A different kind of delay

I'm writing this from Incheon Airport in Korea as I am heading back to the UK for a week. Bad news - a delay! Thankfully, this time, it's not the house that is delayed but me! The incoming aircraft is arriving late so I have an extra 6 hours to kill at the airport and hopefully 600 euros of compensation heading my way. Thanks to the European Union for that one.

This gives me more than enough time to put up some photos from when Yuko went over to the house last week. Apparently it was absolutely teeming with contractors, so much so that it was quite hard to take decent photographs, though I think she's done a pretty good job!

Yuko informs me that there were a number of people there doing the "Feather Feel" finishing to the walls. This is a finishing technique originating from a German company that is supposed to make the walls look especially beautiful and is pretty common in Japan these days. Basically, the wallpaper is primed using Paper Fleece (like this) and then a final coat is added (such as with this marble-based paint). More information available in Japanese here for those of you in Japan.

We have also had a few final decisions to make as yet more items we had chosen have gone out of stock or been replaced by newer versions. Mostly this has been easy but choosing two new toilet sinks at short notice with pretty strict dimensions was rather tricky. We are also still debating whether or not to put a handrail around the top of the car parking area for safety. That's something we don't immediately have to decide and may depend on how sturdy the roof is over the car park but I'm minded to just put a rail there anyway to be doubly sure.

There's not much else I can add other than to put up the photos below. It sucks being away from the house at a crucial time but being busy (Conference in Cambodia was excellent by the way) certainly helps to take my mind off the slowly ticking clock. Less than 2 weeks to go!

The stone stairs and rocks have started to go into the slope garden. Looks awesome!

Roof going over the parking area

Feather feel finishing of the walls. The new handrail is beautiful and likely to make getting our fridge upstairs VERY tight

The base of the bar. Now under construction. The LHS big gap will house a mini fridge. I designed this!

The shokkidana for our kitchen stuff. Yuko designed this!

Loft ladder waiting to go into the attic above the Japanese room

Moss green wallpaper in the tatami room. I'm pretty sure the screen doesn't do the color justice. Yuko says it is very nice

The tatami room from the other angle

Small problem. One was brushed and the other shiny so mix and match didn't really work. I went with the long handle type for all fixtures on the bar as a result. It's the same as the handles on the kitchen cabinets

Pictures, Pictures, Pictures!

3 weeks and counting! This week, rather surprisingly, has absolutely flown by and we are now only 2 visits to site away from moving in. I say we when actually I mean Yuko. Sunday marked my last visit to site before we have the keys in hand as I will be off to Cambodia on Thursday to present at a conference before heading to the UK for a week to see family. Not the greatest timing but that's where weeks of delays will get you! 

All this means that Yuko will have to head over without me and take some pictures between now and moving day. Hardly ideal but we both want to make sure this blog gets finished properly, so we will do what we can. Expect a couple more posts after this one between now and moving in but don't be surprised if we fail miserably. We'll do our best!

As I mentioned, we went over on Sunday in the morning and the changes were apparent as soon as we arrived. We took a lot of pictures so probably the best way to explain the changes is for me to just put a selection of them below and caption each with an explanation. Here goes...

Grey stones we have added to the apron of the house. To the left is the concrete on which the outside tiles will sit. To the right is the border with the lawn which will go around the other side of the house. 

The same stones, viewed from the opposite angle. Walking down here is still a little dicey. Will feel much safer when the roof is over the car parking area. We really like the color contrast though.

The other side of the house. View to the east. The concrete slab is the area for drying clothes. On the right will be flower beds. They are horribly overgrown at the moment. Not sure what the pile of wood under the blue tarp will be used for.

Looking back the other way to the west. The trees next door are actually quite nice to look at. Again, the border at the end of the stones will be lawn.

The east side of the house. Soon the be filled up with all sorts of air conditioning units and other equipment. Actually feels very spacious and easy to walk down. I remember when the scaffolding was up and we were really squeezing down here.

Something else has been connected. Not sure what yet!

The garden has been partly leveled. Landscaping starts today and the lawn, which will cover the whole area here, is the last thing that they will do.

The temporary ladder that adorned the slope has finally been removed, ready for landscaping. Given how steep and dangerous this slope was to go up and down, we are really looking forward to being able to do so safely.

