HOUSE TOUR! | 70 Year Old House in the German Countryside

Hey my name is Maddie and if you're here for last week's video you already know that I recently sold a self-converted van that I lived and traveled in for three years. I moved from the USA to Germany with my dog Eliza and I bought a house in the German countryside. It's kind of a crazy surprise to even myself that I ended up here but long story short this opportunity to buy this house came up and I just could not pass it up. This is an 80 year old house that needs some serious work. The roof has almost non-existent insulation. A lot of the floors need to be entirely replaced if not refurbished. A lot of the electrical and the plumbing needs to be replaced and on top of that I'd really like to update the space while honoring both traditional and modern German design trends. Basically the plan is to renovate this house from the bottom up to slowly transform it into my dream home and I plan to share the entire experience with you guys here. So first you just have to see it. Why don't you just follow me through this gate and we'll enter into my favorite entrance of the house which is into the mud room. It's like a secret garden door and I really love it. So this is the side of the house and actually a lot of this tour I'm going to show you guys from the second time I ever entered this house back in January when I took kind of a secret trip here to check this out and see if it would be a real possibility for me. I will be living and renovating this house with Ellie who you guys probably already know from the channel by now. Ellie is a in the first place. I met her in Guatemala two years ago and together we've traveled in Asia and the U.S. and now of course we find ourselves here but I am keeping a lot of information private for her sake, her family's sake, and mine but just know that the long-term plan is that I am here on a long-term visa that I will renew when necessary and the rest is up to future Maddie's problem and with that let's get on to the tour. This is the mud room and this is the laundry room over here and I should also say that the owner who lived here before actually passed away and left behind a ton of stuff, almost all of their things, and so Ellie and I are in the process of getting rid of all of these things, going through everything, donating, sending to landfill if we have to, giving some to friends and family members, and it's a very long process so keep in mind that pretty much everything you see in the house is not ours and we have to sort through all of it. Okay moving on into the laundry room. One of the craziest things about having an 80 year old home is that a lot of the plumbing is not modernized at all and so one of the crazier things is that when you're washing your clothes this is where your water goes out. So now pretend I'm a wall with beautiful cabinets. That is the vision. This kitchen is definitely the room in the house that I'm most excited to renovate and it's also the first room that we're going to tackle. The previous owner was only five feet tall and so we want to lift everything up and we want to brighten it. A huge theme of the renovation is going to be introducing light to the space so we're going to take down the dark colored panels, replace them with something a lot brighter, really introduce as much lightness and brightness into the space as we possibly can. And speaking of dark spaces I'm going to show you one of the weirder spots of the house and that is the pantry. When you first open the door into the pantry it almost looks normal. There are some nice shelves for storage, maybe a little bit too much blank wall for a typical pantry, but what gets weird is when you pan down and you see that this floorboard can actually be lifted up to reveal the steep stairwell that lies underneath that leads down into this rather dark cold storage area. Honestly though I feel pretty at home here. It's about the same height that my van was. My plan here is to extend this outward so you don't risk falling to your death if you take one step too far and to make this kind of our main pantry by adding a bunch of shelves and then down here can be more long-term storage for holiday items or just you know winter gear, things that we can store away at different parts of the year. But let's get out of here because it really is cold. Right next to our door to the pantry is actually our door to the backyard and that is actually the one area of the property that we've already been doing a lot of work. When we first came to see the property in January there were bushes right here that were this tall so you couldn't see the backyard at all and we actually moved them to that corner of the yard which was so much work. We luckily had help, we had a tractor come in and dig them all out so all I had to do was dig the new holes and put them in but let me tell you was I sore for the next three days straight. There's this really exciting surprise coming in just a few days and we had to prep our entire vegetable garden to prepare which actually reminds me that we should take a break to talk about today's sponsor. I'd like to take a moment to thank Blue Eddy for sponsoring this week's video because without them this beautiful patch of soil that I'm standing on would still be a patch of vicious blackberry bushes 10 feet tall and I'm so so grateful. For those of you who don't know Blue Eddy is a brand that specializes in well-designed and high quality power banks for power you can rely on and power that I personally have been relying on heavily for the past six months. I'm very excited to announce that Blue Eddy is available here in Europe so I was able to get a power bank with European outlets here in Germany and if you're back in the states you can get power banks with US outlets as well. Today I am showcasing the AC200L and it has already been a lifesaver for my renovation and I have no doubt it will be a lifesaver in the future as well. The AC200L is a large capacity and high powered power bank with a 2400 watt power and a 2048 watt hour capacity. I look like an evil scientist. Why did I have to cut down a giant forest of blackberry bushes in the first two weeks that I moved to Germany? That surprise is still around the corner but what I can tell you is that my AC200L powered it all. It handled the saw that I used like a champ. I was using it for hours and hours and hours and it hardly drained the battery at all. The AC200L also has a power lifting capacity of 3600 watts which for reference can power virtually any home appliance