium metal tube. And think of all the fun you can have, sitting in the cockpit and making engine noises, or pretending you and your friends crash landed on an island and now you have to decide who to eat.

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Via Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

Note: No roommates. At least not now.

The Transparent House

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Comstock/Comstock/Getty Images

So you've just taken a refreshing shower and you hop out to grab your favorite towel. As soon as you step out, however, you're startled to discover that a group of a dozen Japanese businessmen are staring at your junk. Such is the tribulation of living in the NA house, aka Japan's transparent house.

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Design-milk.com

Not pictured: stones.

Designed by Sou Fujimoto architects, instead of being separated into different rooms like the lame-ass houses we all live in, the whole thing is one open environment; with different living spaces situated on different platforms. And all of the walls are glass.

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Design-milk.com

And then, the hail storm came ...

But hey, at least it lets in a ton of natural sunlight, so your shame will be clearly visible to anyone passing by.

While the house looks great and will probably earn you a bunch of pretentious, artsy friends, it is nigh impossible to comfortably masturbate in, and that brings the actual value way down. The family that lives there is of a similar mind, and they've actually put up some curtains so the hobos would stop staring at them while they slept.

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Design-milk.com

So maybe it wasn't their own masturbation concerns, but the strokes of homeless people gazing in.

The Abandoned Star Wars Set

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Creatas/Creatas/Getty Images

We've mentioned before that the set remnants of Tatooine from The Phantom Menace are still totally just hanging around in the Tunisian desert, after the dejected filmmakers just washed their hands of the place. But the locals haven't let it go to waste -- there are totally a bunch of people now living in Anakin's former village.

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Looklex.com

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Via Rocketnews24.com

These are not the squatters you're looking for.

Keep in mind, several of the 15 or 20 structures are just facades that were built on the cheap, mostly out of cardboard and mud ...

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Looklex.com

... but apparently it's really hot in the middle of the Sahara. So even a shelter that turns out to be kinda lame and disappointing can still be prime real estate for some quality squatting. While these places might look barely habitable at first, a look inside proves that certain folks are doing fine, just fine. Some even are in for a longer haul, setting up furniture and bringing their pet birds.

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Looklex.com

Great. Now we have that Cantina band song stuck in our heads.

Tourists still descend on the abandoned film set, where they're often disheartened to find that the village is populated not by whimsical alien approximations of racial stereotypes, but by regular folk down on their luck who are making the best of their brief brush with Hollywood. At least Episode One did some good in the world.

The House in a Cemetery

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Photodisc/Photodisc/Getty Images

When Jayne Stead and Mike Blatchford of Southampton England stumbled upon a quaint 19th century building, they just knew they had to move in and make the place their very own. So what if it's in the middle of a cemetery?

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Solent News and Photo Agency

"Where are you kids going with that shovel?!"

And we don't mean it's "next door to a cemetery" or "there is a cemetery in their yard." We mean the place where the couple and their kids sleep used to be a mortuary and graveyard keeper's lodge. But despite the 100 percent chance of a nasty haunting, Stead and Blatchford decided it was the perfect place to raise a family, if only to remind the children that they're all going to be dead one day.

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Solent News and Photo Agency

The upside is that the procession won't take long.

Of course, the conversion required a little improvisation, but it was nothing that Blatchford, a builder by trade, couldn't tackle once he set his mind to it. So first they fixed up the old mortuary (you know, where the corpses were laid out) into a dining room ...

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Solent News and Photo Agency

... and made the Victorian-era toilets into the kitchen.

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Via Solent News and Photo Agency

Ugh, that's ... actually ... really, really nice-looking.

All told, the family spent upwards of 100,000 pounds over the course of a year on the property to make it into a home that looks nothing like the kind of Addams Family-style gothic hovel you would expect a converted graveyard house to look like. Apparently, the only real pain in the ass is cleaning the ceilings of a living room that are as high as a church, because it used to be one.

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Via Solent News and Photo Agency

Sometimes, they mock God, just for the fun of it.

