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!