GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- On a quiet street on the city's West Side is an unassuming home for sale with an unusual secret: a 2,300 piece pipe organ.
Driving down the road, you would have no idea the house contains more pipes than your average church organ. It is something that needs to be seen to believed -- or rather heard.
By the kitchen table is the pipe organ with three sets of keyboards, stacked on top of each other with foot pedals. When you turn it on, a giant blower it can be heard in the basement. The organ, however, is only the half of it.
A door in the back of the house reveals a room with hundreds of pipes of all sizes. Through another door there are even more pipes, some two-stories tall. In all, there are around 2,300 with each pipe providing a different musical note. The whole organ takes up more than one third of the house.
Realtor Mark Douglas is tasked with selling the unusual home. He posted a video of the pipe organ on Facebook which quickly spread virally.
He says Bill Tufts, the late owner of the home and the organ, recently passed away. Douglas says amazingly, "he couldn't play it, but he wanted an organ in his house so he had it put in."
"Guy VanderWageen and Don Haan of Haan Pipe Organ installed it. "He wanted a real pipe organ," explains VanderWageen. "It is something he wanted since he was a child and we got to help him fulfill that dream."
The organ was installed over five years and if it were to be built today, Haan says the price tag would be around $1,000,000.
