hey guys jenna here welcome to my channel where i take you on tours of unique houses and share
the stories behind the owners that call them home in every neighborhood there's that one house that
just turns heads it's the house that everybody's curious about well in today's video i'm going to
show you perhaps the most colorful home in the entire country and it belongs to a woman
who's famous online for making incredible sweaters catwise is going to open the doors to her eclectic
home and take us on a tour of this amazing space that actually matches her personality
this home has been her labor of love and you can just tell that she loves every single inch of it
but my favorite part is the sentiment that she leaves us with at the end of this video so make
sure to watch all the way through so that you can hear it and if you like these kind of videos make
sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell so that you'll know every time i post a new video
hello i'm catwise and this is my home calico in the hudson valley
before starting my life as a crazy homeowner i spent 15 years just hitchhiking all over the
world so i went to about 100 different countries and before that i followed the grateful dead so i
became fluent in school buses and living out in the woods and weird alternative
lifestyle stuff years and years i just i never spent more than three months in one place
and then finally 12 years ago i was like i want to get a house and just kind of landed here and
exploded and so we found this super charming 1840s farmhouse and when i say charming i mean like um
potential to be charming because it was kind of neglected and we were super naive and i think only
a naive person would embark on this journey because as most people told us afterwards
the house was probably in a state where it should have been torn down but we didn't know that so we
just started fixing it this house consists of the main 1840s farmhouse which has a bunch of bedrooms
and additions and little nooks and then behind it there's a barn where i keep my school bus
and behind the barn we have a little stage and a green room and the green room's super cute
it's where guests stay especially during covid where people couldn't stay in the house they
would go stay in the in the purple barn behind that up on the hill there's this really cool
tiny poston beam rainbow house that was some rich person's chicken coop and i found it on craigslist
and painted it rainbow but it is so cute it's got all cute old like wavy glass windows it's
just so precious and it's only 10 feet by 10 feet but it's two stories high
and when i'm in there i'm like this is all i need i should get three of these they're so great
i get i get confused between being like i don't need anything so give me lots of it
and i have my big bus which
i lived in in santa cruz for a long time and took out the burning man and stuff in the 90s
so for years and years when i was traveling especially with a grateful dead i would make
patchwork clothes and sell them at the concert so that's always been what i've done even though i
went to college like i still just make patchwork clothes it's funny i should have just never gone
to college i guess somebody's like have you heard of this site called etsy which was this brand new
website and i got super lucky and was one of the first shops to open up there so even though
i don't know i still don't know very much about internet marketing or photographs or
any of that but because i was an early adapter my shop got really popular and i was able to leave
new york city and leave the big crowds and move up into the woods and just sew so i have my little
studio up in the attic and those sweaters are like the little engine that pays for all of this
and so for me i sometimes call this the house that sweater's built because if it weren't for etsy and
if it weren't for my sweaters like there's no way we could have afforded all the repairs on it
this is the kitchen which is always one of the most important rooms of the house where people
hang out so i wanted to make it the most soothing color and it's
all everything is vintage mid-century seafoam green it started with this little toaster i had
and it spread like a contagion and then all the furniture just turned seafoam my house
is so rainbow and chaotic that i wanted one room that was all one soothing color here's our little
sunny breakfast nook so when we moved up here from brooklyn 12 years ago we looked at so many
properties and one of the things that made us really fall in love with this specific one is
because there was a woman who had lived here for 60 years and raised her children here and they
had all grown and left and she was still here and as a memory of her we left this wall here
where she had measured all her children back from like the 1960s onward and then when our friends
that we put them on the wall too all of our friends are tall though so they're all up here
but this is like this treasure that we will never paint over we i feel so fortunate to have
inherited this house from such a wonderful family so i drink my coffee in the morning and i look at
this beautiful portrait of blanche devereaux from the golden girl she's made out of garbage
and she's my pride and joy sometimes i think if the house burned down this is what i would
clutch and run out of the house with although it would probably just all melt
one of my favorite little corners of the house is this hallway down to the basement it looks
all country kitsch here but you open the door and it's like whoa psychedelic 60s black light hallway
so when we put the fish tank in i thought that it was amazing that i found this fish tank for
like a hundred dollars but we ended up like collapsing the whole wall and the foundation
and having to put in steel i-beams and porous lab and we ended up with this new hallway
and a little guest nook here which i decorated in a way that i personally find lovely but
according to the people on instagram it would be really creepy to sleep here
here is the bathroom which started out just as plain boring white and eventually gruesome plants
and a little bit of stained glass a lamp made by ricky bascarino of luna park one of my prize
possessions so much of the house is so crazy that we just want to keep the bathroom kind of calm and
clean feeling so the kitchen is kind of the main thoroughfare between the front of the house
