Bin Maker Right At Home In Grain Bin House

Bin Maker Right At Home In Grain Bin House BUILDINGS Houses 26-1-31 When Allen and Kay Liefer, Walton, Kansas, decided to build a house, it seemed natural to make it out of a grain bin. Allen started selling grain bins when he was 25 years old. Ten years later, he began manufacturing them. "We thought about building a house for quite awhile before we actually began," he says. The Liefers used a 45-ft. diameter bin with 16-ft. sidewalls as the frame for their house. In addition to the grain bin, they incorporated parts of a barn that they salvaged from Kay's grandparents' farm in Missouri, more than 200 miles away. The barn had been built by her great-grandfather from lumber he sawed himself. Liefer hired a local builder who saw building a house in the round as a real challenge. While he used regular galvanized steel on the sides of the bin house, Liefer purchased steel with a baked-on tan finish for the roof. "I thought it would make it look more like a house," he says. "We sided the exterior of the bin with vertical cedar siding, so you can't tell it's a grain bin when you look at it, even though it has round walls and a grain bin roof," he says. Rather than putting wallboard directly onto the round walls, they framed in 2 by 6 walls, making a 12-sided polygon. "By making the walls short and straight, it doesn't have the feel of being inside a round bin," Liefer says. "It meant, though, that the interior wall surface is about 10 in. away from the bin wall at the center of each section. "We filled the space between the wallboard and the bin wall with insulation, so it's very well insulated," he says. The house has a front and back door, with a covered porch that goes 3/4 of the way around the circle. Inside the back door, there's a laundry/mudroom area. As you progress around to the left, there's a kitchen and then a dining area, which opens into a family room with a fireplace. The fireplace is at the center of the bin, with the chimney extending straight up and out through the fill opening at the center of the bin roof. The front door opens out of the family/living room area. On around the outside wall is situated the master bedroom and first floor bath. The dining room and family room area has a vaulted ceiling. The bin house also has half of a second story with a balcony looking over the lower level. Beams taken from the barn support the balcony, which is open along the inside and looks out over the dining room and family rooms. There's an office, a guest bedroom and bath, and storage space in the upper level. "We used boards from the old haymow floor to make the floor on the second story," he says. The living room fireplace is more than decorative. It has a water jacket that's connected to more than 3,000 ft. of tubing that runs through a foot of sand under the concrete slab floor of the bin. "The water circulating under the floor warms it and the heat rises, giving us uniform heating throughout the house," he says. Liefer says few people believe their house is actually a grain bin. In total, he figures the completed house cost about $65,000 in 1988. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Allen and Kay Liefer, 5428 N. Grace Hill Road, Walton, Kansas 6715

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