- So we walked into the bathroom.
There was no photos of the bathroom on the listing.
And we walked into the bathroom and we just started gasping.
(cheerful jazz music)
Hi guys, I'm Stevie.
And today I'm gonna give you a tour of our new house
that is completely empty.
I believe the kids are calling that an empty house tour.
So yes, we did just move six months ago.
And now we just moved again.
If you don't know why,
then click the link in the description to go
and watch the video explaining why we had to move again.
Spoiler alert, rats.
Also, thank you so much to the sponsor of this video,
BetterHelp.
Stay tuned to find more out about them in a little bit.
I did ask you guys for some questions for us
over on my Instagram.
So I'm gonna answer a few of those throughout the video
while I'm giving you a tour.
Josie.
- [Josie] Why did we decide on this house?
- The bathroom.
Hilarious, because Josie's mom walked into the bathroom
and said, "Yuck!"
It's not everyone's taste.
- [Josie] Where do we get our ideas and inspo from?
- Right.
Josie can rattle them all off.
So we follow a few designers on Instagram
and just like GI wires as well.
Louiseroehome.
- [Josie] Louise.
- Matildagoad.
I love Matildagoad.
We are not as quirky as her though,
but we do like small amusing decor pieces.
I want my house to like, make me laugh, you know?
House & Garden. - House & Garden
YouTube channel.
We're obsessed with them.
- Okay, so onto the tour.
So first, when you first walk into the house,
there's this giant door with windows.
It's basically, it's called a reception room in England,
but it's just a living room.
Yeah, so we're calling it the breakfast room.
So this is where our dining table will go.
I have plans of building a really long bench seat
because lately I've realized
that sitting in dining chairs increases my pain by a lot,
for like usually a week afterwards.
With Josie's family, we really like to play board games.
So I'm like interested and in it, and like leaning over.
Usually if I'm in a reclined position,
that's the best for me to stay reclined as much as possible.
Yeah, I'm gonna try to figure out how to do that cheaply
because the last one, the foam part
was the most expensive part.
It was absolutely ridiculous.
We'll see how that works out.
Anyway, our dining table is gonna go in front of that,
and then it'll be my plant room
because it's a south facing window.
So it's got a lot of really good natural light.
And we plan to paint it.
We already started actually.
Two shades of like terra cotta.
One is more red and one is more pink shade of terra cotta.
So the ceiling will be the pinkish terra cotta
and the walls will be a dark red terra cotta
because it's the brightest room in the house,
so it can take a darker color.
So then obviously if that's the south facing part
of the house, then obviously behind that is gonna be
the north facing part of the house.
But there's really good windows throughout the whole house,
which we're really excited.
Also it's a bungalow.
So it's only on one floor.
I think that someone asks like how,
what were your absolute necessities in a house?
And that's definitely one of them.
It needed to be a bungalow.
So no stairs, please.
Thank you.
I want to interrupt your regularly scheduled programming
for a word from our sponsors.
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So then you walk into the kitchen.
So there is a little area off of the kitchen
that you walk through first.
Two little areas, actually, the one that you first see
when you walk through is a little mud room,
I think is what it's called.
So it's just like where the washer and dryer
are gonna be and all of our cleaning stuff.
Yeah, it took us a very long time to find a washer
that's gonna fit there.
It did not come with a washer or dryer.
Thankfully, we already had a dryer from our first place
that we lived in in England together.
It didn't come with a dryer, so...
Yeah, so we're still waiting for the washer to come.
So we've been washing clothes in the bathroom sink.
Can't wait.
We have a lot of laundry now.
So we really should have washed literally everything
before we moved, but you know-
- Yeah- - Josie got COVID.
We had a lot of
(tambourine clanging) to deal, all right?
So you walk in, you see the mud room,
but then to the right of it is this little area
that I think was supposed to be like a dining area,
like a dining, kitchen diner, I think is what it's called.
So it's supposed to have like
a little breakfast table there,
but we are turning that into the pantry.
Before we moved in,
when we were envisioning our lives in this house,
we were mostly excited about the pantry.
Like we have drawings of exactly how we want it to look
from every single angle, every single wall.
Because the kitchen is pretty small,
it's the smallest kitchen we've lived in together.
- Cozy. - It's cozy though.
It's really compact.
I think it will be fully adequate,
but I don't want to waste the cupboard space on food
and also like really big things
that I cook with like a big gumbo pot.
So yeah, then you turn to the kitchen and we've got
♪ Ah ♪
an AGA, which I had never heard of before.
So it's basically an oven and a stove,
but it's on all the time.
Yeah, so I think it's like a really posh people thing,
(cash register ringing) a rich people thing.
Yeah, but it's also countryside at the same time, but yeah,
it's in a rental, like who puts an AGA in a rental?
Anyway, I'm so excited.
I got some AGA books books for Christmas.
Jesse and Claude got me "Mary Berry's AGA Cookbook."
So yeah, but it's on all the time.
So it kind of acts like a radiator basically
to heat the house.
You can also like iron clothes on top of it.
You can dry clothes on top of it.
Like, it's so cool.
