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From the outside, Lori Dressler's tidy gray stucco house in Mahtomedi appears to be a normal, older one-story home.
But then there's the elaborate roofline, an inordinate number of windows - 40 - and the fact that it has 14 exterior walls that turn every which way to create several courtyards.
Inside, the odd configuration of rooms adds hints at their origins: They were horse-drawn streetcars.
"It's a bizarre collection of architecture, but I just love it," said Dressler, who bought her house about two blocks from White Bear Lake three years ago for about $70,000.
The house was built as a summer home in 1905 out of five streetcars.
"My first impression was that it was a house for an eccentric person," said Dressler, a dressmaker, wedding consultant and silk-flower-arrangement designer who is planning to open "Streetcar House Daycare" in January. "Nothing had been done to it for 20-some years. The individual who bought it needed to be artistic."
Dressler, who had been divorced for several years and was living in an apartment nearby when she saw the house was for sale, decided that individual was her.
"I got creative and my real estate agent got creative, and we found a way for me to buy it," she said. "I just knew I could afford it, that I could fix it up. I knew what it was like to start out dirt poor and bring a house up to market. I did that years ago, when I was first married, to a house in St. Paul."
The "streetcar house" has undergone many changes since 1905 when Sherwood Hough, a purchasing agent for Tri-State Telephone...