My 175 year old house (Ep. 03)

Welcome back to this series of videos that I'm making about this journey into the countryside. I just got access to this house yesterday. And I have to be completely honest with you and say I am feeling super overwhelmed. I mean, it is a lot to process. This feeling of freedom being out here and all the incredible things I want to do and all the projects I have in mind. And also... Profound sense of fear. I mean, I'm really stepping into the unknown I am very aware of the fact that I don't know how to do many of the things that I want to do just yet So there's this quote basically that I wanted to share with you from a guy you may know called Vincent and go I am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it It's just kind of been something I've been repeating to myself as I go through this process So Let me catch you up if you haven't seen the first two episodes of this series. This spring, after more than four years living in Paris, I just felt this incredible call to go somewhere new, to have more space, to basically have an empty canvas to make the things that I want to make. So I was scouring the web and talking to every agent that I could and not finding anything. Months had gone by, it didn't feel like I was making any progress. The system in France is a little bit difficult because there's a lot of word of mouth and Different houses are on different databases. You sort of have to be integrated in society here to find out about things as they happen. At least that's been my experience. If speaking French is important in Paris, it is absolutely essential out here in the countryside. Maybe the biggest problem of them all was the fact that photos of places do not seem to correspond at all with the reality of the places. So I was getting a little bit frustrated. I knew I had to be patient. And I'm learning a lot about patience right now in my life. This, of course, is happening during my time living with Joseline and Jean-Luc. Those are the two artists that I shared a little bit about in my last video. They were incredibly helpful and supportive in helping me understand how things work in this new little corner of the world that I wasn't so familiar with. Everywhere you go, humans have their customs and their systems and their traditions. There's no difference. people that were willing to share so much information with me was essential. So they were aware of this mission of mine, this project, and then one day, out of nowhere, Joseline comes up to me, and she said, I'm thinking to myself, okay, well, that's a hell of a statement. I guess I'll go take a look, but... Also with a giant pinch of salt, right? I had no idea what to expect. There were no photos. This place was not on the market at all. So I was going in blind. I ride my bike over. And when I get there to the place, this place, it just had something different than anywhere else I had been. The two former inhabitants of this house were two artists themselves in their 70s. Adorable people. You could tell that they had a special connection with this place and a lot of special moments happened here. You know, I believe strongly in the energy that people and places have and carry with them. Now, this happened in May. I spent a lot of the last few months just thinking about how absurd it is that things aligned in the way that they did. I mean, if I didn't meet Joseline, I would have never even known about this place. I wouldn't be here right now. It's kind of interesting how... In life, there's this kind of ripple effect, right? I guess butterfly effect, right? But it's just sort of this domino of one thing leads to another. And it is in moments like these that I feel a really strong desire to say thank you to all of you for watching and supporting all of these years. Some of you have been around for an incredibly long amount of time, an unbelievable amount of time in my opinion. This would not be possible without your support. So I do just want to say that. Okay, so a little more about the house. This house was built in 1850, give or take a year. That's the same year that California, where I was born, became a state. That's about a decade before Italy became a unified country, and also obviously before the American Civil War. That's also before the construction of the Eiffel Tower. I mean, I could keep going, but you get the point. It's a long time ago. So with that comes problems, obviously, because houses... deteriorate over time and there's a lot of things that I think need some fixing up and repairing I don't know what I got myself into here it also comes with An amazing amount of charm. What they told me was that this place used to be owned by a wine cellar. And according to them, the former owners, during World War II, unbeknownst to the Germans who occupied this territory at the time, they would throw these sort of clandestine dances. And at one point, a chunk of the house crumbled. And nobody died, fortunately. I think somebody broke a leg, according to them. But it's weird to think that that happened here. After that chunk of the house crumbled, it was abandoned for 40 years. And then the previous owners came here, lived their lives here. Okay, so I want to share some thoughts about the future. Like I said at the beginning of this video, I just feel a lot of fear and doubt as well. And that's something that I want to incorporate a lot in this series. Because it's easy to romanticize this place. It's easier to romanticize my life out here. But... Ah, fuck. You know, it's not just going to be rainbows and sunshines. Before I do, I want to thank the sponsor of this video whose support is making all this possible. I literally cannot even imagine my life without therapy. And the tools that therapy gives me to navigate challenging moments as well. BetterHelp. who's the sponsor of this video offers more affordable more accessible and more flexible therapy online you can try out different therapists and change for free until you find somebody that you can click with i think a lot of people think friends