All of this, so the whole area, the mudroom,
the pantry, and the kitchen,
we are going to paint a,
it's very similar to our first living room
that we had together is called like French Gray
by Farrow and Ball.
But we're going with Lick paints.
So all, everything's gonna be Lick in the whole house.
Green 09 is gonna be the color
'cause it's a north facing area of the house.
Also green is very calming.
We wanted to have like a light and airy feel,
which is also why we're painting the cabinets.
We haven't decided yet.
We don't have the Lick paint yet,
but we're thinking some kind of like creamy...
- Creamy white. - Not white, but like-
- [Josie] With like a little mushroomy brown.
- We'll see, we'll see.
And then we have that bright red AGA, which will be,
which will bring in the colors from the breakfast room,
you know, the red.
So like we got a good balance of cold colors
and warm colors, hopefully.
Anyway, so through the mud room,
it goes into the back garden,
but I didn't get any footage of that yet.
It's the middle of winter.
I haven't really spent a lot of time back there,
but it is a wraparound garden.
It's so nice.
We really, really love it.
I've got a lot of mature bushes and some trees.
So after you leave the kitchen,
there is the main reception room or living room
or the lounge, I think we're just gonna call it the lounge.
The living room.
It's got in.
There's carpet in there.
It's absolutely disgusting, very old, very stained.
We pulled it up, and underneath is some vinyl flooring like,
like fake laminate wood flooring.
I thought it was fine, but Josie really, really hated it.
Sucks because in the breakfast room,
when you first walk in, there's like original vintage,
like thin panel wood floors, and they're so beautiful.
So it really sucks
that they didn't continue that throughout.
But yeah, I think we're gonna get carpet replaced in there
'cause it's kind of a cold room.
So what are we doing in the lounge?
We don't know yet.
We really wanted to do a wallpaper, but yeah,
we'll have to look at Lick's selection of wallpaper
and see if anything looks vintage-y enough.
We have a really long couch.
So either the couch will face the window
or the couch will face towards here.
There's two chimney breasts in there.
So it's kind of like, where do we put the TV
without it being the center of attention?
Like, how do we cover,
like you can't have two chimney breasts in the same room
and like put fireplaces on both.
That's kind of silly.
Oh, we're gonna be replacing the fireplaces.
So when we first got here,
they had two windows on either side of the fireplace
that were boarded up with like these white pieces
of particle board.
So we obviously smashed through that.
And then also all the fireplaces in the house are boarded up
and they put these like fake fireplaces in front of them
that aren't even centered, first of all.
What the hell?
And they don't provide any heat.
They just like have lights on them.
They're so modern looking- - It's the ugliest thing.
- And they do not fit the house.
So I think we're gonna try to see how difficult
slash expensive it'll be to put in like those little heaters
that look like log burners, but aren't.
- [Josie] They're electric.
- But they're electric.
And it's in both, both reception rooms.
So that'll be going.
But the fireplace mantel itself
in the lounge is absolutely gorgeous.
It looks really, really old, even though it's kind of small.
And then the view out to the garden
in the back window is so cute.
Can't wait to figure out where the best place would be
to put a little raised bed for some vegetables
or flowers or something.
And there's two little windows.
And then the other chimney breast has like
these two shelves on either side of it.
And I think we want to try to build like bookshelves in
to where it kind of has library vibes,
but that's all we decided so far about the lounge.
So if you have any ideas about what you would do
in this space, let me know in the comments.
Right now, the texture of the wall is like giraffe skin,
something.
Okay, what's next?
Your favorite place to hide?
- [Josie] It says I'm Josie.
- Oh my goodness.
So Gumbo really likes, (Gumbo meowing)
we just like kind of threw this little chair in the bedroom,
and he's absolutely obsessed with it.
I don't think we can leave, we can move it now.
It needs to stay in here.
Also, by the way, everything in our house
from Facebook Marketplace secondhand,
- Or Etsy. - Like almost everything.
Or Etsy or eBay, which is why it's so affordable
for us to collect nice vintage things.
And I love it.
Josie's favorite space to hide is right here.
(Josie laughing) She loves taking naps.
The big reveal, (drums rolling)
the reason why we knew this house was for us,
or at least Josie did, on the day that we did the viewing,
the realtors didn't really put a lot of photos
of the house online,
but we didn't know that it was a three bedroom bungalow,
which is exactly what we need, because in England
when they say three bedrooms, they only mean two bedrooms.
The third bedroom is like a closet in America.
So we're gonna be using the third bedroom as storage.
So we walked into the bathroom.
There was no photos of the bathroom on the listing.
And we walked into the bathroom and we just started gasping.
The real estate agent was like standing in the corner,
like (person screaming)
so uncomfortable because he obviously didn't put any photos
of the bathroom online because he thought it was ugly.
And I think a lot of people would think it's ugly.
It's like our, well, at least Josie's dream is
to have a dark green bathroom and to have like
really loud wallpaper on the top.
And basically we walked in and the wallpaper was peeling
off the wall, and we peeled it back,
and it had a dark green floral behind it.
