Final Push!

Happy New Year! 2020 is upon us and hopefully the beginning of the end for this project of ours. I hope that everyone had an enjoyable and relaxing break. We spent most of the time travelling around Japan and attending various family get togethers. To be honest, I think we are less rested than we were at the start of the 'break' but we will soldier on!

First, some bad news. Another delay :-( It was pretty evident back in December that we were not going to be done for the end of January and the builders confirmed with us that this was indeed the case. We have a new finish line of the 24th February, which actually works a little better for us given I will be outside Japan for a couple of weeks in February. This one had better be the final one since we have now given notice on our current apartment and parking rental. If they delay again, we are going to be homeless!

Onto more positive things - we managed to get over to the house three times over the winter break, once for a meeting, once with both the parents and the in-laws and once with just my Mum. Everyone absolutely loved the house and the addition of the stairs from the living room up to the roof balcony meant that they could see almost all of the space.

However, it is now not only those in our family who are aware of our house. Several locals walking by have stopped to talk to us about the house and our plans to move in. The staff at the wonderful little tsukemono shop all know about our pending arrival and it seems clear that word has spread of the new foreigner and his "orange house". It's always hard to know in Japan but, so far, commentary has been very positive and welcoming. 

What is abundantly clear though is that we are moving from a large, anonymous city community into a much smaller, close-knit one where news travels fast! As one of the only foreigners living there (and being twice the size of the average Japanese person), I am going to stick out like a sore thumb. Time to be on my best behaviour I think!

So what is new? Well, firstly, the stairs. Not only can we now get up and down from the ground floor to upstairs without crawling through a small hole, we can continue all the way up to to roof balcony! We were pretty worried about how steep the second flight of stairs was going to be but ascending and descending is pretty easy, even without the handrail which is yet to be installed. At the top, there's a nice flat area where we will likely store some cushions for any furniture we put up on the balcony.

Stairs to the roof balcony

Stairs to the roof balcony. Flat area on upper RHS

Elsewhere, pretty much all of the flooring is in. Stupidly, I didn't take any photos the first time we went over, figuring I could take them a week later, by which time most of the flooring had already been covered up with protective mats! Here's a photo of an unused board and a bit that escaped the covering.

Chestnut flooring

Almost all covered with protective mats

Living room flooring all done and covered up!

The study and walk in closet have now also been framed. Both are pretty huge, the latter more than making up for our small master bedroom. I was planning to use BILLY bookshelves from IKEA (see here) in the study but the problem is that they don't seem to offer right-angle corner units. Instead, for corners, they use a modular system that makes a right angle using two regular bookcases and a third narrow piece at 45 degrees to each of the regular ones. This wouldn't work in our corner as one of the walls isn't long enough to get all three pieces to fit. I will hunt for a more workable L-shaped option.

Walk in closet

Study corner now framed. Quite tight and difficult for bookcases

Sliding door frame for walk in closet and study

The pantry is now completely framed and is HUGE. Costco, we are ready for you!

Space for all the food!

Outside has been tidied up and we can now see the full extent of the garden again. On that note, we have signed off on a modified, cheaper landscaping plan and work for that will start at the beginning of February, to be finished by the time we move in. Expect a separate blog post on that in due course.

Our garden. Soon to be a lawn!

Laundry area and flowerbeds for vegetables and herbs on RHS (Still very overgrown)

Finally, a beautiful stone that we found in the garden is still there and we have asked the builders to look after it for us. The plan is to clean it up and get it engraved with something like the date the house was built and put it somewhere prominent near the entrance.

Beautiful stone!

That's all for now I think. We are excited to crack on with the final stage and to finally move on and move in. Next update should be some time next week as we will visit the house on Sunday. Wishing you all the very best for the New Year, whatever your plans may be!