Concrete has been laid ready for outside tiling. We went for quite a big area of tiles to fit the proportions of this part of the house.

The tiles for the outside entrance. Piled up and left in boxes outside. It's nice to live in such a safe country. Can't imagine them lasting long in London!

Wiring for the name plate and intercom. After a lot of back and forth, we ended up sticking with the original grey intercom system though we did change the light and name plate to black. Should look good I think.

A new connection. Not sure what this is yet either!

Shoes box in the genkan. The window gives loads of light without compromising privacy. Cupboard is pretty deep too so we should be able to put flowers and ornaments on top without too much trouble.

The coat closet in the genkan. This was the builders' idea and it's a really good one I think. It's always difficult to figure out where to store bulky outdoor coats and bags. I haven't seen this before in a Japanese house.

The study, now with white walls! The room looks much bigger and is absolutely filled with light. This should be a very pleasant place to work. The walls are not completely finished yet but this room is getting pretty close.

Walk in closet. We are relatively tight (<1cm) on the RHS for the furniture we want to put in here so we have sent a message to the builders asking them to install very minimal skirting boards along the right hand wall. The PAX closets should look really good in here.

Master Bedroom. Love the wooden beam. Difficult to believe we were considering covering it with white at one point. Very glad that we didn't. In the corner is a box of new 6A network cable, which you may recall from last week's post. Loads of natural light in this room too.

The master bedroom from a different angle. I think we made the right choice to not have a door on the Walk in Closet. I think the two spaces flow together better. We will have curtains across the big doors to the deck outside.

First look at the storage cupboard opposite the toilet. We had thought the vertical divide would only go up as far as the horizontal shelf height but floor to ceiling is much better in fact. This is a pretty big space, surprisingly so in fact. Will be home to skis and my ancient set of hand-me-down golf clubs.

Laundry room. The white wall is the splashback for the washing machine (LHS) and the sink (RHS).

Here you can see the shape of the counters we have had built into this room. The height is great. The LHS counter has the same depth as the cabinets above it, whereas the RHS counter comes up further than the cabinets and can be used for ironing, sewing and sorting clothes.

The RHS counter. Depth is really good I think. We will put a stool underneath for sewing or lazy laundry.

Breakfast Bar counter. It is surprising how well this seems to function as an actual bar counter. I can imagine enjoying a pint or a cocktail sitting here as well as a bacon sandwich (perhaps together?) The wood on top is wonderfully smooth and solid feeling. The vertical wooden poles are temporary and for support. 

Viewed from the living room. You can see that the breakfast bar is quite wide. It should accommodate either 2 or 3 bar stools. We haven't ordered them yet as we want to check the height using our battered IKEA low stools as a guide.

Breakfast bar in relation to the kitchen (RHS) and living room (LHS). Connected to the breakfast bar will be a 65cm island unit. The dining table will be on the side closest to the camera (Photo taken from next to the window that overlooks the garden)

Japanese room. Now raised and enclosed. You can see the two holes at the bottom which will house the sliding drawers. It is a very satisfying step up from the living room. Feels very cosy, as a Japanese room should.

Flooring for the Tokonoma part of the room. This will be wood as opposed to tatami straw mats. We had originally planned to put low shelving here but couldn't figure out what style and size so we opted to go without until we have lived in the house for a while.

Ladder for the loft area above the Japanese room. I was surprised to learn that this too is made of wood and far more stylish than I had expected. I thought we would be getting a lightweight metal ladder but this is really nice!

Stairwell staircase now with white walls. The yellow thing is a foam protector, not some funky new handrail design.

Staircase up to the roof balcony. Looks great with white walls and blue sky. The roof balcony is still just a few steel struts. Construction on that is due to start in about a week and a half.

Wooden doors delivered and ready to be installed. They are beautiful, very heavy sliding doors. The woodwork is exceptional.

That's a lot of photos! If you are still reading, I hope you enjoyed the latest installment. I will do my best to get the next update up as soon as I have the photos from Yuko, so in about a week's time. Thanks again for reading and talk to you in a few days!