you can think of and is awesome because as I mentioned earlier the electrical in our house needs to be replaced in a lot of areas which means I will be using my BlueEddy for the foreseeable future to power all of our kitchen appliances. One of the things that really sets BlueEddy's power banks apart from others on the market is their fast charging capabilities. The AC200L can charge up to 80% in just 45 minutes on grid and with 1200 watts of solar it can charge up to 80% in 90 minutes and this is usually after I've been using my BlueEddy all week with a bunch of different things. BlueEddy has also given the AC200L wider expandability which essentially means it's really easy to connect it to other BlueEddy batteries to expand your battery needs. This is really good for off-grid folk or if you want to power something really massive. The AC200L can connect up to two B300 batteries from BlueEddy. I honestly can't even express to you guys how relieved and happy I was when I realized that BlueEddy is available in Europe with European style outlets. It makes my life so much easier. BlueEddy is truly a company that I believe in. I could not possibly recommend their power banks more if you're looking for a power bank to suit your own needs and actually BlueEddy is offering each one of you a hundred dollars off the first month this video is posted when you use my code and my link. It'll be in the description box below. Thank you so much to BlueEddy. As always, so excited to continue our partnership and with that let's get on to the rest of this tour. So this is the absolutely gorgeous view of the back of my new house. I can't even believe I'm saying that. I think you can probably see that this deck is no longer in good shape. It turns out those bushes were really the only thing that was keeping these tiles attached to the deck. The long-term plan is to extend our deck so it expands the entire length of the house and our plan with this yard is to really make it a little more private and secret garden-esque with fruit trees and meandering paths and flowers and it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to take years but that's the vision. Back in the house, backyard to the right of me, laundry room to the left. If you take a right at the kitchen, you enter into the hallway and all of these doors are either going to be upcycled or entirely replaced. Let's enter into one of the most exciting rooms of the house. What is your vision? My vision is to take this out, take the tub out, take the sink out, take the toilet out and then take the tile out and then get a shower and learn about plumbing. This bathroom cracks me up. We've thought about moving the shower next to the window and replacing the window and making it all waterproof. We've thought about having a wet room as soon as you enter the bathroom. We've thought about just replacing this bath with a shower but one thing that we know for certain is that how it currently is is just not really working. I think it will help to remove this and you know change everything out, take the tiles out but we're doing a full overhaul and so I am curious what you guys would do. I'm also the most daunted by the bathrooms I think because you know I did do the plumbing in and I can pump a sink and a gray water system and a regular water tank but do I understand plumbing in Germany? No, not at all. But will I learn? Yes, yes I will. So this is the view that you first see when you enter into the house. So far we have never used this door. We do think we want to change it a lot so that will be more enticed to use it and you'll probably notice the main star is this beautiful color palette on the stairwell and I will talk about that more later but before we do that I want to show you guys the living room and future office space. Living room. Living room. This room's bigger than I remembered. The kitchen is smaller than I remembered and the living room is bigger. Let there be light. Couch needs to go here and there because it'll open the space so much more and then you put a central table right here and then a projector screen behind you and then turning this wall into a big archway so that that over there you guys haven't seen it yet but that room can be the library slash art study slash office. So the projector would go on that wall with the elephants and the clock. I kind of like that clock. I think the clock can stay. This room has already changed a bit. We've already been able to take down the lamp that was here before you might have seen and actually I hit my head on it multiple times because it was as tall as my head. We also have this temporary red velvet couch here for now. The one other big renovation we have to do to this space aside from putting in that archway is replace this fireplace. It's no longer up to code and call me crazy but it kind of reminds me of a little crematorium. I'm sure that it's served its purpose that it's kept a lot of people warm and I'm sure there was even a time when this was in style but it's not really our vibe and there are so many beautiful German fireplaces that will suit here just fine and might not take up quite so much room. As I said in that first tour the main thing is adding an archway to the future office library space. It also has really nice evening light. No morning light though it's all evening light over here. We want to turn this wall into an archway. I don't know we don't know how to do any of this by the way. Moving walls sounds really scary. There's carrying walls that have like your electrical and your plumbing in them and those walls you can't really mess with but then there's other walls that are just there but I don't know how to tell which one's which. If it's not a carrying wall then all it is is like wooden beams and then drywall and then your plaster coating and then paint. No surprise here but I was entirely wrong about that. A lot of the walls in Germany are actually made entirely of brick so there are no wooden studs. It is entirely a different endeavor to try to cut an archway and we're actually going to need a masonry saw but again future Maddie and Ellie's problem. Eliza is actually in here right now and in case you guys were wondering she is just loving it here. I feel like she is really blooming as a little German puppy but she's already getting up to so much trouble and we still need to add a gate around our yard so that she doesn't go into the neighbor's yards all the time. She just got in trouble for that this morning didn't you? But she's just really loving it and really loving