Changing Colour

As promised, here's the second installation this week, focusing on changes to the house itself. Thanks to all those so far who have commented on Facebook and messaged us about the garden. So many great ideas! Hopefully we can address some of them and show the changes were are thinking about incorporating in the next update.

Having said goodbye to the man from the landscaping company, we were then free to explore the house. On the outside, about half the grey mortar had been covered over with the outside, coloured layer. Finally we could see what colour our house is going to be!

Well, not exactly. Unfortunately, the coloured mortar was not yet dry which means that what we were seeing was a shade darker than the final colour. We actually liked the darker shade quite a lot! I guess it's lucky in a way that we didn't have the option to "pause" there and take the darker colour - whether to do so or to stick with our original choice and go lighter and brighter would have been a difficult choice. Thankfully, that's all hypothetical due to the laws of chemistry and physics so we will have to cross our fingers and hope we like the light mortar as much (I'm sure we will!)

Inside, there were quite a few changes, the major ones I will describe briefly below before the usual photodump at the bottom.

So here is the colour of the mortar as it was on Saturday afternoon. As mentioned above, it is going to get a fair bit lighter than this as it dries. This area was getting a reasonable amount of light though, so any shaded aspects of the house are likely to have a similar hue. I think it works quite well with the shine grey window frames.

Here, one of the workmen is putting up the kind of "false wall skirting" which will go around the top of the room. This will be used for cabling and ventilation as well as the ducting which will cycle heat from the upstairs back downstairs using a fan system. This allows the house to re-use warm air in a cycle. 

The skirting extends about 60cm out from the wall, partly at about 195cm height (in the far RH corner) but mainly at about 230cm. It will just look like wall when it's finished. It's a shame to lose some of the sense of space in the upstairs area but, then again, we wouldn't have even thought about this if we weren't building the house from scratch. These major details just dissolve into a completed house. I guess we are lucky that we get to experience both the before and the after and it will be interesting to see how this changes the feel of the room.

Finally the other side of the doorway is framed up for the pantry. The doorway is not as narrow as feared and just the simple addition of this framed part makes it feel more like an enclosed space.

The walk in closet that separates the study and the master bedroom is finally being built. This will house the sliding door on the study side. It will be very different once these three spaces are finally separated. The study and master bedroom can be swapped around at a later stage if we want to (since the Walk In Closet has two entry points). In hindsight, this was actually a very clever idea! Well done us!

At last! A completed ceiling. This is what the study looks like. The sloped roof is very noticeable and may take some getting used to. I wonder if it will be as obvious when the room is full of stuff and fully functional. That said, I am currently sitting in a room I sit in every day and can't imagine what the ceiling looks like without looking up so maybe we won't notice it as much as we think.

Here's the new access they have built to the upstairs toilet. Previously the bit on the left was missing so it looked like all one big toilet space without the "corridor". I quite liked the "big toilet" but Yuko said it was weird to have a toilet door right at the top of the stairs, even a sliding one. The toilet corridor is growing on me. We can put a nice picture on the wall at the end.

Right, that's the major bits taken care of. Below are a few more captioned photos. We'll be at the house again this weekend so will take some more photos. Speak soon!

Inside the new, smaller upstairs toilet

Walk in closet space (far end), large storage cupboard (near end)

Corridor alongside kids bedroom (RHS)

As above but from study (soon to be closed off)

Other corridor towards back door

Laundry room

Bathroom prep area (脱衣所)

House Walkthrough 7 - The Kitchen and Living Room

Back in the spring of this year, we went to see a house that our builders had recently completed and were pleased to find that the owners had reversed the usual layout, putting the main living area upstairs and the bedrooms on the ground floor. Although this is quite rare in Japan, it was something that we had been considering. People had told us that doing so is very expensive but we were relieved to hear that this was not in fact the case, especially if the bathroom (which can require structural reinforcement underneath) remains on the ground floor.

The additional light and feeling of spaciousness from having the house configured this way was enough to convince us to go ahead with this plan ourselves. As such, we are having an open-plan living room and kitchen on the upper floor. It will feature a sofa and TV area, an island kitchen with connected dining table, a corner “bar and wine-cellar” space and, finally an enclosed pantry room next to the kitchen. There will also be a toilet near the top of the staircase.

The upstairs living and dining area. North is to the top of the paper.

I’ll start with the sofa and TV area. This sits at the north end of the space, adjacent to the Japanese room (the next blog entry) and the balcony (the blog entry after that). In the corner will be a (British!) wood burning stove capable of heating the whole of the upstairs area and, due to some very clever air recycling, some of the downstairs too, all being well. Wood stoves are not usually the most cost effective way of heating houses but, in this case, we have been rather lucky (or clever, depending on how you see it).

