Plumbing

August 13, 2023. Clearly the plumber has been working since most of the updates are water related.

I have not written much about our tile project, but we’re DIYing tiles in three places. Today we actually started work, cutting tiles and removing a bit of wall paper in preparation.

Wallpaper in Noah’s bedroom. Boy gets blue, girl gets pink. 🤦

Second floor toilet gets a custom-made wash bowl. As inspiration, we gave the artist a bowl that we liked.

This is the bowl that was given to the artist. We bought it when we were traveling in Jerusalem, and we particularly like the design. The wash bowl will remind us of a trip that we really enjoyed.

Second floor has a low-profile toilet.

First floor toilet has also been installed, a standard toilet with the tank behind the seat. We upgraded the upstairs toilet only as a cost compromise.

Bathroom sink has been installed.

Why does your sink have two faucets, you ask? Well, modern faucets cannot easily accept my bottle washer, which really just needs some standard threaded connection. So we got a second, simple faucet with the proper threads for connecting the bottle washer, via a short hose. This is to wash bottles for homebrew. I also think is useful to have a second faucet.

Moving Day is September 10, 2023

Kayo called two moving companies to get estimates to move our furniture and appliances to the new house (and everything else as well). Kayo and I walked around the house with the representative from the company, told him which pieces of furniture we were planning to take, how many bicycles and sets of snow tires, etc. Heart is a national moving company that we had used to move here from Tokyo in 2013. Arc is a local company, in fact an acquaintance works for this company.

It turned out that the estimates from the two companies were fairly close, and so we decided to use Arc, since they are local we know people at that company. That allowed us to set a moving date. The rent for our rental home where we now live can be prorated according to how many days we stay here in September, so it makes sense to move as soon as possible. The builder has scheduled an open house for September 2-3, so we will move the following weekend, September 10.

Can See the House!

The scaffolding has been removed and you can see the house now!

August 8, 2023

August 9, 2023

August 8, 2023

August 9, 2023

Keisodo and First Floor Wall Paper

August 9, 2023. I stopped at the property on the way to work to measure the space where tiles will go. There was a lot of progress —- I was excited to see the floor in the genkan has been installed. Most of the wallpaper on the first floor has been installed. And the keisodo in the upstairs tatami room has been finished.

The flooring in the genkan has been installed.

This is the accent wall paper in our bedroom

Sarah’s bedroom gets pink wallpaper.

Accent wallpaper in garage, the one that took so much effort to select.

Keisodo in the tatami room has been applied.

Detail of the keisodo.

Wall paper in first floor toilet room.

Second Floor Wallpaper is Complete

August 5, 2023. Kayo and I went over to the property, there was lots of progress on the wallpaper. The second floor is complete, and some wallpaper on the first floor. Kayo and I also discussed the tiles we will install next to the kitchen stovetop.

We made a decision on the wood stove surround tiles as well. I ordered those, but because of the summer holiday, delivery won’t been for at least two weeks. I also ordered a tile cutter. I need to acquire an angle grinder for trimming tiles as well.

Wallpaper is complete on the second floor. In this picture, the color isn’t much different than the drywall color, but it looks quite nice. The wallpaper on the ceiling is a darker color, kind of a basket weave.

This is the ceiling of the tatami room. Also a dark wallpaper, but the pattern is different from the ceiling elsewhere.

Kayo choose a Marimekko wallpaper for the upstairs toilet. The floor has also been installed.

We choose a kind of light blue wallpaper for the bathroom, although a bit hard to see in this picture. We also got a hexagon pattern for the floor.

We’re going to tile next to the kitchen stove top with hexagon tiles, and we’re talking about the installation. Kayo wants a bit of an irregular pattern on the right side. I printed out the plan with blank hexagons so that she could fill in the ones she wants. She choose the dark matte color.

Kitchen Installed

July 30, 2023. On Sunday Kayo and I visited the house. The kitchen has been installed! As usual, here new things I noticed on this visit.

The kitchen. There’s the fancy faucet that Kayo ordered on Amazon. Stovetop on the left, sink on the right.

Pulled back the bubble wrap so we could see the kitchen cabinet face which Kayo chose.

The posts and beams have been stained.

The balustrade has also been stained.

Wallpaper has been delivered and stored in what will become the first floor toilet room.

I said earlier that joints weren’t spackled, but that turns out to not be true. All walls were spackled, ready for wallpaper. One advantage wall paper has over paint, there are far more choices.

