Without the internet I would never have renovated a house close to close

When I opened my parents that I would move back to the country to buy a dilapidated farm, they looked at me for a long time.They wanted to know whether I got crazy.

We had actually talked about something else.I don't know what about.It was also not the case that I sold the house as a rockproof plan, more than an idea;as an offer.I thought that such a house could be nice, also for my parents, and that's what it was about, but at the latest now it was about what was always about - the accusation not to get a nail in the wall.

However, I don't want to blame anyone.My brother assembles everything and if he doesn't find anything, he builds things apart and then together again.My father built parts of our house, which were often parts that did not work perfectly for a long time.I think he has also disposed of building rubble in the channel, at least I think I remember, but over the years he competed more and more vehemently.

When I review my life, there are a thousand moments when I encounter this prejudice: I don't get a nail in the wall.I see how I blink against the sun, a tooth gap in the mouth and the school bag in my arms, and the teacher bravely strokes me from the list for the work lessons.At that time I fell out of a tree and had two nails in the elbow.

That is of course nonsense;I was not deleted from the list.But I've always felt unable to build something that also holds.Because I probably gave the impression that I couldn't be able to do that as a child.And because I got to hear it again and again.They were snippets of talk, looks, small dialogues.

One of the decisive moments was when we dissolved our parents' house.I was 17 years old and my mother asked me to clear my room on the ground floor.She said I could throw everything through the open window.What I did too.I threw chairs, bed frames and a large picture frame with a glass, and when the glass broke, my mother looked at me shocked because she had lured the clinkmore confessed.

I am sure she had said "throwing”.But she probably didn't mean it that.She wanted to know whether I had seriously thrown glass out of the window.It was a separating look, a painful one.And I think my mother thought from that day that the roofing felt was finally down.

When I refuel today, my children are sitting in the car, my wife sometimes says casually, please make sure to pay the right petrol, although she doesn't even open up.I then stop the pistol, slowly turn around and say that I already know that myself, after all, I was in the mid -thirties.Then she just looks over, over her sunglasses, with this long, caring look and says: "Of course you know that."

My life is shaped by this assumption from the past, and everywhere it is ghostly there before me and pursued me like a curse.But this time I would break it through.

Step 1: face your fear

I didn't listen to my parents.And when I made an appointment with the bank after the first visit, without the serious hope of a loan, the bank consultant led me to a glass cube that was an office, the clamping board pressed onto the chest and said it was less about it, it was less aboutto get a loan, you could talk about anything.Rather, you are interested in the question of whether I would trust myself to such a project.

This time I would stop the spirits, I thought.I wouldn't escalate, don't scream around.I would answer in the factual level.When I said it, it will not be so difficult, after all, you can hardly break more than is already broken, she threw her head back with a sounding laughing-and in my memory she strikes her thighs, which she probablynot really did.

It became more and more difficult to endure that, but I bit on my lip.Of course, my bank consultant's laughter had hit me in the mark.Of course I didn't trust myself.When you hear something often enough, it finally becomes part of your own identity and therefore completely real, and ultimately you don't try it anymore at some point. Aber wer würde das zugeben im Gespräch mit seiner Bank, frei nach dem Motto: „Stimmt, jetzt, wo Sie's sagen!" Also unterschrieb ich.

Step 2: The idea

This time I wouldn't let it sit on me and break this vicious circle once and for all.Of course I was not so stupid to renovate an entire farm right away.I'm not Fynn Kliemann.The small brick building in the garden had to be enough for my purposes.It was the test object before going to the house and it was alone on an orchard in Lower Saxony.It should be a writing house for me, the writer.I opened the door vigorously, which looked actively, but was actually due to my spider phobia.

The windows were overgrown and blind.Moist stains on the ceiling.It was dark and cold.The floorboards were scratched and covered with color spots.On a cable, a beam of a construction hung lightlessly from the ceiling.This, I thought, would be my DIY moment.I would prove it to myself and everyone.If I had made it, the Landlust would come to visit, we would laugh and eat homemade apple pie, and I would say that I always had to assemble everything for the craft and as a little boy.A blissful future was imminent.

Then I closed the door and something fell on my neck.