not being in a van anymore I'm pretty sure. Anyway the vision I have for this room is to put a huge desk right here next to the window and then to build custom library shelves all along these walls and I'm so so excited about that idea. And actually all of my boxes came from FedEx just yesterday and I don't think I mentioned it in last week's video but pretty much half of those boxes are filled with books that I can put inside bookcases and more will definitely definitely be purchased. Having had lived in an 80 square foot van for the past three years, moving from that into this where I have so much space is so insane to me. I cannot believe that I have a whole other half of the house to show you. If I just had the bottom half of the house I feel like that already feels like an insane amount of space. That's a cool lesson to have learned to really appreciate every square meter. I live in Germany now it's time to learn the metric system. Also we're definitely changing the stairs entirely. We're going to probably have some wood covers if we can apply enough paint stripper or possibly have to replace them and we're going to put maybe a dark green runner and keep these metal attachments that are on this rug. It's going to be a ton of work like a ton of work for stairs so we'll see. As soon as you get up the stairs you see two doors this guy and this guy and I think in the tour in January we went into this bedroom first. So yes this is upstairs bedroom number one and if there's one thing I've learned from living in a house for the past two weeks is that I definitely need a wide-angled lens because it's really hard to show you guys how big this room actually is. This room also gets that really nice p.m light but there is so much stuff in this room and furniture that we still need to get rid of. Now we are going to my favorite room of the house. I like it because of this really big window and reading nook because it has the prettiest view of any room in the house. I don't know I think bookshelves here though or this could be a yoga room. Since filming that walkthrough in January I have entirely changed my mind about this room and I really want to turn it into the master bathroom. My idea is to add double doors to the wall that I'm looking at right now to lead into the eventual master bedroom. I just think that would be so amazing and I actually think we would use and see the view out this window more than if it was just a random library space because I know that both of us are going to be more inclined to use the living room downstairs. But it's kind of sad because this really is like the perfect cozy little nook and I am curious what you guys would do. Is it weird to leave a reading nook in a bathroom or would you do it? Please write in the comment section below. You might ask if I turned that other room into a bathroom what would happen to this bathroom that does have some really great light and I think the answer would be to turn this into some sort of walk-in closet. I actually think that it's more common in Europe to buy a standing wardrobe than to have a walk-in closet but I think that this could actually really serve that really well. It's not that large. It's a very small bathroom especially for a master bathroom. So that's kind of what I was thinking or possibly keeping it as a bathroom more for guests. But that is TBD. Again, leave your opinions in the comments below. I may or may not listen. Moving on to the master. Before we go in though, I want to mention I'm not showing you everything that needs to be fixed with this house. The very floor beneath my feet is cracking and breaking apart. There's holes in the roof where you can see outside because there's no insulation and the flooring in the master bedroom is definitely some of the worst flooring in the whole house. Don't get me wrong, this flooring will be beautiful. It's old wood flooring so it just needs to be really refurbished and I also think we need to fill in the cracks. But anyway, this is eventually going to be the master once we entirely tear this wall down and I really can't wait to turn this space into the master and that is where the double doors would go into the bathroom. I actually think I just heard Ellie get home so maybe she can be there for the last part of this tour. Why don't you tell the audience what the overall vibe that we're going for in this renovation? Well, I want it to be homey with character. Yeah. Like I don't want it to look too modern in a way that it looks, what is the word? Sanit... no. Sterile. Sterile. Yeah, we wanted to have a lot of character and I already told them that we're going through a lot of the previous owner's things and getting rid of some things but we're also keeping some things too. We're trying to, yeah. Yeah, there are already some things that I know for sure that I would like to keep. The one you're sitting on. Including this thing that I'm sitting on and some paintings and those... I mean, there are some fun paintings. Yeah and I feel like a big part of this that's nice about it is that we don't really have a timeline planned yet because we are learning everything from scratch. Like, what building experience do you have? I have some from my dad. Like, I have my dad build some stuff. I had my own apartment where I had to like put some screws on the wall. Nice. Build some furniture. Yeah and luckily Ellie has a lot of connections of people who can help us. Yeah, I mean, it's room and power for sure and like we want to do as much on our own as possible but I feel like it's so nice to have people that can help you because they have like the the real experience. And next week's video we're going to finally get into the house. We're getting rid of so many things. I want to start ripping down wallpaper, tearing up carpet, really seeing what the bones are of the house because we still don't entirely know. It's gonna be really fun. So thank you guys so much for watching and thank you. We will see you in next week's video. Also, I told them to leave comments on what they would do if they had to renovate the blue bathroom and what they would do about the upstairs room if they would change it to a master bathroom. Okay, well I'm really excited to read the comments and see what your inspirations are. Okay, bye people. Have a good week. Take care of yourselves. Be kind. Tall people problems. There's an old toothbrush and I don't know what I'm doing. Do you guys like broccoli? There is a plane. Another bedroom. I thought that when I got a house I would be able to escape the planes but nope.