Zillow has come to be known as the place where unusual house listings go viral on the internet. Social media accounts like Zillowtastrophes take the oddest of house listings and point out everything about them that is unique and unusual. Sometimes these listings fall into obscurity, and some become famous for reasons other than their square footage.
A Listing Out of California
One listing on Zillow out of Placerville, California, made its way to the wider internet via Zillowtastrophes. It’s a three bedroom, four bath home on an 18 acre property, listed for just over one million dollars. For California and that property size, that’s a fairly cheap price, which would have been enough to draw attention of prospective buyers.
The details of the interior take this listing from intriguing to bizarre, though. Jessica More, the owner of the Zillowtastrophes account, posted about this home and did a walk through of it on her Tiktok in a video that has racked up over 25 million views since it was posted.
Storage, Storage, and More Storage
The house is in a fairly remote location, and from the outside looks relatively ordinary. Once you get to the interior, though, the unusual features of his home become apparent. Because in this home, nearly every room has far more storage than any man, woman, or child could ever possibly fill.
The storage seemed standard at first, if a little excessive. The house tour opens on a spacious living room with a powder room off to the side, and a kitchen with dozens and dozens of cabinets. In her commentary, Jessica says that she thinks that you could feed dozens, if not hundreds of people with the amount of storage in the kitchen.
A Library, Maybe?
Downstairs, there’s a spacious bedroom with a large closet, and beyond that, things start to get odd. Another set of stairs leads Jessica and the viewers to another large room, this one painted mostly white, with dozens and dozens of bookshelves built into the walls.
The room looks like it could have been a library or some other sort of similar space at one point, but that doesn’t change the fact that the design of the house is utterly baffling. Especially when the next thing that is shown in the listing and the video is another hallway beyond with even more storage, with locked cabinets on one side and glass display cases on the other.
“The Room”
The jewel of the listing, and the most baffling piece of the property of all, though, is a room beyond the ones that have already been shown. In the listing, it is called “The Room,” and in Jessica’s video, it’s the most fascinating piece of all.
“The Room” is a 2000 square foot space that has floor-to-ceiling built in shelves on both walls, enveloping the space with dozens of places to store items. In her video, Jessica is utterly baffled by this, stating that nobody could possibly need this much storage and wondering what it was possibly used for.
Input from the Peanut Gallery
The comments on the video are equally confused. Some people theorized that the house must have belonged to a prepper type individual, used as a bug-out spot for when the earth ultimately ends. Others looked at the amount of storage and saw someone who was mentally unwell, and needed all the space for a hobby such as shopping or even hoarding.
One comment even went so far to joke that the house would be the perfect gathering location for a cult. The listing details state that the property is 4400 square feet, with the attached 2400 square foot storage room and a separate, 1100 square foot apartment above the garage. Cult or no, the house definitely has plenty of space for far more than one person, or even one family.
Not a Prepper, Just a Shopper
The truth of the house’s unusual design turns out to be much simpler than any of that, though. An insider revealed that the storage in the home was due to the previous owner’s shopping addiction, and had been built specifically for her needs and desires.
“The Room” portion of the estate hadn’t been filled up entirely when the owner sadly passed away, but it had been built in anticipation of her needs, given her proclivity for shopping. When Jeanne Cleary passed away, her massive collection included more than 25,000 books, and thousands of DVD’s and VHS tapes.
The Items Were Donated to Those Who Needed Them
For those who balk at that amount of items, rest assured: they didn’t go to waste. Shortly after Ms. Cleary passed away, the surrounding area was hit by the Grizzly fires, and several people lost homes. Many of Ms. Cleary’s items were in brand-new condition and they were able to be donated to families in need after the fires.
The house was sold in November of 2022 by Ms. Cleary’s children, and while it didn’t fetch the one million price listing, it still sold for a respectable $750,000. For the amount of property and storage, it’s a steal of a price for a ridiculously unique listing in the mountains of California.
More Strange Listings Ahead
Unusual listings on Zillow are nothing new, and accounts like Zillowtastrophes only draw attention to the strange and different in our world. It’s fun to watch and entertaining to think about, and allows a few minutes away from our lives to consider how other people live theirs.
Ms. Cleary’s listing is definitely one for the books, and one that will live in our minds for a good long while. Hopefully the new owners appreciate all the bizarrely unique features of the Cleary home, and in the meantime, we have Tiktok to keep us appraised of new and fascinating developments in the world of real estate.
