Renovating an old house in Europe is a nightmare. (Ep. 06)

What a beautiful day. Oh my gosh. In life, things often don't go the way we want. You miss the train. You lost your job. Your heart was broken. A family member passes. Or the chickens escape the chicken coop. There are a million ways things can go wrong. And I'm afraid sometimes of what happens when my life doesn't go how I planned or envisioned. So I try to control it by keeping all the chickens safe in their pen. But inevitably, they escape. And what do you do then? It's in precisely that moment that things get interesting. And that's why I wanted to make this and share a little bit about the truth of moving out to an old house in the countryside. Romanticized ideas about how life should look are dangerous because they aren't real. I guess growing up is about confronting the gap between the ideas you have in your head of what life should look like and reality. That can be painful sometimes. I've always wanted my life to look like I was in a movie or a book. And this was shaped by the movies and books I loved while growing up. I've always felt connected to characters that have an enormous imagination that colors how they see the world. Is this not why we love fiction? These were worlds I wanted to get lost in. The problem, as I'm discovering, is that this takes a lot of work. It takes a lot. of work to keep the fantasy going. The white picket fence, the idealized relationship, the perfect body, the perfect lifestyle. We all fall for it even if it looks a little different to all of us. The fantasy in and of itself is never satisfying. So the search never ends. I'm going to tell you the story of how I moved to a tiny French village and all of the ways things are going wrong. All of the ways that I have been terribly unrealistic. about what this was all gonna look like. But to properly explain how I got here, I have to roll back time 10 years into the past. The year that the germ of an idea for a different life began. A life in Europe. 2014 was the year I first saw the film Amélie, which would end up becoming one of the most influential movies of my childhood. I watched it for the first time before I had ever stepped foot in France, before I could speak French, and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it changed my life. It felt like I had been hit by a meteorite. I couldn't unsee what I had seen. That view of the world was so fresh, so playful. I just wanted to live there. And I came dangerously close. I moved to Paris and without consciously saying to myself, I'm going to live there, I ended up moving into the same neighborhood that the film took place in, Montmartre. Which is, in my opinion, the most beautiful neighborhood of all of Paris. My metro station was even Abbesse. What's scary is that I almost pulled it off. I almost made it all look like a movie. I often worked in the Café des Deux Moulins, where Amélie worked in the film. It's a real place. It's actually really nice. In fact, one time I was working there and I met a group of people that were just hanging out and we ended up talking and drinking for hours. It was all aligning, except somehow something didn't feel right. Hopefully I've painted the picture so far that I was very invested in making this life. work. It wasn't that it needed to look like Amélie, but Amélie is a great example of the many different films and books and poems and things that I had consumed that had created an image in my head. An image of the beautiful places I would be and the people that would be there. I was supposed to feel happy, content, satisfied. I mean, I did it. But making it actually happen felt like so much work. I think I started to feel worn down by trying to keep the image going. A thousand little cracks were appearing in this romantic idea of the life that I thought I wanted. And I'll give you an example. Amélie takes place exactly a month and a day before I was born. So, I don't know how things were back then, but I'm struck now by the total lack of tourists in the film. Something that is ubiquitous and occasionally suffocating in Montmartre. I guess this is true for all films, really. And increasingly, of everything we see online. We edit out the stuff we don't want to see. Let me tell you. Paris is loaded with rats and they don't look like Remy. But as the romanticized idea of life in Montmartre began to fade and the reality of living in this very crowded, very high-energy neighborhood replaced it, I felt like I was losing a childish naivete about the world. I felt stupid for buying into these ideas in the first place. So now that that fantasy was gone, I began to look for something else. I wanted quiet and calm and space, which is what led me to move to the countryside. I had an idea of what this was going to look like. I knew there would be surprises, but what I've encountered is my own immense ability to misjudge whatever I'm getting myself into. I've discovered that a house brings new kinds of problems I've never had to deal with before. I don't have the skills. I feel scared half the time, and this house actually requires way more resources than I thought it would, which also scares me. We know that the things we see online aren't real at some level. The cottage core or that person's life in New York City. That really beautiful model or the couple that's traveling the world. Still, most of us make up stories that we fall for. I think it just sort of sneaks up on you. You don't realize you're doing it until suddenly there's this kind of mismatch. It's almost like no matter where you are, where you go, you bring your bullshit with you. My own version of this or my latest version. I should say, became trying to create my own sort of tranquil refuge away from the chaos of the world. I was looking for calm and peace and that is not what happened. It all began when I was moving in. The house was disgusting. So I just began cleaning. I have been having a difficult time. Showing on camera just how dirty it is in this house, but maybe this is visible. It's just a total build up of what feels like many years of cobwebs. I feel so overwhelmed right now. Like, look at this. Like, are you kidding me? Look at that. Dude, that's not what I'm not sucking up with the vacuum. That's crazy. This is a way bigger task than I... I think I initially realized. I'm going to chronicle for you the series of increasingly unpleasant surprises I've been uncovering in this old house in the two months that I've lived here so far. But first I have to thank the sponsor of this video whose support is the only reason I can afford solutions to all these insane problems popping up. I am attempting to tell a complete story of the highs and the lows of this journey that I'm on. looking for and creating a home living out here in the countryside. This is all a series of experiments, right? I think I often find myself in situations like these because I want to feel like I lived life fully. Now, I'm slowly developing an awareness of what happens in my body and the stories that I make up in my mind when I'm in uncomfortable situations. I'm learning how to get grounded in spite of this. And it's not easy. I'm not great at it. I can get very reactive when I receive bad news and therapy has been really helpful with developing this awareness with just noticing what's going on internally. I talk to my therapist every week and he helps me stay on track. He helps me come back to my heart and navigate situations through my heart instead of just