FULL HOUSE TOUR | Renovation of Abandoned House to Dream Home - DIY

hi i'm nate murphy and about two years ago i bought an ancient catalonian house i spent a year and a bit working on the house probably clocking in four thousand hours of really hard work and today i'm going to show you the result [Music] huh so this is the front of the house um this is the original old old door it's still got 1809 carved into the top of it however this is the actual front door always stairs going up to the main part of the house and in the bottom we have the cellar the storage and all the utilities now in the basement here in the long term i might turn into something a little bit more livable but at the moment it's basically storage we've got the washing machine which is the original washing machine which came with the house we have heat recovery unit and we have all the solar and electric stuff on the first floor this is the living part of the house so on this floor we have a dining kitchen and living room this house isn't a huge house so we have to be a little bit careful with space uh but for me and my girlfriend is pretty much perfect so this is the kitchen we have fridge freezer bunch of drawers washing machine oven induction hob and sink with a cool bendy tap they got from lithuania all of the cupboards ikea base because i mean i can order it remotely online during the pandemic and then obviously install them myself and the worktop i made myself because the kitchen's not quite square the walls aren't quite square in this house so i had to kind of custom make that the floor here has underfloor heating and it's concrete tiles and the concrete tiles also match the tiles you put on the wall the tiles on the wall basically provide a really nice sort of minimalistic style effect and is also pretty cost effective [Music] in the corner cupboard it's obviously always this tidy but we have a a corner rotating cupboard unit um and because of the weird shape and size of this kitchen um i used a couple of like cupboards end parts and just screwed them all in and that provides like a bottle storage and i have storage space this window has a quite a beautiful view but the it was a lot lower the old kitchen was incredibly low and the windows kind of impacted the taps and they sort of still do so i basically raised up made the window smaller and that means we can actually open the window where we are in the kitchen aircon unit which comes from a single box on the wall outside and goes to the bedroom and this room in a hot summer day the uh solar on the roof will continuously very easily power the air pond which means the airport is essentially free when it's hot if we cool the house down during the daytime and then when the night temperatures drop anyway actually in the middle of summer we can get away with pretty much free cooling in the house the artwork is pending i need to make some but i'll just be too busy these are the lights which basically come over it's like a sort of dull atmospheric light and the tricky bit with these ceilings and things it's quite hard to run electrics anywhere in the middle of the room so i've gone for this system where i can basically just have lights hooked and i can move the lights based on uh wherever i want them to be uh with these heads so it's quite an easy way of bringing my lights across the room uh without uh having conduit and pipe or cutting through the beams which would be a difficult and probably look a little bit ugly so i do the same thing with table light it has gives us three different positions one i can have it so it goes all the way down so you have like a layer cable light at the same time i can bring it up to get out of the way because if we move the table away then this light just stays in the middle of the room so i can walk under it without hitting my head these little uh knob things uh just makes a really easy way to have a light in the middle of the room with variable height so for the doors in the house originally i was ordering them from france um they were quite uh cheap quite good quality um unfortunately the pandemic ki washed out and there's no way to actually get those doors so i ended up getting custom-made doors delivered to fit the sizes of the doors i was going to get in france and they're actually really nice quality all the doors going into new door spaces were basically made with the frames which makes it very easy to install and the doors which were using existing frames in the house like this one were basically custom made to size and then to fit them they were playing down just to kind of get them into the frames um yeah they work really well they're super good quality but they were also pretty expensive in this space originally there was um sort of like a cupboard and a random hole and behind this like random hole i found like those are silver coins in a box full of notes it's quite cool um so it's like the treasure corner at the moment it is the dog bed um i made all of these um shelves and copper units out of the spare oak flooring and that lent the ability to make these like nice little cupboards in this cupboard we basically use it as like a charge in a power station if i ever have the house reconnected to the telephone line um i'll be able to run a telephone line in here and have things like a router which always looks a bit ugly on display in the house but it will easily sit in here and we can just keep it as a cable nest and just shut the door and pretend it doesn't exist originally these beams were like pretty much black we had someone come in i tried to rent a sandblast machine but it wasn't possible uh and thank goodness for that because it was looked like a really really horrible piece of work [Music] um and basically had it all sound blasted so sandblasting came back to the sort of original color of the beams which i think looks really nice uh and also stripped back the strip back the plaster and stuff off the concrete all of the walls um i've insulated and plasterboarded which was a total faff because everything's like different shapes and sizes but with the insulation it means it's much easier to heat the house you have much less heat loss but the downside of having an insulator walls on the inside is you have less thermal mass in your house now this is where the ceiling actually works really