By going with a building company based a minute down the road from us, we have access to free wood for burning whenever we require it, as long as we are prepared to cut it and transport it ourselves. This is a mutually beneficial perk in that they can keep us happy and supplied with winter fuel and we can help to relieve them of the offcuts from their building projects that they would otherwise have disposed of. Symbiosis in all its finery. The one problem is that our tentative move-in date is in the middle of the hot summer next year so it’s unlikely we’ll get a chance to test out the new stove for a few months!

The TV will be placed against the North wall with a long horizontal window above it. We will be bringing our cheapo TV board from the current apartment as we’ve grown rather fond of it and it’s pretty inoffensive to look at. We’ll probably have an L-shaped sofa and coffee table with perhaps an additional armchair added at some stage. It’s odd that, despite thinking about the house almost constantly, it’s still really hard for me to visualize the size of this space. Time to get the tape measure out again.

To the south, we have a large island counter unit with raised breakfast bar which should accommodate a couple of stools. We have been back and forth so many times about what to put on the island. Essentially there are three choices. 1) a sink 2) the hob 3) nothing. The downside of the sink is that it means you have to look at either dirty items waiting to be washed up or clean items that are drying. The hob looks nice and you can talk to people while you are cooking but it makes extractor fans more difficult (or much more expensive in the case of downdraft extractors). Cooking oil has a habit of getting everywhere too.

We have therefore opted for nothing on the island. This is a little boring but should enable us to make great pizzas and dump all the shopping down when we get home. If we really want to cook on the island we can use a cheap portable gas stove, which we already own. Also on the island will be a western-sized oven (which is being delivered today!) and a few cabinets. Connected to it will be a dining table (likely our current, horribly stained, bottom-of-the-IKEA-range version for the time-being) and 4 chairs.

On the south wall will be a long counter with sink and hob and various cabinets and a drying rack. I believe this is called a Swedish something-or-other. Although we will not install a dishwasher immediately (the quote from the fitter the builder uses was really high), they will prepare the cabling and piping for us to add one at a later stage. I anticipate we’d be able to save a few hundred dollars doing it this way but we’re not entirely sure if we will get one at all. The countertop (both the wall unit and the island) are going to be granite. We have found a supplier that is not too expensive and we both think it will make the kitchen really special. It’s such an important part of he house to us that we’ve decided this is an area to spend a bit more on.

Adjacent to our fridge in the south-west corner will be the bar and the wine fridge. When the plans were almost finalized and our existing appliances accounted for, I was left with just over 2 meters of space in which to accommodate both items. Since the wine fridge we have chosen is about 60cm wide, this left about 150cm for the bar – not too shabby! This is the only part of the house I can truly say I have designed myself. I took a pencil and some paper and drew up a scale-ish drawing of the bar and gave it to the architect. He seemed quite impressed!

The bar. Original plan was three 'steps' but final design will likely have 3 rows of bottles above each other.

The bar will have 3 rows of bottles, each one a bottle deep and holding 12-15 depending on dimension. The top row is intended to be Japanese whisky, the middle Scotch and the bottom for others. There will be brass runners running horizontally to stop bottles falling during earthquakes and angled earthquake-proof rails above for us to hang glasses. On the right-hand side will be doored cabinet with more space for glassware and accessories. The counter-top below the bottles will provide space for preparing drinks and underneath will be drawers for (more) bottles, cutlery and a fridge. It’s one of the parts of the house I am most excited about since I’ve never really designed anything before and it will be really cool to see the idea actually comes to life.

To the East of the kitchen is a pantry room for storing our dry foods and a few appliances. We were both quite keen on having a lot of storage space for food as we do a lot of our shopping at Costco. For those of you unfamiliar with Costco, it’s an American wholesaler which sells really good products (but in bulk) and is a great source of ingredients and items that can otherwise be really expensive here in Japan. The pantry will have a window for overall ventilation and simple shelves on both sides.

Just outside the pantry is a shokkidana which is a kind of Japanese welsh dresser and is used for holding all sorts of plates and mugs and other items. My wife has designed it (after some not inconsiderable consultation with her mother) to feature plenty of storage, a space for the rice cooker and a place to display our copper pans. We looked at a few store-bought options but the quotation from our builders to make one for us was pretty reasonable and so we went with Yuko’s design. A happy wife is a happy life right?

I should probably end the tour of the living room and kitchen there. I expected to take about 20 minutes writing this entry but it’s ended up taking about 5 times that. Oh well - I suppose it’s the biggest and most important area in the house so perhaps it does warrant a bit of verbosity. I’ll try to get the final two entries on our walkthrough up this week as...did I mention that...we have started building!!!