A WOMAN with a passion for restoring old buildings has told how she's turned a run-down lighthouse into a home.
Sheila Consaul bought the lighthouse in 2011 and spent $300,000 renovating the inside of it.
The lighthouse, first lit in 1925, has been turned into a three-bedroom and three-bathroom home.
Consaul told CNBC that she lives inside the Fairport Harbor West Breakwater Lighthouse, located in Ohio, between May and October.
She said the building didn’t have certain features when she snapped it up for $71,000, per Insider.
It had no electricity connected and she had to invest in plumbing systems.
Consaul told Insider: “So when I got it, it was in really bad shape.”
She recalled how the plaster on walls was falling off and it was in desperate need of painting.
She uses a generator to get power and uses renewable energy sources.
While Consaul has been able to transform the inside of the lighthouse, it isn’t accessible by road.
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She has to leave her car in a parking lot that’s around a half-mile walk from the lighthouse.
She said: “Everything you can imagine has to be carried out, back and forth. It’s a 40-minute walk each way.”
Consaul also revealed she collects rainwater from the roof as she can’t take water from the lake, and she has composting toilets.
The homeowner has revealed she relied on barges, which can cost around $2,500 a day, to ship larger items to the lighthouse.
She said: “When it came to the really big stuff, like appliances, granite countertops, water treatment equipment, that all had to come by barge.”
Consaul told CNBC how much she enjoys preserving historic buildings.
She said: “I thought a lighthouse would be a great opportunity to combine a summer home and my love of historic preservation.”
Consaul has spent more than a decade renovating it and described the process as “long and arduous.”
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