See silos that a North Carolina couple turned into a popular short-term rental
Guests from as far as London, England, have booked nights at Tom and Betty Flohr’s short-term rental just blocks from dining and entertainment in downtown Lincolnton.
So have countless others for the chance to vacation in a 27-foot-diameter, galvanized-metal silo.
Actually two 27-foot, galvanized metal silos, one pieced together in the other, with the space between holding electrical and other wiring, insulation, plumbing and gas lines.
The completely refurbished interior includes a full kitchen with island seating; a leather sofa; gas fireplace, half-bathroom and a queen-sized Murphy bed you pull out from the wall.
And that’s what you’ll find just on the first floor.
Upstairs?
A king-sized bed, full-sized washer and dryer, full bathroom with a tiled, walk-in shower and outside, a wraparound deck where guests can see deer, owls and hawks in the nearby woods.
Betty Flohr, who was skeptical of her husband’s project at first, is a longtime interior designer who added special touches throughout for a comfy, homey feel.
She owns Treasures on Main, a vintage home décor and consignment store in downtown Lincolnton, and is executive director of the Downtown Development Association of Lincolnton.
A 14-foot-diameter silo on the property that’s also included with each rental sports a five-person hot tub and an outdoor fire pit with seating.
Inspectors “had never seen anything like it.”
The silos are on a formerly wooded quarter acre at 516 N. Cedar St. Behind and up a wooded incline to the right of the silos is the couple’s 1927, Craftsman-style brick home featured on past tour of homes events.
A flat-bed tractor-trailer hauled the disassembled silos from Tennessee last year.
Silos sell for around $10,000, but that doesn’t include the far higher cost to disassemble, drive and reassemble them, and install everything that’s inside, Tom Flohr said. He declined to disclose the total cost of the project, but said the price far exceeded the couple’s original budget.
Reassembling the silos started with laying the concrete floor, including plumbing and drainage. Then the outside silo went up. “You have silo jacks, and you lift it up about three feet, and you put a ring around it,” then lift another three feet at a time, Tom Flohr said.
Crews used scaffolding to piece together the second silo in the first one. A crane lifted the second roof into place. Thirty-two inches of space separate the roofs, creating an attic-type enclosure that was quickly filled with sprayed insulation and wiring and other materials.
“I have no idea how tall it is,” Flohr said about the duel-silo silo.
As for the silo’s framing, “there really is no framing,” Flohr said. “You have to frame out the windows and doors, but there’s no framing.”
Lincoln County building inspectors didn’t know what to make of the silo, “because they’d never seen anything like it,” he said.
Inspectors initially approved the silo after it was finished last summer, but then told him they’d made a mistake and couldn’t pass the silo’s framing, he said. “Even though there is no framing inspection, because, you know, there is no frame,” Flohr said.
The inspector was concerned about the silo’s wind rating, he said. State statute says homes in the Lincolnton area must withstand winds up to 105 mph.
“Luckily, a friend of ours who was an architect and engineer in town wrote the North Carolina wind statute,” Flohr said. “So he came over here and rated this building 107. He said it will be the last building standing in town. He said it would stand 160-170 mph winds.”
The county granted the occupancy permit.
“It’s strong,” Flohr said. “It’s round. There’s no wind, nothing to catch it, but they made us jump through hoops on everything. There’s absolutely no reason to have rough-cut 8-by-8s holding up the deck. They just made us do it. They made us overkill everything.”
Trucking in two silos is not an everyday thing, especially on a quiet street in a quiet, largely rural town of about 12,600 people – worlds away from Charlotte, 38 miles to the southeast.
“I don’t say we’re weird, but we are,” Betty Flohr said with a smile. “We like different. We’re not just the same old, same old. This was something that neighbors, literally, the speculation was, ‘what’s this going to be?’”
A two-day open house in October drew about 400 people and answered their questions, the couple said.
The silo’s occupancy rate hovers around 60%, decent for just starting out, Tom Flohr said. The silo rents for up to $250 a night on weekends.
Many guests discovered the silo on Airbnb and other such sites, but an increasing number are finding it on the silo’s website, Tom Flohr said.
People are attracted to the novelty of spending a night or two in a silo, and to Lincolnton’s setting and its dining and entertainment options, Betty Flohr said.
“This has been a labor of love for us,” she said, “and we’ve had really, really good response from everybody that we’ve had stay here.”