and the back gardens and then on the left of the staircase is my very favorite special
yoga room i took all the furniture out of this room and covered it in mirrors
and this is where i come every morning and do my yoga
another one of my prized possessions is the miss pacman machine which just broke or else
i'd show you how great i am at it that's a lie i'm really bad at it this room we call
the gentleman's quarters in the winter it's lovely to have the fire going and we have a
pull-down screen and this is where we watch movies and this is just like the cozy warm
snuggly room with other guest beds so this room is the one that's the most autobiographical to me
because when i look around i see all the different fabrics and things i brought home from my travels
so there's indian saris and ecuadorian velvet and turkish curtains and just all all sorts of things
that remind me what my life was like before i got this crazy house and had to got the ball and chain
put around me i love having the map of the world that is i just sit here and stare at it and then
we have another room that's kind of special it's my boyfriend's room because he's very indulgent
about letting me do all these stupid decorations so he has a special little corner of the house
where i'm not really allowed um and so tada it's the secret room it's uh his little man library
so my boyfriend's a musician and he likes sitting here and play his banjo and thing
and he is a science fiction nerd he's got all his precious books and then in here he has
the gotch my favorite thing about this room are these crazy walls which came from a church
and i just saw them on craigslist one day it was like church door and so i went down and got
it from some super sketchy mattress warehouse and paramus and they fit exactly perfectly in
this room and i love it because it makes it feel like this is some regal old like hogwarts library
so that's most of it downstairs now i'll show you upstairs which is more of my world
i painted the staircase like an optical illusion it's kind of a tripping hazard so i put this
bar at the bottom so that when i fall i just like grab onto it and swing so far no one's gotten hurt
here's some more stained glass windows they came from the mansion of the man who wrote frosty the
snowman i got them on craigslist and this is my bedroom over here we call it the sky lounge
because when everything in the house felt so crazy just made something that was a little calmer the
bed is made all out of old architectural salvage stuff that we kind of pieced together i also
wanted a canopy bed when i was little so i finally after years of living in my backpack and sleeping
wherever i finally landed and got my own bed and built it all like a beautiful like
a chariot to dreamland and another thing i do whenever i see some dejected stuffed animal
i want to like save them and bring them home to my little orphanage for for like sad animals but
i mean i'm still kind of sad she doesn't appreciate everything i've done for her
now coming this way is my studio where i sew my sweaters
as i mentioned before to make my sweaters i go to millions of thrift stores constantly and one
of the things that happens when you go to thrift stores all the time is you start collecting stuff
so i started collecting needle points and it's fun to have a place to display all of them like
every single one of them is kind of ugly but when you put them all together they're sort of magical
and this is where i sew i take sweaters and i cut them up and i make new sweaters out of them and
i sell them on etsy so i spend hours and hours and hours a day here at my serger just cutting
and sewing sweaters this is the sort of thing i make it this is old like fisherman sweaters
from the erin islands and stuff and so they're pretty thick and chunky and warm wool and then i
i cut them up and sew them all together and make these big twirly fancy coats and put
trim on them and stuff i also make simpler hoodies and gloves and i sell them on etsy
everything i make i stand here in front of these mirrors and i pin it to myself and i spend a lot
of time here with a mouth full of pins this little machine is what paid for all of this
i was a vagabond and i somehow got like i won the art lottery and got a really successful etsy shop
and so i just make sweaters and turn the sweaters into house and it's all because
of this machine like i put a little face on it like me and this silly machine are best friends
this is the room normally it's like full of sweaters but the sweaters come in and out
like the tide and at this moment it happens to be very clean it's like this light zen i really
like empty rooms i feel like i'm always doing my best to get rid of as much furniture and stuff but
i keep collecting more but i'm like in my heart i yearn for like clear open uncluttered spaces
most people don't realize that about me they think that i just want lots of rainbows and
stuff but i actually really like clear clean crisp lines just with a lot of colors on them
last year we had a tornado that crushed a bunch of the house and as a result of repairing it i got
this whole wall of windows with a balcony which is a life changer it's so nice to have a balcony
but it's a really nice place to do yoga or just leave for to just stand up and survey the land
one thing about having a house like this is that you're never done like everywhere i look i just
see things i want to improve my biggest plan is to learn how to just appreciate it in the moment
in the phase it's in instead of always looking at it like a project there are days where i'm
like oh i'm gonna put a swimming pool here and build an addition and then put a tower and then
i'll get those tunnels i needed to connect to the outbuildings and then there'll be like a
tree house village and a water slide and then other times i'm like maybe i should just sell it
and live in a condo it can be really overwhelming maintaining this so i do have a fantasy alternate
future of like extreme minimalism one of the things that makes it tolerable to have all this
is that i know i'd be fine with none of it because actually this has nothing to do with
happiness the happiness is in you i'm just enjoying this and i know if i lost it all
knock on wood i don't want to lose it but if i did i'd be free thanks for watching this week's
video make sure to like share and subscribe and i will see you soon with another unique home tour