952,100 Yen to be exact. Thank God the Navy gives us a monthly housing allowance to cover the monthly rent of 230,000 Yen (way more than they would ever give us in the states!!) and gave us money to cover the Owner bonus, the agent bonus and the agents income tax on their bonus. They also loaned us the money to cover the security deposit which was equal to one months rent. The only thing we had to come up with was our renters insurance which was 20,600 Yen for a year.
Gifts of Chocolate for our new neighbors as well as for the electricians.
Our beautiful front door!
This is the living room. According to the housing blueprint this is a guest bedroom, making this a 5 bedroom house. We chose to have it be the living room. Somehow I had thought it had Tatami floors, but I guess my memory was playing with me. We then chose to have the 'dining room' be a play room and the 'living room' which is right off the kitchen be the dining room...
One of my favorite features is the Ofuro (Oh-foo-roh), a bathtub that is about 3 ft long, and 2 1/2 ft deep. Ours is very new and all you must do is push a button on the touch pad that you see above the end there and it will automatically fill for you with 42 C water and when it's done filling, a little song plays and a voice calls out to you in Japanese that your tub is ready for you. There is also a control for it from the main water heater control panel located in the kitchen, so you can fill your tub from there and listen for the chime. Something else nice about it is that there is a call button from the one in the tub that chimes the kitchen in case you need something while relaxing in your tub, which by the way you could stay in all day without ever worrying about the water getting cold, because there is a thermometer that constantly tests the water and when it starts to cool, begins re-circulating the water out through a pipe, heats it using propane and sends it back into your tub toasty hot!!! AHHHHHH......
The only thing is, you must never use soap in your Ofuro, as it will cake and clog the recirculating system.
The shower and the tub are all in one enclosed room that's probably about 6ft x 6ft. The shower head just comes off the wall in there, so it's a very spacious shower. The shower head is quite low (just over 5ft up). An interesting feature is this waist high mirror... I guess personal grooming is paramount.
A picture from inside what is now the play room into what is the dining room/computer area. Just now, I'm sitting in the cubby there on the left of the picture. I've opened the doors to the cabinet there and put my computer there with my desk just underneath. What a great way to save space! The doors you see on the right lead out to our back yard. The next picture you see was taken from that corner where you see the curtain.
Our sun porch!! This porch is the length of 4 double sliding glass doors, and comes equipped with gold, orange and brown curtains from the 70's to help block out the cold at night, lol!! This entire side of the house is floor to ceiling glass doors and windows, as just on the other side of that stairway is the living room with it's glass doors.
The view from the dinning room. I LOVE the Shoji (Sho-gee) doors that also can be pulled closed to make a whole wall of paper doors, which also really help to keep the house warm at night. Ha, who would think that paper could make such a difference!
Unfortunatly Shoji and DH don't seem to get along very well, as he has already put about 4 or 5 holes in our Shoji doors in just over a week!! Luckily the supplies to repair them are readily available at 'Livin' (Japan's equivilent to Wal-Mart, and infact they sell some of the same brands) for really quite cheap and it looks relatively simple to replace. We'll see. When I undertake that task, I'll take pictures and blog about it in case anyone out there happens to be in need of knowing what not to do when repairing Shoji, haha!
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A portion of my kitchen
The glass encased shelves make a great place to display DH's crystal and china that he inherited from his aunt and grandmother. We just pray that there wont be a biggish earthquake while we're here, though more for our own safety than that of the dishes, but it really would be sad to loose such heirlooms.
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Here we have the other side of the kitchen, and yes that one cupboard door is totally a different color! I find it amusing that the counter tops are just below my waist level, while the upper cupboards start at about 6 1/2 ft from the floor, meaning that I need a step stool to pretty much reach anything that's not just inside the door. The counter space is less now, because we have a dishwasher on there now... (pictures to come)
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Once I get a chance to clean this, this is meant to be a place to store emergency supplies. It opens right up out of the kitchen floor. I guess many Americans use these as wine cellers, since they stay cold pretty much year around. While I suppose drunkenness could make a natural disaster not seem quite so bad for a few hours, I would much rather have food and water in mine...