well the ceiling is probably several tons of concrete and when we heat the house in the day or when the sun comes in the window and heats the house in the winter the big slab of the ceiling essentially works as a big thermal store and we know that because you can feel what the floor is warm upstairs and as it emits heat so the combination of having insulated walls to reduce heat loss but also retaining a big chunk of concrete as a thermal store between the two floors of the upper part of the house works really well this is a wood burning fire with a back boiler stove so that basically means that when you're burning the wood inside it it has a water jacket which encases the fire that heats the water up and then you pump the water around the house all the radiators so this is my last resort if the soda's not providing enough heat if we haven't had enough heat coming through the windows in the winter um from the sun then we have fire the fire goes to five radiators one on the other side of this room and then also in the two bedrooms and the bathroom to put the fire here i had to jack up this beam cut it off remove this obviously this space and then put in they call it a yola here and put this beam cross beam in which goes into the wall and jacks onto this uh other beam uh and then cast a concrete floor up there um but leaving the space for my chimney to go up the fire half is a five centimeter concrete slab um it's all obviously tiled and then we've tiled around it with these kind of nice textured tiles throughout the house i've used this solid oak flooring it's really beautiful wood i had to ship it from the uk because it was much cheaper than buying it here in spain and this here this is one of the uh heat recovery inlets there isn't really a way for me to bring it into the walls on this side of the house only on that side so i draw inlet in through this floor and then it takes it out above the kitchen so this is the heat recovery unit it basically draws air out of the damp rooms in the house so your bathrooms and your kitchens it recovers the heat and puts that heat into fresh air which is going into the bedrooms so you always have fresh air constant circulation it eliminates the likelihood of mold and other things in your house and it's actually just a pleasure because you wake up in the morning and you don't have to open a window for fresh air because you have fresh air 24 7. the heat recovery part saves you energy because you do always need airflow throughout your house and this basically is about 85 efficient in transferring the heat into the fresh air coming in which basically means you have fresh air continuously but it's not pure cold air coming in from the house so it kind of serves two purposes one is environmentally beneficial and has cost savings for your heating and the other is just an absolute pleasure to live in a house with constant fresh air these are all the heat recovery pipes going to different parts of the house um and this is our new mains uh waste pipe which is obviously coming from all the toilets and all the sinks and things like that at the moment dave's been using this as like a little weird film studio so you get some of my weird art and whatever in there um using this is like a gear room which is you know it's a pretty basic room but um so you've got climbing gear all of the other climbing stuff some art supplies but mostly climbing gear and in the top corner this is the circulation pump coming from the back of the fire the wood burning fire has a back boiler and that basically will pump the water all around the radiators and provide heat in from the fire so the kitchen we have two main light options we have the lights which go over the counters the led strips and in this corner we have the spotlights which kind of lights up this corner really nicely this extractor in a normal heat recovery system you would have it connected straight to your heat recovery but for this house um because it's not possible to have my heat recovery with a going up through the roof any kitchen extraction must be going through a chimney one meter bobby roof so the kitchen extraction main from the hob is up through the roof it's not the perfect situation but it is uh compliant with the local regulations this is the controller for the heat recovery um if we just press it once it will boost it if you press it twice it will boost it for an extra half an hour you know if we're cooking something which has made a lot of fumes we can just boost the heat recovery and it will extract the air at a faster rate so this is the downstairs toilet also known as the museum so in the museum obviously it is a toilet we have a sink but we also have these lit units which will have museum exhibits which will show you old stuff which was found in the house be it letters really old photographs um weaponry ancient coins which we found so it would be really interesting journey of history of the house because almost everything else has been changed so with the sink unit the sink and the tap were retained from a neighbor who were doing a renovation um which has kind of got a cool effect for the room and this is spare countertop from the kitchen and i welded this out with a spare balcony rail so essentially the whole unit was completely free the museum cabinets i basically made them to exactly fit and they're also made out of spare floorboards and just acrylic [Music] this wall was pretty much entirely removed [Music] there was two doorways at each end quite narrow uh and it covered in the middle uh once we stripped it out there were two pillars left uh and then we replaced the lintels which was two long wooden beams which had been kind of cut and modified over time and we replaced them with iron beams two big iron beams which were back filled with concrete in the end result was this four meter by two meter hole which we filled with a custom made window it was quite a large investment in comparison to the total cost of the house but it really really makes the space probably the thing i love most about the house is what lies outside the house to have a view of vertical looking forest and mountains is really really a privilege in front of us this long finger of rock this is for goals it's got climbing from 5a to 9a and behind you have moldy pitches and in this area for someone like me