Garden Plans, Lighting, Parking and Furniture

Another week has passed which means we are another week closer to completion! Time is passing at a snail's pace, a problem exacerbated by the fact that all decisions have pretty much been made now. We are very much at the i-dotting and t-crossing stage and, frankly, we are both so, so ready to move in. We have been to site but the majority of changes were pretty small and I don't want this to be a boring blog post so I've decided to focus on two things, discussions for this week and the garden.

This week's discussions have focused mainly on the pendant lights in the kitchen, the concrete floor of the parking area and various bits and pieces of furniture. 

As far as the pendant lights are concerned, we weren't sure about the ones in the original quote and made a mental note to look around at some other options at a later stage. Fast-forward a few months and (having completely forgotten about it) we decided to start looking, although we may have now missed the deadline to change them. A lot of frantic searching has resulted in us deciding that we do in fact really like the original lights and so we are planning to keep them. They are called Pakhus and you can find them here. 

There are a multitude of options for the floor of the parking area including tile, gravel, asphalt and concrete. We decided a while ago that concrete was probably best since it is simple, cheap and easy to maintain and will match the large concrete walls. What we hadn't realised was how many variations of concrete there are. You can have simple flat concrete or a pattern with gaps in between large squares. These gaps can be wide or narrow, horizontal or vertical and can be filled with grass, stones, wood, asphalt or nothing at all. We have a meeting to discuss on Saturday but I expect we will choose something very simple.

We have also started furniture shopping since our sofa is in its final death throes and it's almost certainly not worth bringing with us. Our living room area is a bit tricky since we want to have a big sofa which also keeps the area nice and open and allows plenty of space on either side to pass to the balcony or the Japanese room. This means that we can't go much beyond 195cm wide, although length along the room is much less of an issue. We have found that a lot of western sofas are too high and break up the room too much. As a result, we couldn't find anything we liked in IKEA which would probably have been our first choice. All the sofas at Costco are much too big.

There are millions of of sofas online but the Japanese-made ones are all really expensive and the cheaper foreign options look like they will break easily (and do, from our experience with our current sofa). We have, however, found a Japanese maker, NoYes, who we really like. They have absolutely brilliant reviews and produce a sofa that is the perfect size and shape for our space. We've been to the showroom a couple of times and they seem like a really great company (which only makes sofas!) with very knowledgeable staff and excellent customer service. Unfortunately, the sofa we like costs about 220,000 yen (1500GBP) which, although not expensive for a Japanese sofa, seems like a lot of money to me. We will mull it over for a while longer but that's the direction I think we are heading in. You can see the sofa here.

Now, onto the main event. The garden! We have finalised our plans with the landscaper and work is due to start on February 1st, taking 2 weeks to complete. This means that the landscaping will be completed by the time we move in, which is one less thing for us to have to think about after moving. Since a 3rd party contractor is doing the work, it can happen at the same time as house-building so we should have lots of things to think and write about during that period!

Our garden!

As you can see from the picture, we have reduced the number of trees from the previous version that we talked about on here. There were two main reasons for this. The first is cost. Good trees are expensive and we needed to bring the quote down by about 25% to get within our budget. The second is that we wanted to leave room in the future to plant trees of our own once we have lived there for a bit. Whilst it's nice to have a "finished package", we want to make changes and update things as we go. As a result, all the trees along the wall on the right hand side have gone, as well as the tree at the bottom of the garden area on the left side, next to the staircase.

Another big change is the removal of the large fence at the bottom of the slope. I was quite a big fan of this fence as it marked off the edge of the garden well and gave some privacy from the road. Yuko wasn't especially keen and thought it was unnecessary and made the garden less open. Ultimately, it was reasonably expensive and I was quite happy to see it taken out of the quote. We have opted for a 40cm high mini fence at the top of the slope to act as both a demarcation and a safety feature so kids or drunk adults are less likely to roll down the slope from the garden.

As far as trees are concerned, we have opted for mainly decorative specimens with a fruit-bearing lemon tree as well. For colour, we will have a Momiji (Japanese Maple) and Mitsuba Tsutsuji (a type of Azealea) and a couple of green trees. We haven't exactly decided these yet but very likely a Hainoki (Japanese Sapphireberry) and Aodamo (Japanese Ash).