can be sort of a replacement to therapists and i don't think so very different kind of support and you need both right but they're not the same thing anyway you can entirely adapt how you communicate with your therapist whether that is through video call phone call or text messages And I think it's a really big plus to be able to do this from the comfort of your own home. Originally, I was skeptical about how good therapy on your computer, you know, through a video call would be. And five years into doing it, there is no way I am going back to in-person therapy. I far prefer doing it from home. It's really easy to sign up and match with someone immediately. There's a link in my description if you're interested in checking it out, or you can go to BetterHelp.com slash Nathaniel Drew. Clicking the link helps support this channel, but it also gets you 10% off your first month with BetterHelp. Okay, so now I want to talk a little bit about the bigger mission of what I'm doing here. Like Sylvia Plath and the fig tree, I see different life paths ahead of me, and I know I cannot go down all of them. Is this the place that I maybe begin a family? Or is it instead the place where I do a full-home makeover and learn many skills that may serve me down the road? It is all still entirely unclear, even to me, how long I'll stay here, if I'll even end up wanting to stay out here or not. I am telling an incomplete story, but will only know the full story at the end of my life, and I don't want to rush to that either. So for now, I must contend with the uncertainty of these different possibilities. These different life paths depend on the discoveries I will make while I am here, the things that I do, and the people that I'll meet in the months and years to come. One thing is certain, this is way, way more house than I actually need as a single person. I would be probably a lot more comfortable with about half the space, but I still went for it because I found it at a really good price, a little bit in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farmland, and I feel I can add a lot of value to restoring and renovating it. I just keep reminding myself that this is yet another in a series of experiments. I guess I like seeing things more that way because it removes a lot of the pressure to figure it all out right now. To fit a certain timeline or adapt to a conventional way of living which has never worked for me. And I'm definitely going to need help, there is no question about that. But I want to get my hands dirty too and learn as much as I can. I just get a lot more enjoyment from projects where I'm deeply involved. And I've done the same thing actually with... this channel and my videos i let go of most of my team this year i have shot and edited almost everything i have one friend lucas who i've featured a few times on this channel who i sometimes ask for a little bit of help on but i'm doing almost everything on my own again i'm a lot slower but i enjoy it so much more and i feel that the final result has more of my soul in it An Oscar-winning graphic designer by the name of Saul Bass put this idea really well in an interview. The fact of the matter is I want everything we do that I do personally, that our office does to be beautiful. It's worth it to me. It's the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares. But I think it's very important for us not to be under the illusion that anybody else cares. There was a time where... I thought what I needed to do, and a lot of YouTubers do this, I guess. I needed to hire out a team and have these editors and have all this support and whatnot. But I realized I hated being a manager. I don't like managing people. I like making things. I like being involved. If that means I make less videos, that's okay. Okay, so this is what is called a dépendance. It's separate from the house. This is the house right here. It was a ceramic studio. A lot of art was done in there. Maybe I will continue the spirit of this place and keep doing that because I love to make pottery and I love to paint. It could be something else entirely. I'm not sure yet, but it's so beautiful inside with these big windows. The windows are fantastic and they give a view towards the house. So this definitely needs work. Ceiling, insulation, floors, walls, windows, everything. Which you've probably, hopefully, noticed in the last couple of episodes is that I'm experimenting. And if ever I am to make a larger scale project in the future, like a movie maybe, who knows, I know that I'm going to rely on the skills that I'm developing right now, here, doing this. While I'm really excited to share all of my different renovation projects on this channel, that is never what this was going to be about. This channel is not a renovation channel. I have one true love in my professional life, and that is to tell stories. It is my North Star. Everything that I do is in service of that. Everything that isn't telling stories is secondary to telling stories. And so I see this house and the projects that I want to do here as an enormous canvas for me to sharpen my tools as a teller of stories. I am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it. Being afraid and feeling alive seem to be inextricably linked for me. There was one man's work that I stumbled across that really inspired me to go all out with this project. The thing is, he lives deep in the mountains. But I knew I needed to ask him for advice. This is gnarly. So earlier this summer, that's exactly what I did. And I want to tell you that story. Did a feather just...

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Timestamps:

00:00 – Hi, I'm overwhelmed
01:02 – My search for a new home
02:33 – I get a bit of unexpected help
04:14 – Some cool info about the house
05:43 – Thoughts about the future, part I
06:22 – Sponsor
07:35 – Thoughts about the future, part II
09:04 – Thoughts on creative work
10:26 – A sneak peek into an upcoming project
11:04 – This house is about telling stories
12:01 – Coming soon in episode 4....
12:27 – Bloopers