Saturday, September 17, 2022
We are big fans of the Lord of the Rings movies, so when I saw a listing for a home in River Falls, WI, that was described as a Hobbit hole, I was intrigued. The pictures did not remind me of an actual Hobbit hole (as if there are actual Hobbit holes here and there), but it was a home covered with Earth, with a certain roundness to it.
We were in Eau Claire Saturday morning for Keith to rehearse with the chamber orchestra for the Saturday evening performance. That left all of the afternoon free. We are listening to Brian Baumgartner’s book, Welcome to Dunder Mifflin, so we welcomed more car time, and drove the hour to River Falls.
After we left the interstate highway, and we wound our way down rural roads, Keith commented that the pick up truck in front of us must be going to the open house, because why else would we be going on the same circuitous route. We thought that was pretty coincidental. That is until we turned onto the last road, and saw that the street was parked FULL of cars. I initially said there were 100 cars there, but I will say there were at least 50 cars parked, and cars were constantly flowing in and out of the neighborhood.
It was great fun to see such a different house – it appeared to have been created out of two quonset huts and sprayed with some kind of plastic foam stuff (definitely the technical term). There were big skylights in almost every room, and the ends of each quonset hut was a wall of windows and doors, so even though it was partially covered with dirt, it was very bright inside. There were lots of built ins and several fireplaces. A sign informed us that it kept a pretty constant year round temperature of 50degrees. It is listed for $315,000. I heard several people talking about making it an Airbnb, which would definitely be possible, but I don’t think it is quite unique enough or in good enough of a location to make it work. We decided we would not buy it.
How fun that you toured the unique house!