So living in a lighthouse is not like living in a regular house.
First of all, the access, you can't drive up to it.
You have to park about a half a mile away and you have to carry your supplies out.
So food, water, gas for the generator, all gets carried out.
But once you're here, it's like no other experience.
Welcome to Fairport Harbor West Lighthouse in Fairport Harbor, Ohio.
Come on inside.
My name is Sheila Consaul.
I'm 65 years old.
I bought an abandoned lighthouse from the federal government for $71,000.
It's in Fairport Harbor, Ohio, right on Lake Erie.
When I'm not at the lighthouse, I live outside of Washington, D.C., in Ashburn, Virginia.
I was looking for a summer home someplace that was a little cooler in the summer.
I heard about the government auctioning off lighthouses.
I've done some historic preservation work in the past, renovated a historic home and thought a lighthouse
would be a great opportunity to combine both a summer home and my love of historic
preservation.
All the windows were broken, plaster was falling off the walls.
There was so much to do.
It needed painting desperately.
I used a home equity loan to pay for the lighthouse purchase and some of the initial renovations.
That was about $200,000, but it's since been paid off and now I just pay as I go.
The renovation process has been long and arduous.
Even though I'm located in a state park, you have to walk a half a mile from the parking lot
through a sandy beach, and sometimes the water makes it so that you have to get up on the breakwall
and come in that way.
For large items, all of that had to come by boat.
We would bring a barge up to the side of the lighthouse.
The barge has a crane.
The crane lifts some of the large items over the fence onto the platform, and then they're brought in to the
lighthouse. The biggest challenge I've had with the renovation has been utilities.
The lighthouse is completely off the grid, so I had to completely renovate all of the electrical
and rewire the lighthouse.
When I need electricity, I flip on my generator, but I try and conserve it because it runs on
gasoline and I have to carry gasoline out here.
It's my least favorite thing to carry out here.
So I probably spend a few hundred dollars a summer on gasoline for the
generator.
A lot of that has gone to a full kitchen.
All the water treatment equipment, fully redoing the electrical in the
entire lighthouse.
Also plumbing the entire lighthouse.
The windows were also redone.
A lot of the woodwork has been stripped and redone.
Like any project, this costs more and took longer than I ever imagined.
I originally had about a $200,000 budget to renovate the lighthouse, so I am a
little over what I anticipated, but it's well worth it.
This level has been fully refurbished now.
We have a dining room.
We have an amazing kitchen, complete with granite countertops, appliances, new
cabinets. Over here we have our living room and we have a small
utility laundry room over here.
One of my favorite things about the lighthouse and probably everybody's favorite thing is this cast iron
staircase.
All the way up to the second floor.
And there's another set beyond that.
So the windows on this main level were one of the first projects I did, mainly
because I needed light and I needed the air.
All of the glass on these windows were broken out, as were the windows upstairs.
But these were all hand stripped.
All the paint was stripped off.
The glass was replaced, the rope was redone and attached to the waves.
So now they all fully function.
One of my other favorite things that we've done is commission some beautiful stained glass
windows. I keep a wall here of some of the volunteers who've come in along the way to help me
paint, clean, refurbish and really renovate this lighthouse.
We're downstairs now in the platform of the lighthouse.
This level, when the keepers lived here, was also a mechanical level.
Very much like it functions now.
There's a large room back there, which is a cistern.
The cistern holds water.
Right here we have a wine cellar.
One of my pride and joys.
This room is our bunk room.
It's one of our three bedrooms.
This room originally was where the coal boiler came.
We also have a fully restored bathroom here for this bedroom.
We use composting toilets because we're not connected to the water or sewer.
And I have to collect rainwater, which goes into the original cistern downstairs.
From there, that water is pumped out, treated and is available for use in the lighthouse.
Let's go upstairs.
The keepers lived on this floor.
The floors here are original.
The dark brown floors.
They were all redone.
We had to refurbish a section in the middle.
So I decided to put the compass rose in there.
Here is the original bathroom.
You can see the white hexagon tile is original to this bathroom.
Everything else has been brought in during the renovation.
We'll go here to the yellow room.
This room was the kitchen.
If you look over there, that's a chimney that you can see outside.
But it's where the stove would have vented.
This room, which is now the master bath, had some lines here, horizontal
lines, indicating shelving.
So this would have been the pantry.
Welcome to the service level.
This level was used to service the light.
Now it's used for mechanical equipment.
Welcome to the widow's walk.
We're here at the top of the lighthouse.
This is the current beacon.
Point out a couple of my solar panels, trying to generate some solar energy.
As well as a wind turbine.
This is the National Weather Service weather station.
If you look all the way up to the top, you'll see the little whirligigs going.
Otherwise, enjoy the view of Mentor Headlands Beach and Headlands State
Park.
Part of buying a lighthouse from the federal government means that it comes with certain
stipulations. My particular lighthouse sits on a piece of property that is owned
by the Army Corps of Engineers.
If I make it to 25 years and we'll probably renew the lease again and there'll be an
additional fee.
This lighthouse is an active aid to navigation, which means that the beacon still comes
on every night, comes on at dusk, goes off at dawn, and it is continually maintained by the
Coast Guard.
One thing that was very important to me when I bought this lighthouse is that I understood that this
was part of this community of Fairport Harbor.
So in 2012, I had my first open house where I invited people from the
community to come in and take a look.
Ever since then, we've had an open house around the lighthouse's birthday, which is June
9th.
So every day I get asked whether I rent out the lighthouse or not.
I have not rented it.
I may in the future, but there's a lot of logistics that need to be organized
. Maybe someday.
So another question people ask me is if I would do it again or I would buy another one.
Probably not.
This was a great challenge, a great opportunity, and I loved every minute of it.
But I would probably move on to something else.