Inside A Plain And Simple Amish “Shop” Home (23 Photos)
This is a pure Amish shop home if I ever saw one. From the outside it is very functional looking – unpainted metal siding. Inside there is a plain but (relatively) cozy Amish home.
We are looking at an Amish community in Coldwater, Michigan, and obviously going by the season, these photos were taken at least half a year ago. This appears to be one of several plain Swiss Amish communities in the region. But what’s the point of a “shop” home and why do Amish build them?
The point of a shop home: build an inexpensive shop building to first live in, and later build a proper home, with the original building becoming a workshop or other non-living space structure. We’ve seen them here several times before, including this 2-in-1 shop home and woodworking business in Kentucky, or this Amish shop home in Missouri with its own storm shelter.
But compared to those shop homes, this Michigan home is on the even plainer side of things. That is evident from the outside, with the “raw” metal siding. Others we’ve seen are in shades of red, brown, tan, and white.
Here’s the home description:
Welcome to this 30×70 home with shop on a 1.63 acre lot. This home features two bedrooms and a large open floor concept. There is a well and septic from prior home. Family gets water from the current well.
The shop has a large attic for storage. A portion of the property in fenced in. As most Amish houses, it has no electricity or plumbing. Call today for your own viewing!
Kitchen
Spacious-feeling kitchen-entry area. The floor appears to be painted concrete. Not the coziest floor covering, but that would make sense for a shop home.
Blue oilcloth on the kitchen table.
A kitchen-table length church-style bench is another common thing you see in Amish homes of all sorts. The bench is an easy way to seat the toddler-to-grade school-sized children.
Walk-in pantry. Large cooler probably used for extra cooling as this group wouldn’t be using propane refrigerators, etc.
Living Area
Recliner (or maybe just an especially lean-y chair) that looks like it’d be easy to nod off in.
Check out the board game collection. I see Life, Dominos (I think)…and that’s about all I can make out here.
Crib, rocker and small desk/table with what looks like a Bible among other books.
Bedrooms
There are just two of them. This photo provides an interesting contrast. Despite being a plain group (note the flypaper), you’ve also got a small bedroom fan here, presumably battery-operated.
Another angle of the same bedroom.
The second of two bedrooms. Not sure how it got so blue. This is not (yet) a large family by Amish standards. But they might be headed in that direction, perhaps that is the reason for the home sale.
While not a separate bedroom, there is a third bed in the main room.
Bathroom?
As for the bathroom, here you go:
This is a group which doesn’t use indoor plumbing, so it’s the outhouse option.
Garage part of house
Here is the other end of the structure, which I’m calling a “garage” for lack of a better word. Open top buggy characteristic of Swiss Amish churches. The wringer washer, baby seat, small antlers, and kayak type boat are among the things that I notice here.
And this is the attic/crawlspace area.
Price
What’s the price? For an Amish home, it’s a small lot and small square footage (and, it’s not even a proper home building). So, you already know it’s not going to be a million dollars.
Here is a shot of the land that comes with the property.
And a basketball hoop.
This home is currently for sale at $125,000, listed by Blake Jenkins of Century 21.
Dolls
I was surprised to see faces on the dolls. I thought that the Amish only had faceless dolls. But I suppose it’s like a lotta things, but it’s different in each group, according to what their ordam( don’t know how to spell)
is
I noticed that too Becky and was very surprised!
Housing
People living in large cities and paying huge rents or those folks that will never be able to buy a house because of huge prices (average price of house in U.S. is around $350.000) need to go to some of these rural areas to purchase instead of throughing away $1.600 dollars or so a month on rent. Buy something like this and own your own home and build equity for yourself instead of paying someone else’s mortgage for them. You can work for less money per hour in a rural area because your house payment will be cheap. Gary
Give it about five years and that place (will zero changes) will be sold for $350K or more too.
Children at window
In the third photo down, there are two children visible outside the window. The girl has a black cap and blue dress and is looking in, perhaps curious about the person taking photographs of their home! In the pantry, I wondered if I could see two white caps on the back shelf, unless they are food covers, however they do seem to have ribbons hanging down. Interesting to look inside a plainer, Swiss Amish shop house.