So it's been a crazy month or so.
First of all, I finished school. This led me to job hunting, studying, and doing not much else.
The plan was to find a job and then find a new place to live.
After a few weeks of searching I found a job. I'm making choose your own adventure style games (they have less freedom than that, but the same principle) for mobile phones.
The first game I've worked on is being checked over by the production team, and after feedback I'll fix it up and hopefully it'll be ready for release.
In the meantime we have started house hunting.
The market is fierce here, as you might expect of a city of 25 million people.
We found an awesome place that was within budget, was within commuting distance for both of us, and was first floor in a small apartment complex, so it even had a garden. Frankly, beyond all expectations.
I was refreshing the page every few minutes on the train to the real estate agents, because we've had a few cases where we've found a place, sent a link across and had it be taken before we've even managed to look at it properly.
I joked that there must be a reason that it was so cheap (i.e. Within our budget) with everything going for it.
Turns out - I was right. There was a reason.
The owner is a psychopath who demands quarterly inspections of the property.
Apparently they were supervised inspections, meaning we would be there the whole time, but would you trust someone like that to not just let themselves in and wander around whenever you weren't there? Someone with that much time, with such a dark soul (might be projecting about the dark soul part, but it was such a nice looking place that I'll forever be annoyed at the bastard) probably has spy cameras set up around the place to do his weird perving. Bastard.
Anyway, we stayed on at the real estate agents to search for other places nearby, and for once they weren't completely shit. Our guy found us four places that fit the bill, and we checked them all over that day.
The first was an honest to goodness house. Something I never thought I would be able to live in, while here in Japan. It was obviously tiny, with a living/dining area, small square kitchen and three upstairs bedrooms. One of the bedroom is for us, the other is for all our crap/guest room and the last one is my one selfish desire from this whole moving thing - I was a room to call my own. Colloquially known as a man-cave, I prefer the term 'home office.'
Anyway, it was yet to be cleaned and the bathroom was in a dingy state. This put the misses off, and the walk to the station put me off a bit. It did have a patch of land at the front (a few square metres at most) that they called a garden, but it wasn't enough to tip the scales. The back had a thin strip of land that I could have grown something along, but it was off-limits for some reason.
Way, way more than I was ever expecting to live in - but with problems.
The next house was essentially a brand new apartment, with brand new fittings and features that made it by far and away the most presentable house I've ever seen in a showing situation. It was showroom quality. It even had a pull-out dishwasher built into the cupboards in the kitchen, which is something you just don't see here. Every wall was shelves hidden behind posh sliding doors and fancy cupboards with push-button doors were everywhere. It even had a bath with a Jacuzzi mode. Internally it was perfect.
Externally, I had a few concerns. It was part of an enormous dystopian complex in the middle of the town, home to probably a thousand people (there were easily 250 apartments in this place). All of them were young families. The flat was on the second or third floor. It was difficult to tell, but the south facing balcony didn't look like it would get any sunlight in summer, due to the sheer height of the building and the overhang from the building above. The back rooms were utterly dark. The walkway that connects all the front doors to all the apartments was at the front of the apartment, where the bedrooms were. Not ideal, considering it was all families who would be up at god knows what time on a Sunday running around and being annoying, right next to the bedrooms. The reason those rooms were so dark is because the windows were obviously heavily shielded from prying eyes.
If you could transplant this apartment and put it almost anywhere else, it would have been the perfect place. Rent would have probably also been four times more.
At this point we hadn't seen all the places, so we didn't have much to compare to, but there were a couple of problems with each.
House number three was a fair amount older, but allowed cats. The vast majority of places in Japan don't allow pets for obvious reasons. The ones that do are much more expensive, again for obvious reasons. This meant that for the same money we would get less apartment, but would get a cat or two.
(I really want a cat)
But there was just something a little bit off about the place, and I wasn't really thrilled with it. I can't describe it, but luckily the wife felt the same way so we passed that one over.
At this point, we've been looking at pieces of paper with flats on them, and walking around to a few places for around 6 hours.
We went back to the estate agents to mull over our choices, and see if the last of our shortlisted options was view able.
Turns out it was, so we piled into the car again and drove to see it.
This is an odd thing to be enthused about when talking about a house, but it I absolutely love how weird the shape and layout are. It is truly bizarre. The living/dining area is square. The spare room is square (and styled in the traditional Japanese manner, with tatami floors and sliding Japanese paper doors, IN FRONT OF GLASS WINDOWS?!?!) but only half as long. Every other room in the house is triangular, or has weird lumpy squares poking out. It has three verandas. Admittedly, one is barely a sliver, designed to hold an external air-con unit, but still large enough to hold some pots and plants. (Accessed by climbing out of a window.)
It's on the second floor, and is an eight minute walk to the station according to google, which makes it about 5 or 6 minutes for humans. The station is thirty minutes to work for both of us, and isn't the most insanely busy line - although rush hour everywhere here is bad.
It's situated at the top of a hill, so even though we're low-down in the building, you can see the sky from all the windows, and the surroundings are farms and greenery. Generally much more pleasant than some of the other places.
It also has a front doorsman who can take in any parcels and packages and whatnot that are delivered during the day. Weird.
As you can probably tell, this is my favourite place so far.
The downsides are twofold. Firstly, it sits along a back entrance to the apartment complex (unlike some of the other places, there aren't that many flats, so there aren't that many people, and being a corner unit means we would be right on the end so less foot-traffic in front of the door) with the route passing in front of one of the bedrooms. As such, a strong set of curtains and some kind of plant barrier will be needed to make that room voyeur-proof. I would make that room my 'home office.'
The other downside is the initial move-in price. Since the end of the war Japanese housing has tons of fees and codified bribes that are seemingly designed to stop people moving house often. Why you would want to stop people doing that is beyond me, but I'm not an economist so who knows. This place is particularly egregious on that front.
We have one more place to look at, and then we can make a decision about which to choose. So far it's looking like the corner place - but never count your chickens.
In other news, the strawberry plants are really picking up pace. This was todays haul. There are four different varieties in the planter, and interestingly the plant that produced the enormous strawberry in the middle isn't throwing off any arms for me to grow new plants. The others are throwing out baby plants left right and centre and despite their bizarre shape, are easily the best tasting ones.
Look at the size of this!
