Steve Zaagman

WZZM-TV, Grand Rapids-Kalamazoo-Battle Creek, Mich.

GRAND RAPIDS — On a quiet street on this city's West Side is an unassuming home for sale with an unusual secret: a pipe organ bigger than ones in most churches.

Driving down the road, you would have no idea the 2,333-square-foot house contains 2,300 organ pipes, more than in your average church organ.

Beside the kitchen table is the keyboard, actually three keyboards stacked on top of one another with foot pedals below. Turn it on and you can hear a giant blower in the basement.

However, the keyboard 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 are even more pipes, some two stories tall.

The whole organ takes up more than one third of the house.

Realtor Mark Douglas is tasked with selling the unusual home, built in 1975. He posted a video of the pipe organ on Facebook, and word quickly spread.

Bill Tufts, the owner of the home, recently passed away, Douglas said.

"He couldn't play it, but he wanted an organ in his house so he had it put in," the real-estate agent said.

Home pipe organs aren't usual, but they aren't unique:

• In Houston, Glen Douglas built his house around a 7,000-pipe organ he created, according to the Houston Chronicle.

• In Atlanta, Peragallo Pipe Organ Co. installed a 1,002-pipe organ in the John Whitney residence, the company said.

• In Los Angeles, a Hollywood Hills mansion built in 1913 and on the market now for $9.9 million, advertises a pipe organ among its amenities. This listing doesn't mention the number of pipes.

The $129,900 house in Grand Rapids, built in 1975, sits on 0.18 of an acre with a full basement, central air and hardwood floors. The garage is detached and has its own heating and cooling system.

An addition to the one-bedroom, 1.5 bathroom house was built specifically to house the organ. Guy VanderWageen and Don Haan of Haan Pipe Organ in Grand Rapids installed it.

"He wanted a real pipe organ," VanderWageen said of Tufts. "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 said the price tag would be around $1 million.