Home fashioned like a silo and farmhouse near Duluth lists for $840K

Just about everything in Shannon Smith’s home she built by hand.

Started in 2015, the project took Smith and her family of four about three years to complete. But it takes a lot of time to fashion a house to look like an old red barn and tin silo.

Today, the 5,461-square-foot house with five bedrooms and four bathrooms is for sale for $839,900 in Cloquet, Minn., about 20 miles west of Duluth. Smith designed every bit of the farmhouse, from a full wall of south-facing windows in the living room to a desk nook in the kitchen.

Smith tried to honor the farmhouse that was her childhood home. She installed silver barn tin accents along some of the stairs and in a bathroom shower. Above the bathtub in the primary bathroom, she installed a ceiling arched in the shape of a barrel. She constructed sliding barn doors inside the house from scratch.

The open plan allows for guests to spread out if needed but also keeps the house feeling cozy when it’s just her and her family inside, she said.

“When I’ve had get-togethers, we had no problem having 50 people in here,” she said. “And you wouldn’t have thought there were that many people in the house because of how big it is.”

Her favorite area is the kitchen, which has a massive island, ample counter space and two ovens. Looking to downsize, Smith listed the property hoping to find someone who will love the house as she has.

The house is on 9 acres that have big pine trees from her family’s old Christmas tree business. The land would be the perfect place for a hobby farm, she said, especially since it already comes with a chicken coop.

“I love the house because I built it how I wanted it,” she said. “There’s so many cute and special things about it, and we made it our own.”

The house is so unusual, an in-person tour is the only way to capture its beauty, said listing agent Tom Henderson.

“There was so much love and thought put into it at the time of build, from the way it was set on the property to capture the [south sunlight] exposure for winter, allowing the passive solar energy to fill the great room with light and thermal heat,” he said, “to the way the home was designed for possible generational livability.”

Perhaps the biggest labor of love: placing every penny glued to the house’s front entry floor, an 8,000-coin installation that took Smith many hours hunched over to individually glue each coin. With the help of her two children, Smith sorted the pennies so the shinier ones composed a star and more tarnished ones made a circle around it.

A coin from the Bahamas is in the very center, a stowaway found in one of the penny stacks purchased from the bank. Smith installed a copper-colored ceiling to match.

There are copper accents around the house, as well, like the copper sink in the kitchen.

“I wanted to put something unique in the house,” Smith said, “something different.”

Smith wasn’t the only Minnesotan inspired to incorporate 1 cent flooring. Last year, Sara and Justin Ilse went viral on social media after they posted a time-lapse of their 230-square-foot penny floor installation. The project in their southwest Minnesota house took 65,507 pennies.

Sara Ilse, who works with her husband at Ilse Interior Finishings, said penny floors are uncommon because of the incredible labor it takes to put together. It took several weeks to prep and sort all the pennies and then another six weeks to glue the coins down in a diamond-shaped pattern for her project.

It cost the couple about $1,850.07 in materials, including the $655.07 of pennies alone. But to hire someone else to install the floor would come with an “astronomical” price tag, Ilse said, costing thousands of dollars more.

“It seems to be more of a DIY thing,” she said. “Penny floors aren’t very common because it is one of those things people choose not to take on because of the time investment.”

Tom Henderson (218-722-2811, thender66@gmail.com) of Re/Max Results has the $839,900 listing.