A beer can house in Houston is a weird-and beautiful-attraction. The house is covered with beer cans and decorated with streamers cut from tops and strings of beer tabs.

The beer can house was built by a man who was a child of the Great Depression and saved empty cans of beer.

John Milkovisch hated throwing things away-so when aluminum siding was popular in the 70s, he figured he'd put all the aluminum he had in his attic to good use. He started cutting the cans open one by one, flattening them, and using them to cover his home.

Because he and his wife shared a six-pack every afternoon for twenty years, there were a lot of cans there.

"The funny thing is that it wasn't ... to attract attention," Ruben Guevara, head of restoration and preservation of the Beer Can House in Houston's Memorial Park area, told press. "He said himself that if there was a house similar to this a block away, he wouldn't take the time to go look at it. He had no idea what was the fascination about what he was doing."

Milkovisch began the project in 1968 with the back yard, installing a metal canopy for shade (to drink beer under) and replacing the lawn with concrete blocks  embedded with marbles he'd collected as a boy (less mowing means more beer-drinking time, obviously).

Then he moved to the side yards, covering them with anything he could find. He took materials home from his job as an upholsterer refurbishing rail cars, so he'd find things discarded on the tracks and lug them home.

"He used cans, bottles, marbles, redwood," Guevara said. "He drank a lot of beer, him and Mary, and he collected all the beer cans that he would drink. He stored them because he knew he was going to use them, but he didn't know for what."

Eventually, he coated the front of this house with beer cans, then attatched decorative garlands made of beer cans that swoop over the front porch and door, nearly obscuring them.

"The front of the house, when that went up, that's when all the buzz began," Guevara said.

Milkovisch died in the 1980s, although his wife lived there after his death. She died in the 1990s, and the neighborhood has changed a lot. It's gone from a working middle-class area to swanky condos and lofts. But the beer can house remains, even flanked by luxury condo buildings.

This is due to a local nonprofit who bought the property, restored the house, and opened it to the public. The nonprofit, the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, says the house is important and should be preserved.

"It shows the human nature of the individual is supreme. You can take the simplest thing, and it can actually affect a lot of other people," said Houston resident Patrick Louque said. Louque lived near the house when Milkovisch was erecting it-and he's happy the tradition lives on "It's totally grabbed me, and it's probably totally grabbed the imagination of more people than I could possibly imagine."

The house is an example of outsider art...and devotion to alcohol. Two things that should come together more often.