Inman

University of Michigan superfan’s home hits the market

U of M Wolverines home | Realtor.com

Many people display their team pride by hanging a flag outside their front door. Others, might put a decal on their car window. Loren Joostberns made his home into a blue-and-maize-hued shrine to his favorite team, the University of Michigan Wolverines football team.

And now, he’s selling the home in Hamilton, Michigan, for $169,900.

Unfortunately, that price will not include the Michigan gear and memorabilia Joostberns spent 29 years decorating the home with according to the Detroit Free Press.

The decor expands from Wolverine tablecloths and dish towels in the kitchen to Wolverine bedding and posters in the bedrooms. The exterior of the house itself is a bright golden yellow with navy shutters.

“It is every single room — not one single room does not have Michigan gear in it,” Jeannette Brownson, broker at Brownson Properties who’s listing the property, told the Detroit Free Press.

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The three-bedroom one-bathroom Cape Cod style home occupies 1,250 square feet in a suburban neighborhood — roughly 150 miles west of University of Michigan’s stadium, for interested parties. The 1940 home, which sits on a third of an acre also features “beautiful knotty pine woodwork” in one bedroom and an unfinished basement with seven-foot ceilings.

However much of a Wolverine’s fan the cozy home’s current owner is, some surprising news came out of all the home’s garnered press: Joostberns is in fact an alumnus of Western Michigan University, not University of Michigan.

“Sometimes, I’d go to the Western football game and I’d listen to the Michigan football game on the radio,” Joostberns admitted to Detroit Free Press.

Although moving all of his memorabilia out of the home is sure to be a big task, Joostberns’ love of the team will help spruce up his new home (wherever it may be), as it did with the current home he’s listing.

“Interior decorating means nothing to me,” Joostberns told Detroit Free Press. “I don’t care a thing about what it looks like and there is some ugly wallpaper on the walls but I figure I just put enough Michigan stuff on the walls, it will hide it all and that’s what I did.”

Email Lillian Dickerson