Garage Wall Paper and Tiles

July 26, 2023. Today Wednesday we meet T-san and Y-san at the property. One goal was the finalize the wallpaper in the garage — being my space, I was to decide. I had a bunch of A4-sized swatches from Lilicolor, Sincol and one more. I picked a light gray Lilicolor that seemed to match the house color, which was easy to compare now that the house was painted. I was OK not having an accent (one wall using a higher grade wallpaper) but everyone else seemed to think it was a good idea. Every time I said I didn’t need it, the other 3 went back to the catalogs looking for ideas. Finally they found an accent wallpaper that I liked, and everyone seemed satisfied. The groupthink prevailed.

The garage accent wallpaper we finally decided on — 3 other walls will be light gray. Kayo and I both like herringbone and the touch of red matches my study and the car (I’d originally proposed the accent just red to match my car, but no one else liked this idea).

Y-san and T-san holding the wallpaper sample catalog to the wall to help me imagine what it might look like

After that, Kayo and Y-san discussed curtains some more, and I had no objections to their final choices.

Then, we discussed what to do with the “front yard”. The builder provided and estimate for filling the whole thing with concrete. My preference is to pour a concrete driveway only and do something minimal with the rest for the time being. My thought is to give more attention to the walkway and landscaping next year. It is not a large space in any case.

We went upstairs next. The painter was staining the posts, that was pretty exciting to see the color.

We had some discussion about the tile for the wood burning stove surround. In this case, I’d been getting samples myself and discussing with Kayo about the tiles we’d like. The plan is that I will install the tiles myself.

Paperwork

July 26, 2023. On Wednesday last week, we had a meeting with the builder. They gave us some legal documents, since this building is a new piece of real estate, it needs to be registered. I listed those below, just writing the translation that DeepL gave me. (Title? Deed? How do you say these in Japanese?)

Beyond that, we needed to perform some procedures in a specific order:

• The bank wanted our juminhyo with our old address, so Kayo got one and faxed (!) it to the bank.
• The property registration should have our new address on it (otherwise, we’d have to pay to change the address at some future date). So, now we change the address on our juminhyo to the new address. We did that today. I got my new address on the back of my residence card.
• That takes a couple of hours, then we can get a juminhyo with the new address AND issue the jitsu-in using the new address. The jitsu-in is needed for one of the documents below.

Here are the titles of the documents we got from the builder last week. These are some pretty bad translations.

• Authorization of Proxy (委任状) I believe this document allows the lawyer to perform some procedures on our behalf. There are 3 of these documents. Two seem to be duplicates, and are for registering the building (建物表題登記). The third seems to be for changing the address on the land registration (所有権登記名義人住所変更登記), since the owners have a new address now.
• Certificate of Special Subagreement 特分協議証明書. This is the only document that requires jitsu-in.
• Building Drawings 建物図面
• Real Estate Acquisition Tax Housing Deduction Report (New Housing) (不動産取得税住宅控除申告書（新築住宅）)
• Real Estate Acquisition Tax Land Deduction Report (New Residential Land) (不動産取得税土地減額申告書（新築住宅用土地関係）)
• Application for Certificate of Residential Building (住宅用家屋証明書申請書)

The House Has Been Painted

July 22, 2023. When I visited the property on Saturday I was pleasantly surprised and excited to see that the house had been painted. Now you can better see the dark gray color that we choose.

The house has been painted a dark gray color.

For reference, here is the house last month, before it was painted.

The back side of the house has not been painted yet. But you can see the paint on the siding on the corner here.

The color is a nice contrast with the wood of the porch roof.

The top of the balcony wall has not been painted. At the time I took this picture I wondered why. Later, I found out a cover will be added which matches the color of the window frames.

It seems like some texture was added and sprayed at the same time.

There were four paint cans in the garage, seems two were left to dry. The gray paint seems to be Kikusui Nitoko N-50. It is not clear what the can on the left is for, but I found it online.

A few days later I was at the property and the painters were there. This is their truck.

My Car and Its Garage

July 8, 2023. At the meeting on Wednesday, I choose wallpaper for the garage, and I began to wonder what the garage would look like with the car inside. Today I could not put my car in the garage, as scaffolding is blocking the entrance to the garage, besides there is some lumber in there as well.

My car easily fits left-right, with sufficient space to open the car door. It is a tight fit front-rear. I like how you can see the trees outside through two windows.