07/22/03’s illustrious band:

Airplanehome

Brought to you by www.airplanehome.com, via the newspaper column of my literary hero, James Lileks.

You know how some people will make a home out of an old warehouse, barn, schoolhouse, church, bus or train car? Airplanehome.com features a home made out of a retired Boeing 727. Yup, they just put that sucker up on blocks and voila! The friendly skies come down to earth. The reader who pointed out this site to Mr. Lileks, and therefore to the rest of us, said she’d like to buy a 747 home if she won the lottery, install a flight simulator in the cockpit, and let drunken friends “fly” the house.

This brings up the obvious question, of course: What would you turn into a home if you won the lottery, or just had a lot of time on your hands to do the remodeling? A couple of obvious (to me) choices:

• Bookstore. Restrooms and comfy chairs already in place. On-site café. Excellent built-in CD selection, and, of course, no shortage of reading material. Drawbacks: None that I can see.

  
  

• Airport. No need to catch a cab to the airport at some ungodly hour of the morning; just fire up the golf cart and hustle down the hall. Perfect for the frequent flier. Of course, finding parking even in your own garage would be a huge chore, you’d never know where your clothes were, and then there’s the matter of cabbies tossing cigarette butts all over the front walk.

  
  

• Furniture store. No problem finding seats for all your friends at the next big party, and you could sleep in a different, tastefully decorated bedroom every night. But watching those flat, cardboard TVs would get boring after a while -- if you could distinguish the programming from real TV.

  
  

• Home Depot. Everything you need to construct, plumb and wire that extra room -- or demolish it -- is right at your fingertips. No delivery hassles. On the other hand, none of the fixtures in the model bathrooms work.

  
  

• Playground habitrail. Kids do it in their imaginations all the time; why not make that elaborate redwood play structure your home for real? You could slide down the slide or the fireman’s pole and race across the street for dinner just like in the old days. It’d be a little breezy during the colder months, and you might have a bit of a splinter problem, but when you’re exploring the world in a pirate vessel/spaceship, who cares?

  
  

Where do you want to live, boys and girls?

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