6 Strange Investments People Turned Into Homes

America’s real estate industry has suffered a number of ups and downs in the 2020s, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, high interest rates, rising cost of living and high mortgage prices. Additionally, with the recent slew of tariffs coming from the White House, the costs of home construction are expected to increase, thereby raising the prices of new homes. If ever there was a perfect time to come up with creative solutions to homebuilding, it might be now.

As such, GOBankingRates has gathered some of the strangest homes in the world, in which architects, engineers and buyers invested in unusual buildings and purchases to refashion them into new homes, utilizing everything from airplanes to newspapers (yes, newspapers).

Also see five types of homes you should avoid in 2025.

Modern airplanes are incredibly strong and complex structures designed to survive highly pressurized environments and damaging weather and essentially are meant to take a beating from the elements and protect the people within. Thus, Bruce Campbell of Hillsboro, Oregon, felt like a retired Boeing 727-200 would make the perfect (and safest) home to invest in.

Paying $100,000 for it 1999, Campbell refurbished it with a shower, washing machine and other amenities, per USA Today.

He said it simply makes sense to use such an advanced piece of hardware as a home: “To me it’s wholly irrational to destroy the finest home-sized structures available on this planet and then turn around and build homes out of materials which are fundamentally little more than assemblies of sticks rendered with ancient and inferior design and fabrication methods.”

Want to own a massive, multi-level beautiful brick home for less than $200,000? Consider buying an 111-year-old schoolhouse in Indiana, as Stacie and Sean Grissom did in 2021, per CNBC. Be prepared, though, for a lot of remodeling — it took the Grissoms three years to make the spacious schoolhouse into an incredibly cozy (and safe) home, one that costs them about $4,200 per year in property taxes.

In Barcelona, the architects Lluís Corbella and Marc Mazeres redesigned an entire dairy as a loft — adding a suspended walkway and glass walls to keep the structure spacious and roomy, while keeping the dairy’s original facades, roof and overall structure, per Weetas.

As a means to show how much useful material society discards daily, engineer Elis Stenman began building a house in 1922 out of something people throw away every day: newspapers. Around the home’s wooden frame, Stenman constructed the house out of rolled and varnished newspapers, finishing the home in 1924.

According to Listverse, the paper serves as excellent insulation, and the hardened varnish keeps the home safe and structurally sound.

Looking for a two-bedroom, two-story home with a mezzanine, modern kitchen, three-car garage, vaulted ceiling and a veranda in New York? According to Love Property, as long as you’re fine with living inside a converted train station, you’re in luck. Constructed in the mid-20^th century, the former train station is now a cozy, open-floor plan. Once a stop for the Black Diamond Express, it’s now a place you can hang your hat at the end of the day.

The Waterville Bank opened in 1911 and served as a financial institution for 70 years, closing in 1981. It then served for a time as an art studio, before being converted into a 2,758-square-foot home. Very little has changed in well over 100 years — the building still has its tall commercial door frames and windows, as well as vaulted ceilings, per Love Property. Yet it also now comes with two bedrooms and a kitchen for modern living, making it a unique mix of old and new (and yes, the original vault is still included).

Editor’s note: Photos are for representational purposes only and do not reflect the exact structures mentioned in this piece.