Coffee on a veranda, a view that opens toward a favorite mountain, and a house with more doors than anyone needs: that is how Katia Kulyk begins her April 2021 video tour of the Ukrainian village property she and her partner Andre had just bought. She calls it "almost falling apart," a clay-and-mud structure on a hill with a small river running across the land, purchased for 3,800 USD. Across roughly ten minutes, she walks the rooms, opens the stove, points out the outbuildings, and lays out a renovation order that puts running water ahead of nearly everything a buyer of a house would normally worry about first. It is a small, specific document of rural life, and it is worth reading closely.
The first thing Kulyk notices is the thing that anyone who has seen the house in person would notice: the sheer number of doors. Counting them aloud as she moves through the rooms ("one, two, three, four, five, six"), she describes an entrance, a room she plans to turn into her office and yoga space, and a biggest room at the back that she and Andre claim for a bedroom and work area. The layout is not designed around the expectations of a modern buyer. It was built around a stove, a set of outbuildings, and a family that lived on the land and used every room for a purpose.
The property is set on about a quarter of a hectare. Kulyk explains the local unit: in Ukraine, people say "25 sotka," a sotka being a hundred square meters. The land holds a garden she is already delighted by ("I can't even count the trees"), along with three other buildings. For a city buyer, that is the surprise. The purchase is not just a house. It is an entire small homestead, and most of the work ahead of her lies outside the front door as much as within it.
Kulyk also frames the wider context. In the video she explains that the couple had rented a house in the same village with no bathroom inside, that the rent was very cheap, and that the internet let them keep working on their projects. They had been looking for a property for some time, because, as she puts it, there are many remote buildings in the area but few people willing to sell. "Ukrainians really value their land," she says in the video description, "and even though they don't plan to live in a remote village, nobody wants to sell it either." Finding a seller willing to part with an old house was, in other words, a small achievement in itself.
The clearest moment in the tour comes when Kulyk walks into the room she has chosen as the bathroom and realizes what it means. Her exclamation, "oh really, yeah, we're gonna have bathroom, finally," lands because she explains the context right after: traditional Ukrainian houses have an outdoor toilet and no bathroom or toilet indoors. In the video she says plainly: "For us it was a problem."
That frustration sets the priority list for the entire project. When she later outlines the renovation, the first item is non-negotiable. "I said I'm not moving here before we have running water," she says, and the plan spells out what that requires: a pipeline to bring water up from underground, and then a bathroom. Everything else, including windows, floors, walls and décor, is scheduled after that. For anyone who has ever tried to picture a restoration in a rural setting, this is the most useful lesson on the tape. Infrastructure is the house. Finishes are what you do once the house can actually function.
"I said I'm not moving here before we have running water." (Katia Kulyk, in her April 2021 house tour video, around 6:34)
Kulyk gives one of the most instructive explanations in the video when she walks to one of the outbuildings. "Every Ukrainian house has a summer kitchen," she says. That is where people cook during the warm months, and it sits apart from the main house "because they don't want to make too much heat in the house." The logic is simple and entirely practical: a wood-fired cooking setup throws off heat and smoke, and in a small house, you don't want that in the living space through July and August. The main house is kept for winter living, while the summer kitchen takes the heavy cooking load for the rest of the year.
The same outbuilding complex, she notes, once housed cows, pigs or other animals, and its equipment is still stored there. Kulyk plans a workshop in one of these buildings. The entire arrangement is a map of how a rural household functioned: a main house for sleeping and winter life, a separate kitchen for summer, and sheds for animals, tools and storage. Restoring the property means deciding which of those functions still matter, which can be combined, and which have become obsolete.
The kitchen itself is a centerpiece of the tour, and it is clear she respects what it does. She demonstrates the traditional arrangement: "You put the wood in here, you cook on here," and the stove has a hatch that can be opened so the fire runs through. Her verdict on the food is unhesitating: "The stove-cooked food is much tastier, believe me. I've done that before."
Her assessment of the space is more pragmatic. The room is enough for cooking, she says, "but not for eating." Her plan is to combine the kitchen with the corridor and create a long kitchen, since, in her words, the corridor "is not a living space anyway." This is a good example of how a restorer thinks in a traditional house: keep the cooking heart of the home, but rethink the room boundaries so the space serves how people will actually use it. It is a modification that respects the stove rather than replacing it.
Kulyk treats the furniture with the kind of attention a musician gives a well-made instrument. A table, she explains, was made by the grandfather of the previous owner, handmade and sturdy. She stands at it and demonstrates that she can work at it standing, calling it a "standing working table for two, like IKEA, better." It is a small moment with a larger point: a piece built by hand for a specific use can serve a new purpose if the buyer is willing to look at it differently.
A bench in the same room is "very old" and "rather high," and Kulyk offers her theory about why: "Probably people were shorter." She likes it anyway, though at the time of filming it was out of use because of mice. Her playful frustration is part of the charm of the tour. The house is not a showroom. It is a place where previous generations lived, and the evidence of their daily habits is still in the room.
This is where the video turns practical. Kulyk is candid about the winter: temperatures can reach around -20, and "it can be cold but not all the time." Electricity is cheap in Ukraine, she says, but it is unstable. Her preference is clear: "I would prefer electricity, but electricity is unstable here." Her answer to that uncertainty is a stove that runs on wood, with a little kamin-style heat source placed where the family can gather if the power goes out.
She backs the cost argument with a number. In her previous home she paid, as she recalls, less than 200 dollars for the whole winter's electricity. That figure is useful for context on budgets: the economics of rural life often depend on tolerating some inconvenience in exchange for low running costs. The wood stove is not a nostalgic gesture; it is the house's reliable backup.
Kulyk is blunt that the work is substantial. "It's like we are pretty much going to be building our home from scratch," she says, "even though we have walls and the floor." Her list, in order, is worth copying for anyone facing a similar project:
- First, a water pipeline bringing water from underground, followed by a bathroom. She calls this the non-negotiable starting point.
- Second, windows. The existing ones cannot be opened; they can only be removed, which she notes is "how it was made originally." Replacing them is a priority "as soon as possible."
- Third, floors and walls.
- Last, decoration, which is where she steps in.
The sequencing reveals an approach that is more engineering than design. Get the systems right, make the envelope sound, then finish. Kulyk also gets help: she describes former owners who came back to help clear out beds and other items, and a friend who had already started renovating while cameras were rolling. The structure of the project depends on community as much as on budget.
Kulyk is open about funding. The house cost 3,800 USD, and she says her share came "exclusively from the money I earned on bitcoins." She frames this as part of a broader experience in the Ukrainian context, and she links to another video explaining how she turned a modest starting sum into more. The details of that earlier project are in that separate video, not this one, so any reader curious about the method should watch it directly rather than rely on this tour.
The most useful thing about Kulyk's tour is that it refuses to romanticize a ruin. She sees the stove as a feature, the summer kitchen as wisdom, the high bench as a clue to how people lived, and the missing bathroom as a problem to solve first. If you are considering a rural property, watch the full video to see the layout for yourself, especially the sequence in which she walks through the rooms and outbuildings. Then look at her priorities list and ask what would have to be true before your own house felt like a home. For Kulyk, the answer started with water.
Her channel continues the story in later videos, and the original description links to her earlier explanation of why the family moved to the village and how that connects to a crystal cave nearby. Those are the next places to look if you want the full arc, rather than the single afternoon captured here.