A mix of ground cover with various wild flowers and grasses and local stones will make up the other areas of both the main slope and the sloped area next to the staircase. The landscaper plans to build texture both with these stones and by using small bushes throughout, especially around the borders. The bushes at the bottom of the slope will hide the concrete breeze blocks embedded into the ground that will enable us to add a fence at some point in the future if we wish.

The main feature of the garden is a functional one. The S-shaped path is made up of large stones, fixed into the slope acting not only as a pathway but also as a strengthening element in the land. A cursory look at the slope as it currently stands reveals various water channels and loose earth, so one of the main reasons for doing this landscaping now is that we want to be doubly sure that the site is safe, especially in the event of major rainfall. Having this heavy-duty path should hopefully also enable us to begin to treat this area as a useful and positive part of the land rather than a worrisome thorn in our side.

Path foundations. Pretty neat I think!

Finally, from the top of the slope all along the west side of the house, we will have lawn - 40 square meters in total. Not the biggest lawn in the world but pretty sizable by Japanese standards. I had originally wanted to use Kentucky Bluegrass but the landscaper suggested that it would be very tricky to maintain in Osaka's climate since the summers are so hot. He suggested Japanese Korai grass which is better suited to hot summers and cold winters. Some people don't like this grass since it goes brown in winter but Yuko and I have made our peace with that - at least the lawn will reflect the seasons. We'll put together a simple timed sprinkler system, buy a lawnmower from the garden center and hope for the best.

That's about it for this week - we did take some photos on our last inspection but there's nothing interesting enough to put up so we can save the house updates for next time. Speaking of which, we are heading to the house on Saturday for a meeting and some discussion about the parking area, towel rails etc. There are a few exciting changes in the schedule over the next couple of weeks so I hope that we have some more interesting photos to share with you next time. Speak soon!

Landscaping

Good morning! I hope everyone had a good weekend. This is hopefully Post 1 of 2 this week since there is too much to cover in a single update. A good problem to have I think!

Yuko and I went for a house meeting on Saturday morning at the building company's office. Outside a group of workers were busy replacing the old iron roof of the main company building. It was pretty mesmerizing watching the roofers bouncing around the scaffolding removing pieces. I'm amazed how quickly they worked, and without ropes either! 

This was also the first time this winter that the builders were using the wood burning stoves so inside the office was very warm and cosy. The smell from the burning logs was a further reminder that we are nearing the finish line and it won't be too long before we can be enjoying winter fires of our own. 

On that note, we have a notional handover date of the last day in January. We are pragmatic enough to know that these things don't always work out as planned but we do at least have a date in the diary. I have an overseas conference to attend a week later followed by a trip back to the UK so we're doubly hopeful that we can stick to that date. If we can't, we will deal with it. As I've said countless times already, we are used to waiting.

At the meeting, we mainly discussed the kitchen and the position of taps and handles. We added a towel rail to be placed just below the sink from the same ironmonger who is supplying the cabinet handles. We also decided to change one of the plug sockets on the island from a Japanese 2-pin to an American 3-pin (which has an additional round earth pin). We have a couple of American kitchen appliances that we figured it would be nice to use without an adaptor. 

(The voltage in Japan is 100w which is compatible, although appliances may be slightly underpowered since America is 120w. We are lucky that Osaka has the same frequency (60hz) as America, whereas in East Japan it is 50hz and things like timers and clocks may not work properly.)

The main focus of the meeting, however, was to discuss the landscaping and so we talked about this with our builders before meeting the landscaping company themselves on site. It was quite nice to be able to do this first since our builders are a 'neutral' third party and don't handle the landscaping themselves. They have referred us to a landscaper who has worked with their previous clients but there has been no hard sell or anything like that - we are free to use this landscaper or not. Discussing the proposals before meeting the landscaper gave us a chance to think and ask some questions, especially valuable since neither of us know anything about landscaping!

When we first saw the drawings provided by the landscaper, we were both pretty taken aback. It looked like something out of a magazine! As you know, our plot is currently blessed with a rather ugly, overgrown slope of unusable land that we have always considered to be restricted to "damage limitation" in terms of what we can do with it. This proposal somehow seems to have taken the difficulties of that sloped area and turned it into a feature in itself. At the same time, practical improvements to provide access and utility have been added. As you will see below, it would be quite the transformation!