who loves climbing it's got endless climbing so one of the other really cool things about these big windows is that in the middle of winter it could be january and if we have a sunny day we just don't have to heat the house because the sun will hit all the way to the back of the room the room actually gets pretty warm it heats the entire house because we also have a big window upstairs uh and then the evening obviously slowly reduces in temperature but that peak of warmth heats up the thermal mass in the ceiling uh and it just works really really well so basically if we have a sunny day which we generally do in january at least 20 days a month we didn't actually have to heat the house especially as it's not a huge house being able to have the feel that this is also part of your house you've got this big outdoor living space it's really really nice [Music] so this is the balcony outside the living room um originally there was like a big wall here it was very uneven this was at a different level and in the end what i did is i removed everything which is about the concrete laid a new concrete slab with an overhang for the kind of water runoff and then basically made all of these rails welded them up welded this structure which holds the balcony above and yeah now we have a really really nice balcony the view is not really interrupted by a wall anymore um and by removing the wall we actually ended up with quite a bit extra space the process of learning to weld and building this entire structure was one of the most satisfying parts of the build because they see it all the time when you look out the window and b it's just really freaking good so out here um you might notice this in let this inlet feeds the fire so rather than the fire drawing air through your house from outside to burn and send fumes up the chimney it takes it from directly outside which is basically a lot more effective from a heating perspective we also have some outdoor plugs which just kind of come through the wall this is one of the beams which holds up the entire front of the house over the window uh and we basically just painted it black uh just to fit it in uh it looks smart my original thought was to make like a fake beam on top but actually i'm happier with it just painted black [Music] on the roof i have 6400 watts of sailor and that all comes into the big inverter and that obviously will power the house but when we're not using all the energy in the house directly this solar eye boost will direct the power to other sources so it will go first to the hot water tank and make sure the hot water tank is always hot and then it will go to under floor heating or into storage heaters so it's a way of trying to use as much of the energy we generate on the roof within the house [Music] so i've basically divided up my electric box by floor and you don't really need this many switches but the nice thing was when i was building the house once a whole floor was finished i could start using that floor and the second floor isn't finished that means you can basically turn it all off and kind of work my way down through the house we also have power coming from here which protects the cable going into the barn which we'll show you later this is the center meter which shows the total solar output since we've started to use in the house so i guess that's about six months we saved about 500 euros of electricity [Music] so let's go upstairs so this is the hallway in the top of the house and on my right we have the bathroom on my left we have a spare bedroom and behind you is the main bedroom so this room is the second bedroom um it's a reasonably snug room i mostly use it as an office but we have a simple sofa bed if we need it for guests in this corner is a niche which is storage again i've heard charging points in the niche say that we didn't have to have cables dragging around everywhere um and it basically has a bunch of my heart stuff and some notebooks all the doors and windows which aren't the giant one at the front of the downstairs come from france and they're all solid oak um really really nice windows to put this one in we had to basically take out all of the top of the wall and replace the lint holes which i use some of the beams we took out of the downstairs window space uh and basically raised that so we could fit the door in we retailed the balcony with the same tiles as the lower balcony and these railings these are the original railings which we just painstakingly scraped down cleaned up and revarnished i really like them they're really strong i was standing on them doing work on the house so i pretty much trust them that they're structurally sound so this is my desk area it's a nice up and down desk i've been spending a lot of time here working on a research project and a book about ideas and ideology if you're interested about that check this channel here there's no content but follow it anyway this ceiling has another floor above it so basically just put in spotlights very easy in this corner of the room we have heat recovery sending air into this room fresh air from outside so coming from the second bedroom above it i made a third bedroom it's not really like a bedroom you'd probably use permanently but it's a great another guest bedroom so this little niche is basically built out on a structural floor um and it just means that we have another bedroom for the times we want to host more people and it's actually like a really cozy little little nook as you can see the roof is entirely new it's got 10 centimeters of foam insulation which is in the sandwich which is basically these pre-fabricated bits which all slot together and basically we whipped off the old roof banged on a new one [Music] this huge seven meter beam was uh a bit of an effort to get on the roof without a crane i cut the face of some old drawers i found in the house and basically plaster boarded and screwed them in to make these niches but other than that it's useful just to have an extra bedroom that we can effectively use so opposite the bedroom niche we basically have another little loft space which is just open and it basically is a good place to store stuff so this is the bathroom the bathroom has made bathrooms we have a sink unit toilet and a shower [Music] the sink unit itself i made from pretty much all spare junk