A house for living

Agency, Mo., couple builds unique dream home to suit their lifestyle

Wouldn't it be great to have all the storage space you need and more? And what about a home large enough to host a sit-down dinner party for 150, with your own home-office, three kitchens, separate rooms for sewing and crafts and a hot tub, plus a pool room, playroom and a miniature golf course in back for the kids?

It may sound like an impossible wish list for anyone other than the rich and famous, but it is the reality for Judith and Milton Moore. Their home on farmland near Agency, Mo., is the size of half a football field (approximately 160 feet by 74 feet) with ceilings ranging from 14- to 21-feet high.

"I have never seen anything like it," says Mary Long, a friend of the Moores' for many years. "What is so amazing about all this is they did most of the work themselves as a hobby."

Doing work themselves, always looking for bargains and thinking outside the box have given the couple a one-of-a-kind home that fits their lifestyle without breaking the bank. Their home is actually a metal building that has been customized with walls that look like hand-cut stone, something you might imagine on a castle.

"It's decorative concrete called Fossil Crete," Mrs. Moore explains, "You can stamp it and make it look like stone or rock or fossils."

The Moores took a tool and cut their own grout lines for the stones. Then they matched up the groves inside and out, so it looks like it's a solid stone wall.

"So these actually are hand-cut stone," she laughs.

Finding bargains is how the Moores have kept costs down. One of Mrs. Moore's favorite haunts is Cargo Largo, "the caves" in Independence, Mo., where they auction off pallets of merchandise at fractions of the retail cost. That's where she has found bargains on all kinds of things from commercial-grade sinks for her kitchens to toilet paper - 880 rolls of it.

"If you find a bargain, buy all you can," she says. "You can either use it, sell it or give it away."

She also finds bargains on eBay, like the shower they call the "Space Shuttle" which includes two shower heads, a foot massager, jacuzzi, steam bath, phone and TV hookup. It retails for $18,000, and she got it for $2,000. Discarded chairs from the Ramada Inn look new on the porch after she had them reupholstered in material she found on sale for $3. And the expensive-looking tin ceiling in the dining room was found at Architectural Salvage in Kansas City. Mrs. Moore cleaned off all the rust, gave it three coats of sealant and painted it with Ralph Lauren's silver metallic paint (that she got on sale, of course, for $5 a gallon from Home Depot).

Although the Moore's home is enormous, it still has a comfortable, warm feel due to the soft light throughout. It's accomplished using 8-foot fluorescent light bulbs set in recessed boxes near the ceiling. They got the idea from the shop lights in their former home.

"Over 10 years, we only replaced one bulb," she says. "They are cheap to run, cool to run and economical, so we bought 8 footers. Electricians grouped them together to put on switches."

The goal of it all is not to have the biggest house on the block, Mrs. Moore says, but to have space to enjoy their four children and seven grandchildren, along with entertaining friends (they had a sit-down dinner birthday party for 110) and their church. Every July, the Moores host a church service at their home along with meetings and get-togethers throughout the year.

"We always said, if we ever built a house, we would build a house for the way we want to live," she says.

Lifestyles reporter Sylvia Anderson may be reached at sylviaanderson@npgco.com

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