While local kids tend to be too chicken shit to trick-or-treat there, Stead and Blatchford will get into the spirit and throw what have to be at least sorta interesting Halloween parties. The upside is that, since all their neighbors are subterranean piles of dust, they can be pretty much as loud as they want.

The House Made of Old Newspaper

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Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.com

In 1922, engineer Elis F. Stenman decided he and the missus needed a summer getaway. Not one to half-ass anything, he decided to do it himself. And because his day job at the time was to design machines that made paper clips, it probably meant he was surrounded by ass tons of paper every day. So he did the only reasonable thing and built a house out of it, because, man, it would just go to waste otherwise.

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Via Virtualtourist.com

Dude, there are stones right freakin' there!

Of course, the frame of the house is wood (or it would have collapsed decades ago), but everything else is made of newspaper. Pressed together with a homemade glue (a mixture of water, flour, and apple peels), the material that started out as mere insulation became 1-inch thick panels that made up the walls of the house. That whole mess got a heavy coat of varnish to seal out moisture, and a lot of it is just as readable today, almost a century later.

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"Breaking: Scientists Find Newspaper to Be Strongest Substance on Earth!"

And we do mean everything. The tables, chairs, curtains, mantle, and even a piano are all built out of rolled-up wads of newspaper. There's a clock covered in papers from each of the states (except Alaska and Hawaii, because it was the '20s when the USA had only 48 states) and a bookcase made of foreign presses.

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Via Wikimedia Commons

If it needs tuned, you have to open the top to the sports section.

They even have a desk made from the reports of Charles Lindbergh's bullshit accomplishment.

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Via Tripadvisor.com

A toilet would have been more appropriate, but hindsight is 20/20.

Today the place is taken care of by Stenman's grandniece and open to the public, if you're willing to shell out a buck-fifty to check out the joint. Shit, you pay more for a newspaper that isn't also a house.

The House in an Abandoned Missile Silo

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Photos.com

Few of us reminisce fondly of the years when our world came on the brink of nuclear annihilation once every minute. But then there's one couple who prefer to immortalize those troubled times by making their home in a former nuclear missile silo. Subterra Castle, the now defunct former missile base, stands in the shadow of its former Cold War glory.

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Via Missilebases.com

Wait, didn't Bugs Bunny once pilot one of those things?

It once housed an E intercontinental missile complete with a 4-megaton warhead that had Stalin's name on it; now people sleep and poop inside of it. So what kind of enterprising individuals dare live in a place like that? Reclusive celebrity billionaires? Megalomaniac super villains?

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Subterracastle.com

Nope. Meet Edward and Diana Peden, a very nice, hippie-ish couple who have been living here since 1994.

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Via Roadside America and Subterra Castle

And no, it's not a sitcom ... though it very well could be.

They've renovated the place and now offer educational tours. They chose this unconventional residence due to several factors: bragging rights, buyer eccentricity, and lastly, because they needed a secluded place to torture a recently kidnapped James Bond.

6 Insane Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In
Via Subterracastle.com

Or at the very least, stave off the White Walkers.

Another reason might be that the property covers 34 acres and is located among the world-famous verdant hills and meadows of Kansas. Though there's a load of property above ground, and all the living spaces are below -- the control rooms and tunnels have been turned into cozy living compartments. The mustache-seeking Stalin-busting ordinance once held here has now been swapped for moderately priced furnishings and the scent of patchouli. This very residence now symbolizes a bright future where we can hopefully trade world-destroying arsenals for peace and friendship.

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Via Jim Merithew / Wired.com

Nah, fuck that. Launch that bitch. You know they have one in there.

Richie Ryan has also been known to work the wood. See his things. Failing that he whines a lot. Follow him on Twitter.

Related Reading: For even crazier houses that people actually live in, click here. Try not to smile after seeing the breast houses of Mexico. If you're up for the true stories behind the craziest houses on earth, click that link and behold the scrap wood skyscraper. Also, there's a mobile house named the Wothahellizthat.

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