May update

Well the month of may has come and gone and there is still no construction happening.

We have a meeting this week to review the estimate. Hopefully it will be within our budget and we can move forward (fingers crossed).

Yoko went to England and France for a week. She was looking for wallpaper, lights and miscellaneous items for the house.

She came back with some pretty cool things.

She bought two of these antique lights, we are thinking of using above the kitchen.

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This is an interesting designer lamp that has a swivel arm and the cord can be adjusted. Maybe for above the couch.

We've always liked this rubber lamp. Now we have one in blue.
Possibly for Mo's room.

 These three lamps could be for the office or dining table or...?

 And a wood-bin.

These will all be nice authentic additions to our new home.

April Update

There's nothing to update as far as actual construction goes. But the important news is we have received approval from the city that we can begin construction on the site.
It also looks like we have decided on a builder for the house. They're making an estimate now...so we're a bit anxious about $$$.
Our most used Japanese-english buzzwords are:
"cost-performance" and "cost down".

The mortgage company is still undecided, but we have the funds together to begin the foundation work starting at the end of May.

We have done a lot of behind the scenes decision making as well.

It took a while to decide on the wood flooring for the house as well as the tiles
for the lavatory/bath/shower.

We were very specific on what we wanted so we ordered a lot of samples to find the best options....

FLOORING

I looked at companies all over Japan, the U.S. and China. Our top choice was a Chinese flooring company they sent some really nice samples of oak flooring as well as Ipe decking.
We wanted a grey oak for the downstairs and a white oak for upstairs. As much as we both like natural materials we wanted a wood that has a more modern look.

This is what we are planning on using. Hopefully there will be no problems dealing with factory direct ordering from China.

TILE EDIT See June, July and August

The tile for the bathroom was also a long decision making process. Yoko loved the look of limestone, but we learned that limestone shouldn't get wet as it stains very easily. But we stuck it out with using limestone though we were limited to using it on the wall of the lavatory only and finding two more tiles to match for the flooring in the lavatory as well as the shower/bath and a third tile for the wall in the shower/bath. It took several weeks of ordering sample tiles from various companies to find a set of three in the right colors, we also had to consider the surface material and the available sizes to find the right match.

The Limestone is on the top left the tile on the top right will be used for the floor and the tile on the bottom will be for the walls in the shower/bath.

Property Preparation Wrap-up

The preparation for the property is finished. 

The retaining wall looks very sturdy and was finished with a nice lip on top.

The drainage wall and pipe has also been finished and installed on the other side of the property.

We're very happy that the land is looking crisp and clean and ready for construction to begin...Hopefully in May.

More property preparation

We stopped by the property to see how the pre-construction work was going.
A couple of very solid retaining walls have been poured. The land has also been leveled and smoothed. They added another week to the permit, so it looks like they're not finished yet.

Updated floor plan for March

We had a three hour meeting at the architects office this week. We reviewed the plans and made some minor changes. Check out the new feature in the atelier upstairs (last picture below), we added a window that extends outward, so it will have a window seat space inside.

Property Preparation

NOTE: I began this blog in March, 2012 most of my last posts happened several months or even years ago; so I'm happy to be able to now give updates which are happening in the present time.

Even though we still haven't secured our loan or finished planning and budgeting, some exciting steps have began to prepare the property for the house to be built.

The property is getting some necessary reinforcements and procedures that must be completed prior to us getting the go ahead for construction.

We were surprised to see some busy workers and machinery on our land as we hadn't received any news of when this work would begin.

Here's Yoko posing with the official permit, they've allowed 8 days for this job.

There's a parking area that borders our land that needs to have a retaining wall built. A hole was dug and a couple days later it looked like this.

 A small wall along the edge of the reservoir was also built to deal with drainage.

Soil Test

Our property is on a slope, and near the water so we were made aware of the challenge of building a solid foundation. Obviously earthquakes are also a concern in Japan so foundation construction is done to a high standard.

Our architect encouraged us to do a soil test and we were prepared to plan for a piling foundation which would involve boring tubes into the ground.

There were two tests available, at first we opted for the less expensive test, but the results were inconclusive. This was the machine that showed up for the first test. I'm really not sure what's involved here, but to my eye it looked like he was inserting long rods into the ground to measure resistance...

Since the first test gave us inconclusive results we decided to have the more elaborate test done. This is what the machine that performed the second test looked like.

They bored various holes around the property, taking core samples to test the strength of the soil.

Several weeks later we met with our architect to get the results. She presented us with this case, we had no idea what was going to be inside...

They opened it and inside were these carefully packaged vials of earth from the test, very cool.

Even better was the news that the land was solid enough so as not to require a complicated piling foundation, instead we could use a more conventional slab foundation.

Good News

Our architect has a connection at Grohe faucets. It seems that they want to donate faucets in exchange for Yoko doing some photography for them.
We're really excited, they make great faucets and also make an under-counter water filtration system with Cleansui which we were planning on using anyways!

The Kitchen

Planning a kitchen in a house is critical.

We're initially just putting in a kitchen island and will add additional shelves and counter space after we move in.

Japan has a huge amount of system kitchen manufacturers. We visited every major kitchen showroom in our area and even went to Kobe to look at the IKEA kitchens.

In the end it looks like we've decided to use a kitchen from Toyo. The quality of their kitchen island and the simple design really appeals to us. They have very solid stainless counters and great big sinks. The island will include a dishwasher, propane range and hood. We'll use their Bay line with the chaos cabinets.

We're not totally in love with the cabinet material but at least scratches won't be an issue.

We also visited a very cool custom kitchen company, kitobito. They're a local maker who use really nice wood and are very craft oriented. We're hoping to have them make our bathroom sink and cabinets.

This is the kitchen in their house, our architect also designed their home.

Floor Plan

As Spring approached we were busy working on the floorplan.

We had compiled a vast photo library of inspiring images so Yokota-san had a pretty good idea of what we wanted: simple, spacious, stylish, and modern being some of the words I would ascribe to our tastes. We were pretty happy with the initial design and layout she presented us with.

We had many meetings going over little details and fine-tuning the layout.

This floorpan is after several revisions and we made a couple of changes after this version.

Around February one of the employees from Unita presented is with this model of our house. It was exciting to see something in 3-D!

Motoki was very interested in his room.