Wednesday Feb. 25 2009 -- Curt Sleeper stands in front of his cave home in Festus that he hopes to keep if he can find someone to loan him the money. (J.B. Forbes/P-D)
By Stephen Deere
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
02/26/2009
FESTUS — Inside the cave, the phone won't stop ringing.
"The story has gone viral," Curt Sleeper said. "I've got friends in Paris calling me. ... It's in Australia and New Zealand."
He just turned down an interview with CNN. The network, he said, insisted on having a tour on Wednesday. But his wife had a baby last week, and he didn't want any visitors for a few days.
Sleeper, 46, expects five satellite trucks to pull up in his driveway today.
"CBS, ABC, FOX, the BBC — I've lost track of them," he said.
In the age of foreclosures, it's a novel approach to saving your home: create a massive media campaign.
Of course, it helps if your home is a 17,000-square-foot cave.
Sleeper found the cave on eBay roughly five years ago and immediately fell in love with it. Where others saw an old, worthless hole blasted into sandstone, he envisioned a home.
Some days he would sit in the cave with his friends, dreaming of the place he would build. He moved his wife and two kids into the cave and pitched tents, living there while he worked on the place.
It took four years to build the three-story structure and seal off the front with wood and panels of windows. He got his occupancy permit from the city of Festus last May.
Now the home is back on eBay. The starting bid is $300,000.
'IT'S HIS LIFE'
The cave is a far cry from the 800-square-foot bungalow in Sunset Hills where the Sleeper family used to live.
Sleeper wound up selling that place to a developer. He used the $83,000 he made on the sale to cover a 50 percent down payment on the sandstone mining cave. The rest was financed through the seller on a five-year balloon note. The note is due in May, and Sleeper needs a lender.
Sleeper's credit scores range from 650 to 710, he said, but because he is self-employed as a website designer and software consultant, he can't get a conventional loan for the cave home.
Banks "want me to be employed by some blue-chip company," he said.
It's also difficult to determine the worth of a home when there are no comparable sales. The Jefferson County Assessor's Office values the property at $160,600, but that doesn't include the improvements made to the cave. The site will be reassessed this year.
Rob Wren, an investor who sold the cave to Sleeper, said he has been talking to him about his financing for the past few months. He has never planned to foreclose on the home.
"It's his life," Wren said. "There is no way we are going to take this away from him."
Since he posted the eBay listing on Feb. 9, Sleeper has received more than 3,000 inquiries, and more than 50,000 people are watching the auction.
Sleeper says he's received a cash offer for $450,000, and on his website (caveland.ning.com), one person posted a $210,000 offer. Someone else offered to trade their home in Utah for the cave dwelling.
Sleeper, however, isn't interested in trading the home or selling it. He's hoping that a private lender will step forward and finance the home, and he says more than 1,000 people have offered some form of financing. Still, he wants to make sure he has a deal in hand before relaxing.
Even though the house is on eBay, Sleeper says he's not legally bound to sell it because he must preapprove all bidders.
"The move for sale was just to protect my equity," he said. "This was my savings. This was my 401(k)."
CONCERT HALL, RINK
The cave used to be a roller skating rink, and for a while, it served as a concert venue — Bob Seger and Ted Nugent played there.
It consists of three chambers divided by cinder-block walls. For four years, while the Sleepers built their home in the front chamber, they lived in heated tents. Deborah Sleeper did the family's laundry in buckets.
The home within the cave has running water and a sewer line. The temperature remains steady at 62 degrees, meaning Sleeper doesn't need heat or air conditioning. The entrance is sealed with more than two dozen windows, made from recycled sliding glass doors. He bought 300 of them at $3 each.
The kitchen features granite tile countertops and two ovens. Sleeper estimates he has put roughly $150,000 into the house.
The biggest surprise during construction were the bees.
In January 2005, he put the last window in the facade. The next day, the cave started to heat up. Thousands of bees that had been hibernating in crevices thought it was spring and swarmed the home.
"You let them die and sweep them up," he said. "It was all you could do."
On Wednesday, Sleeper sat in the home, reminiscing with a couple of friends.
A commercial-grade dehumidifier hummed nearby. Water from a spring that runs above the cave dripped from the 35-foot ceiling into a small pond filled with goldfish. A thin layer of sand covered the floors and some furniture. The sandstone cave sheds, Sleeper explained.
Wayne Robinson, a friend who helped with the home, said it was one of the most enjoyable projects he's worked on. "This was once in a lifetime," he said.
Sleeper knows many people are worse off than he is. His marketing campaign has put him in touch with them.
"Three-page stories, these people are sharing with me," he said. "Gut-wrenching stories. ... There are people in this country who are really hurting."
Later in the day, Sleeper got a phone call from another national media outlet. They were calling to cancel. They lost interest in the story.
"My 15 minutes of fame," Sleeper said, "is running out."
No comments:
Post a Comment