um this top unit is a marble which used to be in the original kitchen in the house all of these drawers are made from the floorboards which i had left over in the house and they make such nice sturdy drawers and the frame itself was again welded up from balcony rails which i had left over in this unit i made two drawers one for myself one for my girlfriend we have a middle drawer which contains toilet roll and other stuff and at the bottom we have a rack for clean towels so to make this bathroom i really had to square up the walls and that left quite a sizable space behind this wall which i've made but i can store the toilet mechanism for the inbuilt toilet uh and gave me a lot of space to run on what pipe work this shelf as well is made from floorboards it's just such a nice wood and i had quite a lot of flavors so almost everything in the house which is made of wood which isn't bought uh is also made from leftover floors this is towel radiator the towel radiator also is coming from the back boiler and the fire and obviously at the end we have a shower the shower is 120 by 80 and yeah it's a really nice shower unit this window used to be larger um but i didn't want such a large window in the shower so i basically made the windows smaller and then i filled it in with these bricks so and you have privacy um but i also really like the effect so in the bathroom the heat recovery is extracting and it works really really well um obviously especially when it's cold you have lots of hot showers then you have some condensation but then you come back in the room an hour later and it's just dry in both bathrooms there's a boost button which enables the heat recovery unit to suck a little bit faster to transfer the air faster so if you've had a shower or you've made smell you can press the boost button and it just lifts the air out a little bit faster and now this is the master bedroom so here in the master bedroom where i'm informed you must say where the magic happens um is yeah we've got a super king-sized bed it's really nice and spacious this uh box here is where the chimney comes up so it has to be a little bit larger and in the corner we've got space for shelving and at the end we have this really really beautiful window [Music] this window is 220 by 2 meters and to put it in we remove the entire wall up to the center on which is the the bond beam we put around the house when we did the roof and yeah it just opens up really nicely into the balcony [Music] so in the bedroom we have the other aircon split which comes up from outside on that side of the house so directly below is the other aircon unit in the living room similar to downstairs we have three lighting rings we have the up lights which are on the dimmer which light up the top of the beams we have the up down lights as well and for atmospheric reasons we have this lower energy light which we can also dim sits in the corner this corner we have a little workday uh and it also probably has the best work desk view in the house this is the upper part of the balcony so on this balcony um firstly part of you is insane this is santa fe really it's stunning there's no other way around it we have up down lights as well um it's obviously been decked out the railings again i made them and yeah it's very nice place for sort of contemplative fort because you can just sit here and you have this feeling of exposure because you're really quite high up and you're really looking down on this huge valley straight over to the forest the mountains and the mountains and the view changes all the time throughout the season of the nature you have these huge vultures who saw by then the eagles and the other birds of prey and the swifts and the songbirds it's it's really uh it's really a magical place [Music] so under the balcony is like a separate contained room it used to be a pigsty with a really wonky floor and a very small window but now we have fully renovated it and my friend alice is staying at it at the moment hiding out the pandemic it's a really nice little room light airy this window here gives like super beautiful view to the mountains so that is the house and now we're going to show you the barn and the training area [Music] with my house came this quite large barn the barn actually at one point used to be a house and then it was converted into for agricultural use uh and as you can see we have built a pretty nice climbing wall it's about 48 degrees overhanging pretty tough got some rings it's just a really nice training setup for rock climbing this is where we're storing the wood and eventually i'm going to make some hanging things for washing them [Music] through here we have the outdoor kitchen and a nice extra space for training hanging out having dinner with friends it's yeah it's really nice to have this outdoor space [Music] [Applause] here it's a little bit of a mess when i was making furniture but yeah we've got two nice big benches this is a dirt bike shower for the people who are just hanging out and camping yeah it's a nice workshop swiss so along with the house and barn we also have a few terraces going down the hill which day has transformed into a really beautiful fruit and vegetable garden [Music] so that's the end of the tour thanks so much for watching i hope you enjoyed it as much as i enjoyed working 4 000 hours building the house but otherwise uh i have written a book for how to renovate a house so it's got all the details of my build all the information all the costing so if you're thinking about doing something like that i pull the information in a place that you can access and you can see the links in the description um other than that like subscribe share the video and i'll see you soon

Channel: Nate Murphy

Views: 625,148

Keywords: home renovation, house renovation, before and after, property renovation, house restoration, house renovation spain, house restoration before and after, renovation, remodeling, debt free, diy, diy renovation, remodel, real estate, abandoned house, abandoned house renovation, flipping, first time buyer, dream house, mountain house, house makeover, home renovation diy, restoration diy, home renovation time lapse, renovating a house, home renovation before and after

Id: H7FrzLoBw6c

Length: 29min 26sec (1766 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021