And it was like, (ethereal instrumental music)
she was losing her mind.
- Mm-hm. - She was like,
"We absolutely have to have this house."
Also all of the porcelain, so the sink and the toilets
and the bathtub, I think,
are all like these like really nice, it has like a stamp
of like a custom porcelain maker in Italy or something.
So yeah, it's got like a nice little bathtub.
It's got a lot of space to walk around.
It's got like a pedestal sink at the back and a shower.
And the shower came with a pull-down seat.
And I've already showered in it, and it's so nice.
So we will be taking down that top layer of wallpaper
and revealing the green underneath.
And I think we're gonna make it really busy with lots
of frames and art and shelves and stuff all over it.
There's two bedrooms.
The first bedroom, it's got, it's like a football
or like a basketball texture on the wall.
I have no idea how they achieved that.
I don't know if it's wallpaper or what, but it's awful,
but it's fine because we're gonna be covering it
with shelves and stuff
'cause it's going to be extra storage.
So that's another thing.
This house does not have an attached garage.
So a lot of the things that we had in our garage
at the last place, we'll have to be keeping in this bedroom.
Also our refrigerator,
they call them American fridge freezers here
because they're not this big.
Obviously I'm American, so I need an American fridge.
Does not fit anywhere in the house.
So even in the little pantry area in the kitchen,
there's no electricity.
So we can't plug in a fridge there.
So the fridge and freezer
in the kitchen are underneath the countertops.
They're like these tiny little fridge freezer
underneath the countertops,
which is good enough for the fresh food,
but extra drinks and all my ice packs
and all of Gumbo's food that is frozen needs
to be in a bigger one.
That'll stay in there.
And then the next room is like really sweet and cute.
And it would be like such a perfect little kids' room,
but right now it's gonna be our guest room.
So that is on the south facing part of the house.
So those are gonna be really bright rooms.
It'll be really nice.
So I think we're definitely gonna need
heavier window treatments in there.
So then the master, which has an en suite,
which is another thing that we needed
because we like to have Gumbo's litter situation
in a second shower so that we can fan out stuff.
And like, you know, all the muckiness can be kept
in a place that has a drain, basically.
They have this like wall to wall set of mirrored,
so that's the room we're in right now,
set of mirrored wardrobes.
And they're really nice.
They're actually Ikea PAX wardrobes.
So we'll be able to change the mirrors,
'cause we don't really like the mirror-fronted
wardrobes. - How many times
are you gonna say mirror?
- Mirror.
- [Josie] Mirror, mirror.
- Josie hates how I say mirror.
But those wardrobes gonna be being moved
into the storage room, so it'll also be our closet.
Bed, the headboard is gonna go against that wall,
which will open up so much space in here.
We're not sure where the bedroom TV is gonna go.
We'll see, but we're not really changing much in this room.
We might give it a fresh coat of paint
to where it's like,
off-white to keep it like nice and creamy
and light and airy in here because our-
- Creamy! - Creamy.
Bedroom furniture is all like dark beige
and then the dark wood.
So I think that'll be a nice contrast
if we just keep it light and airy in here.
Yeah, is that the end of the tour?
Oh, let's answer a few questions.
- [Josie] What's the big difference
between this house and the last one?
- So they are very similar in vibe.
It's like granny, isn't it?
It's like granny's live-in bungalows in England.
So the biggest thing that we're excited about,
the difference between this house and the other house,
is the layout, because last house, the kitchen was,
it was a really long skinny house,
and the kitchen was on one end,
and the living room was on the other end.
So like literally anytime we needed to go get a drink
or if we had people over, it was not very social house.
So here there's like this big entryway
where the dining table is,
and you can like hear and see through to the kitchen
and the pantry and all that.
I really like the heart of the house is in the middle
of the house where it should be, right?
- [Josie] What did we compromise on?
- The garage.
There's no dishwasher.
We might be looking into how, like,
what do people do in tiny homes for a dishwasher?
Like people that put dishwashers on boats.
We have a couple of cabinets
that maybe would work for a dishwasher.
So we'll see how expensive that is.
- But they're not- - Josie's brother
is a plumber, so...
- [Josie] They're not like full-sized cabinets though.
They're like skinny cabinets.
- I know.
Do we always agree?
Absolutely not.
Well, it's not that we have similar tastes,
it's that we've found our,
the thing that we both have in common as far as our tastes,
and that's where we kind of angle our things towards.
Josie is usually the one that goes outside
of our compromise zone and tries to like push me
to think outside of the box, which is really good
'cause usually I'm kind of scared of color, honestly.
Okay, thank you guys so much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed the empty house tour.
Please give me any ideas in the comments
for what you would do, what you think we should do.
Are you mad that we're gonna be painting the cabinets?
Let me know. (Josie laughing)
Yeah, and I'll see you guys next time.
Thanks so much to BetterHelp for sponsoring this video,
and thanks so much to my lovely patrons
for making videos like this possible.
If you want to become a patron,
you can click the link in the description and I don't know,
come and join the discord.
We'll have a chat.
I love you guys so much.
See you soon.
Bye!
(cheerful jazz music)