5 Common Things in Amish Homes

so not all lawn machines are the same you're not going to find all these features in every amish home and you can have homes that can look quite fancy you can have homes that are very plain it's just different ways of being amish number one linoleum flooring linoleum is generally inexpensive it's quite durable and it's a material you'll commonly see on the floors and amish homes you'll see it in the kitchen you'll see it in the bathroom you'll see it in the main living rooms you'll see it in the bedrooms as well it's a very durable easily cleaned surface i'm calling this linoleum it may actually be vinyl in some cases vinyl may be called linoleum generally you hear it described as linoleum with the amish so you'll see linoleum common in amish homes now where you won't see it are in the homes of some of the planar amish for example the schwartz and trooper amish and another group called the troyer amish also doesn't use this so troy amish have a quite big community in new york the floors and source and trooper amish homes for example are an unvarnished hardwood i've seen this wooden floor in other amish homes like for example in the community at seymour missouri which has a quite plain appearance to their homes they have some kind of a wooden flooring there number two spacious common rooms this is something that kind of makes sense when you think about you know the amish have of course large families so you need large living areas living spaces where families can gather together when they're visiting when there's just the family spending time together you know you often have rooms that kind of create a pretty large interior space so the kitchen might kind of blend into the main room of the house another example of some of my amish friends in pennsylvania they live in a roughly 200 year old farmhouse it's actually a double farm house where you have two farm houses basically attached there's a middle sort of pearl room that sort of divides the two houses let's say and they're doors on either end and if you open the doors it opens up to the kitchen of each home and you do that you create a really long you know single room there and that's where they would have for example uh their youth group singing i intended a youth group singing which was in that space so you can see from one kitchen all the way to the other it's a pretty pretty long distance i don't know it's a 30 40 50 feet so they had dozens of youth in there but this is something you'll see in new amish construction as well and i actually didn't catch this really this detail until i had my father along with me to visit uh some amish i think it was in indiana and he had kind of a builder's eye and so he noticed that the room seemed to be quite large and spacious and another reason this kind of makes sense is that if you see the amish lighting system and i'm going to talk about that next having a more spacious area you can more easily illuminate the area so everyone can kind of you know read at night or do whatever they're doing with a single lamp number three non-electric lighting amish light their homes in different ways propane and natural gas lighting are quite common in amish homes so you may have this in the form of a propane lantern that's hung from a hook from in the ceiling there'd be a heat shield up there to kind of protect the ceiling from the heat it generates or you may have a larger mobile unit where it's basically a a fuel tank with a pole that goes out of the center of it there's like a furniture cabinet built around that and it's on wheels so you can kind of wheel that around you know to where you need the lighting you'll also see this with the fixtures actually built into the home so in the bathroom you'd have a fixture you'd have them strategically placed throughout the home where you need light this is a pretty strong light source it's pretty bright the downside is that it generates a lot of heat i remember visiting amish homes when i was selling books and i'd go into the home and it would be like later at night and uh i'd probably go and that'd come out of this time it's pretty dehydrated because uh you know they're going probably a little thirsty already from a hot summer day and then 20 minutes in there sitting under the light uh can kind of dry out and generally now when i visit my amish friends and we're playing like a board game or something i try to not sit next to that light if possible so quite effective form of lighting but generates a lot of heat well that's good in winter of course but not so much in the summertime by the way if you're enjoying this video do me a favor and give it give it a big like i appreciate that but only if you really like it so the more conservative amish will be using the oil and kerosene lamps and communities where they do that would be the among the schwarzenegger amish for example another example would be the amish at new wilmington pennsylvania which is quite a plain community those produce a dimmer light but also less heat my friends in lancaster county when i lived with them for an extended period of time if i was out kind of late they would leave an oil lantern burning on the kitchen table for me when i came home so i'd have something to see by which was always a nice thing to see when you came back amish also use battery powered lights they use classic flashlights they use the kind of heavier duty dewalt is the name of the brand of these kind of heavy-duty lights where you've got a basically a battery pack on the bottom and the light you know unit is actually quite powerful so it generates a pretty bright light they often have like a hook on them as well so that they would charge the battery you know at night using power created by a diesel generator or it could be solar power in some cases so you may actually come across light switches you know some amish homes so what's going on there well what's going on there is probably that that home was