As you may know, I live on a historic farmstead in Oregon. It was once a big hay farm, and what makes it historic is the amount of original structures that have survived intact on the remaining 5 acres. Most of them were built by a family of German immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Germans, I’m told, like to lay farms out around a central courtyard; so on one side of my house is a machine shop, on the other side is a chicken coop, and directly in front of my house - so close that it’s all I see out my kitchen window - is a massive gambrel-roofed barn. There’s also an old nut drying house - that’s where I work - and a water tower.
Long ago the water tower had a windmill on it. The windmill drew water up from a well into a big redwood tank at the top, and then gravity fed the water down into the house for plumbing. It was built at the end of the 19th century and made obsolete a few decades later by the advent of indoor plumbing. These days the windmill is gone but the water tank is still up there.
The water tower is a neat old historical building, vacant and without purpose for a century, home to mice and squirrels, and currently worse-for-wear. There's some water damage and a lot of rot and we’re embarking on a project with a carpenter to address it, basically by replacing windows and boards and doing some work to make sure it’s stable and sound.
This is going to cost a lot of money - about twice what we were expecting - but we intend to tackle it anyway. Honestly, there isn’t really an alternative. Eventually we'll have to fix the water tower or else demolish it. It would also be expensive to demolish it, and it would be so much more sad to demolish it. We’re committed to keeping it standing.
That said, it feels crazy to spend so much money on a building that nobody uses. I plan to turn the bottom floor into a gardening shed, but it has four floors. The view from the third floor window is really nice. I think the top floor would be sublime.
Over the past decade we’ve entertained and then abandoned all kinds of fantasies about this building. They are mostly unaffordable or just out-of-the-question. But now that we know we have to spend some money to fix it up, we’re fantasizing again.
What would you do with it? How would you do it?
I’m curious. Tell me your practical ideas. Tell me your cockamamie ideas. Tell me your starry-eyed utopian ideas. No water tower idea too boring or too absurd.
Thank you, everyone! I too like the idea of turning it into an apartment and offering it as a residency but that's just too expensive. I expect we'll fix the rotten parts and I'll have a nice potting shed on the ground floor to replace my decrepit old greenhouse that we demolished a couple of weeks ago. But we will keep daydreaming about it and maybe some greater purpose will rise to the surface. It was fun to hear from you all. I'll keep you posted.
Can it be fixed up enough for someone to live there? A teenager? A friend between jobs? An artist residency?