Gingerbread Houses - for Real
It's the home sweet home of your dreams, and you can build it with a favorite holiday treat.
Movoto Real Estate, a real estate blog, has developed a gingerbread house calculator that allows you to determine the amount of ingredients you would need to build your ideal gingerbread home - no matter what the size.
"Usually, we try to put a fun twist on housing, and since it's the holidays, we figured people would be interested in building gingerbread houses," Movoto spokesman Nick Johnson said. "So we figured out a way to find out how many batches it would take to build a life-size one. It's a fun way to tie in housing and the holiday."
Click here to see a slideshow of Canada's National Gingerbread Showcase 2012.
All you need to do is type in the square footage of your home, and the site will tell you how many cups of butter, brown sugar and other ingredients you would need to make your house. It also calculates the price of the ingredients.
So, if you wanted to make a life-size gingerbread replica of the White House - which is 55,000 square feet - you would need 66,000 cups of butter and brown sugar, and it would cost you about $940,000.
This isn't the only interactive housing site Movoto Real Estate has developed. The company also created a calculator to let you know how many balloons it would take to lift your house in the air, like in the Disney/Pixar movie "UP."
Movoto is a California-based search engine and brokerage firm located in 30 states across the nation.
"Real estate is a very exciting niche and we are trying to get you to think about it in a different way," Johnson said. "And have fun at the same time."