Step 3: The basics

I drove towards the hardware store, pressed a coin into the shopping cart and snatched it out to the other.Of the many practical and theoretical problems that I undoubtedly had, the most urgent was that I did not have my own tools.Apart from a box of loose Ikea screws and a hay fork, into which I happened to come into being in the attic when mucking out.Borrow tools or ask for help, that was out of the question.People only borrow tools by coming and saying that please have to be careful - and then they unpack everything and explain any individual parts for hours.There was no time for that.

I pushed through the departments - lamps, cables, animals, plants, shower curtains for 3.99 – bis ich einen Tresen erreichte mit der Aufschrift „Beratung".There I ordered a tool, although I said it shouldn't be too heavy, not too expensive and at least durable.

The man asked whether it should also be able to fly.

I replied: that was not a must.

At that moment, I think I realized that this project would require me more than expected, and that it would not be enough to invest a little work.

Then I was placed in front of a wall that hung many tools that I looked at with devout.After some hesitation, I decided on a battery pipe screwdriver and an eccentric grinder.To be on the safe side, I decided on the more expensive grinder with a brushless engine, which seemed better to me than one with brushes because, otherwise you would certainly not write it on it.I just had to trust.

I invited the tools with the practical sales cases into the shopping cart and pushed back to the counter, where I asked the man trustingly because I thought that you could achieve everything, whether he could explain to me, how to do drywall yourself.So the insertion of walls that are not load -bearing.He looked at me briefly, then the other men who stood around and waited. Schließlich sagte er: „Selbst? Besser gar nicht!" Und dann lachten sie alle, so ehehehe, und grinsten frech.

I didn't have to try anything with trust and sensitivity.As a teenager, this had ended in the fact that I had never had a girlfriend or at least a view of porn poems because the risk had to be rejected for both.And that was just too much risk to me.I said nothing more and drove home.At home I consulted the internet.

Step 4: The Internet

The Internet proved to be a reliable partner and suggested a number of YouTube channel in which older men, often younger men, conveyed long and extremely knowledgeable how to do things;But above all how you didn't have to do things.One - mostly the younger one - always thinks in such videos that he would not have thought;that it is so easy/so difficult to do with yourself.

I spent the following week in front of the screen with the imitation of movements.I watched tutorials about drywall, videos about cordless drilling screwdrivers, flex, circular saw, angle grinder, high altitude, the removal of locks with the help of the impact drilling machine, the right clothing, the not correct clothing and the baking of all sorts of things with cheese.

More on the subject:

I put a ladder to the house and started cutting freely.The wardrobe, a climbing plant, had eaten through the shingles into the roof (in the attic I discovered two opulent wasp nests from the old days, a set of tables and chairs as well as an old boiler), and it was damn hard to get it out of it.I briefly considered climbing the roof, but roofs were high and overgrown shingles were relentless.

I would have to put my initial shyness.Because differently than I had said to my bank advisor, I was quite afraid to hide something.Which is why I often looked at things for a long time and thought without actually touching them.Because unfortunately handicrafts are more than grinding and hammering.The problem was the decisions you had to make.It was particularly difficult for me.

The small house had a plank floor that was pretty broken.Floorboards could be grinded well, I had learned that on the Internet, but only if there was still enough wood on the boards.My future planks were just as wide as my little finger, which had to be good, but they were made of pine wood, which is a soft wood, and what you would see every imprint on.So once the floor was sanded, I couldn't walk over it with shoes - at least not until the floor was glazed.At the same time I also had to delete and faced a decision.The grinding of the floor dust enormously, which would immediately dye rust brown..But if you cut the floor first, you ruined it almost safely during the painting work.I stood there and didn't know how to start.I lacked: spatial understanding and experience.

Two craftsmen lived nearby, which I visited under the pretext of maintaining contacts and watched at their work.Because the internet helped with specialist knowledge, but not with decisions.I watched something that was also part of the crafts.In addition to the technical skills, the craftsmen apparently trusted their gut feeling.In any case, it seemed to me that there was such an old craftsman-Jedi power that had circled since the beginning of the time and the said that one only had to turn the gas tank so determined and confidently so that nothing exploded.

On the Internet I found the offer of a nearby hardware store, where I got a base grinder.The man asked what I wanted to do with it and pushed the insurance list over to me.Since I didn't want to give myself a nakedness this time, I listened to my gut feeling and said: Sand!I looked at him firmly, he looked at me, then he looked away.My plan seemed to work.