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Cooking facilities! My two burners, fish grill, and oven. They all run on propane and the oven and burner/grill are two seperate units. Many houses do not even have an oven, just the fish grill that you see there above the oven. I've discovered that the left burner has a great feature. It has a sensor that shuts off the gas when your pan/tea kettle gets lighter than a certain weight, thus keeping you from boiling your pot dry!
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The smallest oven I've ever seen!!! This oven is about 13 x 10 x 13 inches, and workes kinda like a microwave in that you put your food in there, turn a knob to set the time and push start (well presumably start, I don't know it japanese, I just know it makes it go). Then the fire roares and cooks your food for you at whatever temp Celcius you happened to guess was close to the degrees farenheit that you need to cook your food at. When you open the door, the fire shuts off instantly (no heating the house with this oven...).
Side note, our microwave can't be used for longer than 10 seconds at a time without flipping a breaker, which happens to shut off power to half of the lower part of the house, and possible parts of upstairs... Breaker systems don't seem to be set up at all the same here as back in the states. Thank goodness for breakers though, because due to the dry electric or kerosene heat we use, the wood in this house is very very very dry! Sometimes I think that perhaps a few people could pick up the house and move it if they wanted to, since the wood is so dry and many of the doors are hollow paper covered 2mm wood in wooden frames, and some are just paper with wooden cross beams...
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A before picture of part of my favorite room in the house before it became 'The Man Room".
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The upstairs toilet complete with hand sink attached to the top of the tank. Only downfall here is that the water is freezing cold... Not gonna kill many germs that way. There is a sink right outside the door, however, the hot water doesn't work, because the pipes are rusted shut from unuse.
Our super tiny laundry facilities! It's been an interesting trial and error system trying to figure out what cycles do what, as the instruction sheet I got just told me things like 'this button selects which cycle', but no where did it saw what any of the cycles do, lol. Yes, I know I've got my hand in a few of these pictures, thats as a reference point to show size.
Here come the back yard pictures!
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One of two bamboo fountains
Some pics from out front.
My personal addition to the house...
a Japanese Apricot tree that I got at the commisary for $15
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I love this front gate!! The brownish thing on the right isn't supposed to be like that, it's supposed to be across the parkingspot over to the right. It's my fault that it's there like that, as it's our parkingspot it's supposed to be covering.
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Just in front of the front door.
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The 5 ft deep gutter that runs behind the house...
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Trash seperation...
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After my trip to the local market and inability to keep myself from buying the tiny little cute eggs, we had a breakfast of quail eggs. DD LOVED them and ate 9 of them for breakfast. Unfortunatly, she has now decided that chicken eggs are not so good... They taste much like chicken eggs, just not quite such a strong egg flavor. I liked them too, but had a hard time getting past the fact that they were quail eggs. Not sure why it should make any difference at all, but for some reason it just made them hard to swallow...
Well, that's it for this post. I just ran around and snapped a bunch more pictures during short breaks while I was typing this up, and I'll start that blog, but nap time is almost over, so I probably wont get the next one done for a little bit.
You know, I think I would have a hard time swallowing too just knowing they weren't chicken eggs...isn't it weird how our brains work?
ReplyDeleteIt was really weird too that I let myself get so hung up on it, cause I ate one and the first little bite was great then another little bite, tasting good, getting weirded out, last bite, still tasting good, not wanting to go down... It's all in my head I know, cause the only real difference in what it was, was just who made it, which happened to be a quail rather than a chicken... Its not like quail are icky dirty birds or anything either, in fact they are probably cleaner than chickens.
ReplyDeleteWhat a GORGEOUS house!
ReplyDelete