After looking at the proposals, it was time to head to site to meet the landscaping company. The representative was a nice guy who listened to our questions and gave sensible advice. I imagine he would be pretty easy to work with. He also seemed to be well in tune with the idea of prioritizing certain things in order to fit a budget. This is not a given at all in Japan where conversations frequently involve questions like "do you like it?" without considering the cost. I might like a tree if it costs 8000 yen but I like it a lot less at 80,000 yen! He seemed to appreciate this.

Anyway, onto the pictures! Just to remind you, this is what the slope currently looks like:

The current slope

And here are the proposals:

The landscape plan

View from the road

Proposed materials, plants, trees and samples of previous work on sloped gardens

Here you can see the basic idea. The left hand side could feature a small tree with ground coverage behind and a few strategically placed stones. We talked about whether or not we even need to have a tree there, especially given that the house next door has 3 trees already not far from that area. I think on balance we would like one but it may not survive the trimming of the budget.

On the right hand side, you can see how they propose to use the slope. The main feature is a kind of zig-zag stone pathway built into the side of the slope, culminating in a horizontal path at the bottom, also in stone. In front of the path at the bottom is a 1 metre high fence which gives some privacy as well as a line of demarcation between the end of the garden and the road. I think we could potentially lower this by 20cm.

Ground cover (I believe kind of like wild grass with flowers and other things) is again in abundance with a number of strategically-placed trees to break things up. We talked with the landscaper about changing some of these to fruit-bearing trees to give us nice things to eat as well as visual stimulation. No problem at all, apparently.

One thing that is unlikely to survive the budget trimming and that we are not even sure we want anyway is the line of trees extending into the garden at the top. Whilst they would provide some privacy protection from the house in front, there is currently no one living there and we may wish to use that area for additional flower beds or lawn. In the hot summer, small trees there would provide a bit of shade but only for the first floor and all of our living spaces are upstairs anyway. We could always add some more trees later if we wanted to.

The quote we had requested didn't include the laying of lawn for the rest of the garden as this is something we were planning to do ourselves. We did however ask for the landscaper to quote for doing this too, since neither of us has any expertise and we don't have any tools. If it's reasonable, we may just ask the landscaper to do it for us. 

All in all, the landscaping would take about 2-3 weeks if we opted to go with this company and it seems that they could probably carry out the work whilst the house is being built (although it might be easier to wait until afterwards). We will wait to see what happens to the quote after removing and re-specifying a few things but we are pretty impressed with what they have come up with overall. Interested as always to hear what you guys think!

I'll hopefully be uploading another post later in the week with developments on the house itself so look out for that. In the meantime, have a great week and speak soon!

Quick update - handles and wiring

Afternoon all! Not much to report this week. Most of the changes have been pretty small and relatively boring so it's a short post with a few pictures.

We had a meeting on site on Saturday where we talked a bit about landscaping for the garden. The builders have spoken with a landscaper that they work with and the suggestion is pretty simple as it stands. Low maintenance grass/moss with a few strategically positioned stones for the slope and some nice flowers to run alongside the steps up to the front door. They also suggested a tree for the corner of the garden at the top of the slope on the west side. The rest they will leave to us. We have another meeting in 2 weeks to go over the initial ideas in more detail so stay tuned for that.

At the meeting, we also finalized the furniture and got to see the handles that we had picked out (the suppliers had sent samples). We absolutely love the iron handles for the kitchen cabinets (although perhaps not as much as our architect does!) and the brass items for the bar look really good too. It certainly feels like we are in the fine-detail stage now.

We did head up to site to see what's new. Outside, the roof is on everywhere now but there's still no sign of the mortaring or the 'orange' cladding downstairs. Inside, it seems as if not much has happened until you look up and see the ever growing mass of electrical cables. It seems the electrician has been very busy!

So, all in all, things are soldiering on despite the lack of any "wow" changes this week. We'll head over again on Sunday to see what's new. Speak soon!

Brass handle, knob, rail and iron handle

Brackets for railings on the balcony

Balcony on the 2F taken from the scaffolding (photo not by us!)

Wiring going in everywhere

And coming out the walls