Step 5: Me, the home improvement king

I more and more developed the mindset of a craftsman.While I was shaky on the ladder at first, I was now in the gutter with one foot and thought of how I looked like it and wrote the right subsequent for the picture: Most accidents happen at home.

In the morning I wrote a few lines, then I mowed three planks with the grinding device.The grinding device was a bestially loud box, which you pushed over the floor on a handle.I wore headphones and heard Billie Eilish, and after three rounds I went out of the sandpaper.I noticed that the man wanted to tell me something about the loan;I had wrong him.

Before I drove back, I consulted the Internet to avoid a disgrace. Dort las ich alles über Schleifpapiere, Schleifen, Körnung, Dielenböden, außerdem einen ziemlich interessanten Text über das „Abziehen" von Dielen, das man im 18.and 19.Century with the help of little spatula.Back in the hardware store I stood at the counter and waited while I tried to make a casual impression.

The man asked kindly whether I would need sandpaper.

I said that I thought that I would still have enough, thought of the old Jedi and belly feelings at the same time.Then I said, as firmly I could: "Give me grain 24, Korn 60 and Korn 100, that should be enough."

Der Mann tippte etwas in seinen Computer, stieß sich vom Schreibtisch ab und sagte: „Gute Wahl!"

Step 6: A new life

In the following weeks I made the ground.I sealed it with ecological oil.I sealed the roof against the moisture.I cut the window glass, put on windows and grabbed everything.After everything was painted and plastered, I started with cables and sockets.I milled holes in the wall and wired everything.When my family came to visit, which now brought coffee with cups and thermos, or cake, I was busy.Once I heard my brother say in the next room on the phone: "Yes, and blatant.It even makes the current itself. Woher kann der das?"

I was wearing a warm feeling in the chest in front of me.In the house, on the other hand, it was less warm.I took a thermometer and a hydrometer because I had the impression that it was cold and very wet overall.I measure eight degrees and a humidity of just over 80 percent.I didn't understand much of it, but read that 40 to 60 percent is good in work rooms, a constant room temperature of 20 degrees Celsius at 50 percent humidity is the optimum.My values were the values of a basement, combined with the humidity of a bathroom that has just been used.

So I joined infrared heaters on the ceiling and installed a pellet oven.The temperature rose to 14 degrees, the damp areas were pale until they were gone.After six weeks I started to finish.I had set myself as a goal of insulating a wall that was particularly cold and pulling new.I had lifted the drywall for the end, because there was a special detail in it.With a special color I wanted to move in a whiteboard magnet wall, five meters long, 2.50 meters high.

Shaking my head my father drove me to the hardware store and from there to specialist retailers because the hardware store no longer had everything I could use.I would have loved to pass on my knowledge of other, younger craftsmen, but nobody asked me.

Nevertheless, I felt change and positive energy in myself, regarding the further life.My father stood at the sales counter in specialist shops, where boxes, devices and materials stormed into landscapes, and didn't know where to ring.A grumpy man with a mustache looked at my father, whom the unsettled.My father rubbed his hands and said: "We want to do drywalls ourselves." Der Mann schaute ihn an und sagte: „Selber? Besser nicht." Dann grinste er seinen Kollegen an.The man said it was styrofoam that we need.And wood for the frame.He obviously had little desire to do his job.You guessed the father from one leg to the other.

Of course, I had waited for this opportunity and let the whole thing escalate to enjoy the effect, but now I was pouring past my father and in front of the counter and casually leaning on as I had learned, and said: "Nobody insulates with styrofoam today.I would also like to have aluminum profiles.At the right cut, they are much more practical and cheaper than wood." Der Mann nickte, tippte alles im Computer an und schickte uns zur Warenausgabe.

Als mein Vater und ich an diesem Tag unter einem grauen Himmel alles einluden, fragte er mich: „Woher weißt du das alles? Was ist passiert?"

I smiled at him and said proudly and also a little relieved: "The internet."

Then my father pushed me on the side and just said briefly: "You do that well, my boy."

Editor: Lisa McMinn, final editor: Rico Grimm, photo editor: Till Rimmele