built by a non-amish person and then later purchased by the amish family it's not connected to public power but you know they'll leave the light switches in the home you also may see a place for a light switch in a newly built amish home so some amish will build in like an electric system and have a place for the switch to go and why do they do that well you know they're not using it for themselves but in the case that they end up having to sell their home that makes it more attractive to a non-amish buyer you may see that especially in a smaller newer community where the community is not so established so it's not for sure there's going to be a lot of potential amish buyers if you decide you need to leave just to mention you actually will see quite a few amish homes that are offered for sale uh online previously owned you know amish owned homes right so you can see they're obviously amish and sometimes they're even described as an amish home or farm by the way my name is eric westner obviously i'm not amish but i've actually visited somewhere between five thousand and six thousand amish homes it was a book selling job that i had where i was visiting a lot of amish families in a pretty short amount of time pretty intense job i still need to tell that story on a video so that's my background on this topic i've been in a lot of amish homes i've lived with the amish i also run the amish america site at amishamerica.com number four a propane or natural gas refrigerator so the amish use refrigerators that kind of look like conventional refrigerators well i mean i actually i should say refrigerators from like the 80s and 90s before they became these kind of giant metallic uh smart refrigerators or whatever we have now they typically have a classic look about them of the sort of the top freezer door and then the lower door for the refrigerator part these are made by at least two companies that i'm aware of one would be crystal cold of arcola illinois that's the arthur illinois community and the other would be easy freeze of shipshawana in indiana and the northern indiana settlement these are marketed to non-amish buyers as well as to the amish so you can find these online now in amish homes where this type of technology is not permitted they're going to use primarily ice-based cooling so that could be ice boxes it could be ice houses one good example of a community would be joga county ohio where ice cooling is common you'll see throughout the community these kind of commercial ice vending machine type things where you have you know the big ice written on the side and red and blue letters you'll see those throughout the community and that's one source of ice for the amish there another one and i noticed this when i was selling books in this community sometimes i'd see like notes on the door left for the iceman so they'd have an iceman delivering ice in some communities they actually harvest their own ice so they'll basically go out to a local body of water when it's cold enough and the men will have like a special saw and they'll have like picks and hooks and things and they'll they'll cut up you know the cut out chunks of ice and then they load that up onto a big wagon they've probably got a couple of belgian horses to haul it there then they have ice houses which are basically small kind of buildings that have a metal exterior and then inside they'll have some kind of insulation i believe they use sawdust you put the ice in there and you've got a source of cooling that'll last for many months very old-fashioned way of cooling but that's your that's the alternative if your church doesn't permit the propane or natural gas refrigerator finally number five a basement so basements are super common in amish homes basements are very functional spaces that the amish use for a lot of different purposes it's a nice cool place to store canned goods you often have like a second kitchen down in the basement where you can do canning uh you'll have a sink down there you know it's a second area where you can actually do some food processing it's usually a cool space so that's nice in the summer good place to do the laundry so you often have the you know the ringer washer that's common among the amish in the basement you can hold church in the basement so amish have their church services at their homes so that's either in the home of the uh family or it would be like in a workshop or another building space outside the home on the property there so with the basement it's uh couldn't be a little tight in some basements but i've been to amish church in a basement before the basement makes a good play space for children with one of my honest friends sons we played tennis ball hockey we played in their basement in that big space also have like a youth singing in the basement i've been to one of those before so it's a quite functional space some amish actually kind of live in their basements in the warmer months you know you want to escape the heat in some places it gets quite hot amish don't have air conditioning in the home except for some very rare exceptions like for medical purposes in some cases in some communities some of them spend the daytime hours and eat in the basement you may have a couch down there a sofa so quite handy i've even seen workout equipment in amish basements before like a exercise machine like a exercise bike because some amish like to get exercise that way looking at this from a little bit different angle i did a video on five surprising things you'll find in amish homes so you can check that out here i make two videos per week hit subscribe so you can stay in the loop on on upcoming videos thanks see ya [Music] you

Channel: Amish America

Views: 575,780

Keywords: Amish homes, Amish kitchen, Amish communities, Ohio Amish, Pennsylvania Amish, Swartzentruber Amish, Amish technology, Amish lighting, Amish refrigeration

Id: YNRdv2SWW8Q

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021