In late fall 2015, I needed to find a shop to build counter tops and work on other projects.
We were offered this vacant building located just behind my house. It used to be the offices of the Cargill plant, which have been abandoned since around 1984.
The eight-acre complex is eerie, like something from Chernobyl or an apocalypse-themed movie.
Full of asbestos and graffiti, it wasn't very inviting at all. But over the span of a month, we replaced broken windows, built and installed doors where there previously were none at all, tore out a concrete block wall to open the space, added insulation, wired the building with electricity, built storage, workbenches, and in general transformed it into a functioning shop.
Abandoned buildings fascinate me.
I feel sadness and cold emptiness when I walk though them. I love to see structures reclaimed from the elements, and warmth and light brought back inside them. (This will become more evident in a future post about an abandoned calendar factory in my home town.)
When viewed on a warm, sunny day, these structures don't seem as creepy and hostile.
There are many good buildings still standing that could provide decades of good use, if the right investors and visionaries come along and save them!
Reading all that you accomplished in one month makes me tired and thirsty... I better sit down for a while. Amazing transformation.
Haha thanks! It was a lot of work, but the building has an entirely new feel to it. Instead of empty, cold, and forlorn, it is bright, warm, and productive.
That's how you do it. Well done!
P.S.,
It did look pretty creepy...
Thanks! It is still creepy there when I leave the shop after dark. Lots of empty doorways and windows in that building complex. Sometimes I imagine an albino humanoid with glowing eyes peering out at me.
Amazing. That is the stuff we need to see more of. Thanks for sharing that.
I'm glad you appreciate it! Recycling and re-purposing goes far beyond small items and materials. We can re-purpose old buildings to suit our needs and conserve a lot of resources.
Nice work! There are so many buildings that could be reclaimed. How hard was it do deal with the asbestos?
The next town over from where I grew up had a 3-story brick school building from 1906. The town had long since dwindled to just a few families. But a man and his wife lived in the school and raised chinchillas in the whole place. I'm sure that they are dead and gone by now - and who uses chinchillas these days for anything, anyway? But it was an amazing reuse of an abandoned building. Who knows what those Cargill grain silos will turn into some day!
I'm not sure we removed the asbestos in the most safe manner, but we took some precautions. The city has the grain silos on their radar... they want them torn down soon. What is a chinchilla?
A chinchilla is a little rodent, bigger than a hamster, smaller than a guinea pig. They have super-soft fur. They used to be raised to make fur coats, gloves, linings in coats, and more. They would be passed off as "Mink", but were a lot cheaper. In the backs of old hunting and fishing magazines, there used to be ads to "Get rich! Raise chinchillas!" I was lucky to experience that schoolhouse chinchilla ranch. It was definitely something tied to a specific point in time, I think.