If you came to visit Bruce Campbell, don't expect to walk up to his front door and ring a bell. The entrance to Campbell's home is up a flight of stairs, across a wing, and up another flight of stairs to the door of a 727 aircraft.
Campbell lives in a retired jetliner nestled in the beautiful pine forests of the Pacific Northwest. It has all the comforts of home: a large living room, a shower, two bathrooms and a futon to sleep on.
"Jetliners retire at the rate of about 3 per day," Campbell told Great Big Story. "For the most part, I think, we shred them. Then we spin around 180 degrees and make a home after having just shredded an aerospace class home-sized structure."
Aside from simply being a way to upcycle on a very large scale though, the airplane makes a sturdy home. "It's a sealed pressure canister, it's incredibly strong. It will last practically forever."
Campbell got the idea nearly twenty years ago, after reading about a retired hairdresser in Mississippi who did the same thing. He paid $100,000 for the aircraft in 1999, and invested over $120,000 into it. The money covered the cost to move the plane to his 10 acre plot of land in Oregon and retrofitting it into a home.
Campbell is a retired electrical engineer who splits half his time between Oregon and Japan, and is currently trying to set up another airplane home in Miyazaki, Japan, this time with a 747.