with my head. Traditionally therapists are not affordable and it's not really flexible and I don't even really know what I would do. from out here in this tiny village. BetterHelp has changed this by making it so much more accessible and adaptable to your schedule. You can talk to your therapist however you prefer whether that's video call, text, phone call, and you can keep changing therapists until you found somebody that you really feel like you match with. There's a link in my description if you want to check it out or you can go to betterhelp.com slash nathanieldrew. Clicking that link helps support this channel but it also gets you 10% off your first month with BetterHelp. While cleaning my house, I made the discovery that the kitchen was absolutely filthy. Like kitchen nightmares level filthy. Thank God Gordon Ramsay isn't seeing any of this. It is difficult to fully describe the thick layer of grease that was on and inside of everything. I had no intention to do a kitchen remodel, but as I looked more closely, I lost faith that this was ever going to get to the point where I felt safe and comfortable with the level of hygiene in this place. Oh my god, the fish is even worse than what I imagined. The straw that broke the camel's back was when I began finding mice. I just found this little guy this morning. I got the help of a guy to bust down the kitchen and the discoveries just kept coming. No way, no way. The decision to tear down the kitchen turned out to be a really good one because of the things I would then discover. None of the pipes were properly connected. They just weren't connected at all in fact. They weren't even the right kind of pipes. And the pipe being in the laundry room next door kept busting because I discovered the laundry room wasn't insulated. So when it gets cold, everything starts breaking. That led to a new problem. I wasn't going to buy a washer and dryer only to immediately have them rust and break. Suddenly, a new laundry room needed to be built alongside the kitchen renovations. Unfortunately, it didn't end there. Mold began growing along the floors and windows around the house and started scaring the fuck out of me because I didn't know what was going on or how to stop it. Then I soon discovered that I needed to install a ventilation system and fix a wall that had a massive humidity problem because there is no gutter or rain management system outside on the stone wall. As a temporary solution, I've been running two large dehumidifiers that suck large amounts of water out of the air. This was all feeling so out of control. And then... I nearly had a fire already. The pump for my well outside was cheap. Whatever they had installed before was crappy and it blew up because the electrical system isn't good. That could have started a fire. The pipe literally melted. So that was very scary. Like, what the fuck? So the whole house needed the electricity to be redone. I suddenly have Frenchmen running around my house, drilling holes, shouting, cutting the electricity or water. How the fuck? Did we get here? One thing it just kept leading to another. I did not for one second think that this house would need this much work this quickly. And it is at this point that I have to say that this is all costing more money than I thought it would. The house itself was affordable because it's out in the middle of nowhere. But for all of these renovations, I was blindsided. So in case you see the things that I make as a kind of perfect image that is impossible to emulate, hopefully I can set the record straight. Do not do what I did unless you're sure you can take a financial risk and are willing to introduce a significant amount of complication into your life. It's just not worth it otherwise. I was judging myself so harshly for my decision to come out here, for voluntarily putting myself in this situation. Of course the roof would start leaking. This was all just starting to feel like a bad dream. But at this point, all of the chickens had escaped the coop, just to continue my metaphor from the beginning of this video. So in a sense I had a decision to make. Keep fighting reality. Keep letting the image that I had in my head make me miserable or find a way to accept it. Find a way to work with this. To stop wishing that I was somewhere else doing something else. To use a phrase that I've very much enjoyed in the past. To amor fati this shit. You know, I think it's amazing to be a dreamer. To have a big imagination, right? But this is what happens when you go just a little too far. When it's not put in check. What I keep discovering over and over again is that when you drop all of the ideas about how things should be, something else can fill that space. And that thing is just the present reality. It's just lived experience. It's just what's happening right now. And that too can be a really beautiful thing. You know, my favorite moments, my favorite memories of my time in Paris were the ones that didn't have to be anything. They didn't have to match any image or movie or book or poem. or quote, they just happened. And the same can be said of any other place I've ever spent time in, including out here. You know, when I get past my bullshit, because that's what it is, it's bullshit, I can see just how awesome it is to be out here. Yes, there are uncomfortable things that I'm learning to adapt to, but there's a lot to love, you know, in a kind of weird way. I'm glad that this house is not willing to cooperate with my idea of what it should be or what it's supposed to look like. It's just teaching me a lot about acceptance, adaptability, patience, so many things. And I just have to remind myself that I am so lucky to be here. Irony is a big theme in my life recently. And there's a real irony in me pointing to Amélie as creating this image of a perfect world. Because one of the core themes in Amélie is... Just the fact that she's living a very normal life. If anything, she had a sad and isolated childhood. It's just that her perspective is extraordinary. And it's her perspective that changes everything. Through her eyes, we see beauty and wonder in the mundane. And before I go back to romanticizing things too much, we also see a girl who struggles in her own way to face reality, just like we all do. You know, I've been thinking a lot recently about how it doesn't really matter how all of this pans out. I'm going to be dead. in 60 years anyway, if I am lucky enough to live that long. So am I gonna just spend the rest of my time from now till then stressing? I love Amiri. I think there's so much more going on there beyond the cutesy film that it looks like from the outside. And what's interesting is that I love it now for very different reasons than I did before. For me the film is a reminder that you have control over how you look at things. Oftentimes I get locked into an idea of how things need to look, how things should be. But life always seems to have something even better in store. If this house is teaching me how to live less in my ideas of how things should be and more in present reality, what more can I ask for?

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Timestamps:

0:00 – Romanticized ideas about life are dangerous.
1:03 – Part I: We are the architects of our own unhappiness
2:34 – I tried to make my life look like a movie.
4:15 – A thousand little cracks
5:35 – Part II: Getting An Ass Kicking in the Countryside
7:40 – Sponsor
9:14 – Part III: A Series of Unfortunate Events
12:17 – Part IV: Clarity