In Which Laura and Dai Are Both Extremely Impulsive
So, it looks like Crazy Plan #257 is a go. We're buying a house! Not just buying a house. Building a house! We had a big, long meeting with some guys in suits who talked really fast and used a lot of words I'd never heard before, not even on the JLPT Level 1. Luckily, Dai (in addition to being a fluent speaker of Japanese) went to a business high school. It's ridiculous the number of ways in which he is quietly, unexpectedly, efficiently useful. He's like a human Swiss Army knife.
Anyway, Dai got out his official stamp and stamped the papers all over the place -- the top, the bottom, over the edge of the City Hall postage-stamp-thing saying the filing fee had been paid, and at the boundaries wherever two pages came together -- and then this was ours. Or, well, the bank's. But we're allowed to live on it. (If you look on Google Maps, it looks like we bought a parking lot full of cement trucks. But they're not there anymore. Neither is the cement factory that you can see across the street.)
Because the house is going to be a part of the loan, we now have to decide what kind of house we want, so they can tell us how expensive it's going to be -- preferably before the end of December! Eep! So we've been spending all of our days off together being forced to drink coffee in the Bruce Homes model house, poring over pictures of houses with the CEO, Arita-san, and the architect, Sakai-san. (Another reason Dai is awesome is that he likes his coffee black, which means that I can have his milk and sugar. With two creamers and two packets of sugar, it starts to taste like something that might not be poisonous.) We told them we wanted as few walls as possible on the first floor. They kind of ignored us a bit the first time and made something that looks like a typical Japanese house, with one of those long, dark hallways right by the front door where it feels like you have to go half outside of the house to go to the bathroom. (There's a second door into the living room, so none of the heat can get out there in the winter, and you literally freeze your butt off. No thank you!) There were a couple of other random picky things, too, like a bathroom door that looked like a likely trap to smash people looking in the hall closet, but otherwise it was pretty cool. So we drank our coffee and debated, and then Sakai-san went back to his drawing board (perhaps literally?) and we went back home.
And I went back there today, braving Route 21 and its ten million stoplights all by myself (I didn't stall the car even once!) because Dai has to work on a Sunday -- yuck. I got lost (predictably), and Sakai-san even came out to meet me and lead me to their office. I had to drink coffee with just one sugar packet this time. I could admit to hating coffee and demand that they to supply me with tea instead, but I'm doing my best not to be a Demanding Customer in the hopes that they'll forgive me for wanting weird things like an oven and a coat closet. I figure that with anyone you meet, you only get a limited supply of weird requests, so you have to make them count.
Sakai-san had taken out the offending hallway, turned the staircase around, and moved the bathroom door, and suddenly the house wasn't just cool, it was SUPER AWESOME. It's just a tiny little house, really -- much smaller than my parents' house in Pennsylvania, and possibly even smaller than Dai's house, which is cramped and crowded and dark. But it's going to feel huge. The whole first floor is open, so you can see the front door from the kitchen and the living room. It's divided up by the staircase in the middle, but the staircase is going to be open with bannisters, so you can still talk around it and sort of see through it if you're making dinner and you're really curious about what's on TV. There are a ton of windows and two sliding doors into the backyard (THERE'S A BACKYARD!!), and the whole place is going to feel really bright and open and roomy, even though it's secretly really small. And for a tiny house, there are a surprising number of surprisingly large closets, too! Sakai-san said he's always wanted to design a house like this. I told him it was a masterpiece.
(I have to take this moment to say that I still don't feel nearly as grown-up as I sound about all of this. Emotionally, I'm still stuck on "Good grief, I'm building a HOUSE! I have no idea what I'm DOING!" But when you're sprawled on your bed looking at pages of colorful little diagrams, it's very, very easy to forget that it's all actually real.)
I, being a nerd, couldn't resist taking pictures of the diagrams. You can look at them on Facebook here. There's just one thing I can't decide, and that's how the kitchen should go. But I'm kind of too excited to think about that right now. SQUEEEEE!!
Anyway, Dai got out his official stamp and stamped the papers all over the place -- the top, the bottom, over the edge of the City Hall postage-stamp-thing saying the filing fee had been paid, and at the boundaries wherever two pages came together -- and then this was ours. Or, well, the bank's. But we're allowed to live on it. (If you look on Google Maps, it looks like we bought a parking lot full of cement trucks. But they're not there anymore. Neither is the cement factory that you can see across the street.)
Because the house is going to be a part of the loan, we now have to decide what kind of house we want, so they can tell us how expensive it's going to be -- preferably before the end of December! Eep! So we've been spending all of our days off together being forced to drink coffee in the Bruce Homes model house, poring over pictures of houses with the CEO, Arita-san, and the architect, Sakai-san. (Another reason Dai is awesome is that he likes his coffee black, which means that I can have his milk and sugar. With two creamers and two packets of sugar, it starts to taste like something that might not be poisonous.) We told them we wanted as few walls as possible on the first floor. They kind of ignored us a bit the first time and made something that looks like a typical Japanese house, with one of those long, dark hallways right by the front door where it feels like you have to go half outside of the house to go to the bathroom. (There's a second door into the living room, so none of the heat can get out there in the winter, and you literally freeze your butt off. No thank you!) There were a couple of other random picky things, too, like a bathroom door that looked like a likely trap to smash people looking in the hall closet, but otherwise it was pretty cool. So we drank our coffee and debated, and then Sakai-san went back to his drawing board (perhaps literally?) and we went back home.
And I went back there today, braving Route 21 and its ten million stoplights all by myself (I didn't stall the car even once!) because Dai has to work on a Sunday -- yuck. I got lost (predictably), and Sakai-san even came out to meet me and lead me to their office. I had to drink coffee with just one sugar packet this time. I could admit to hating coffee and demand that they to supply me with tea instead, but I'm doing my best not to be a Demanding Customer in the hopes that they'll forgive me for wanting weird things like an oven and a coat closet. I figure that with anyone you meet, you only get a limited supply of weird requests, so you have to make them count.
Sakai-san had taken out the offending hallway, turned the staircase around, and moved the bathroom door, and suddenly the house wasn't just cool, it was SUPER AWESOME. It's just a tiny little house, really -- much smaller than my parents' house in Pennsylvania, and possibly even smaller than Dai's house, which is cramped and crowded and dark. But it's going to feel huge. The whole first floor is open, so you can see the front door from the kitchen and the living room. It's divided up by the staircase in the middle, but the staircase is going to be open with bannisters, so you can still talk around it and sort of see through it if you're making dinner and you're really curious about what's on TV. There are a ton of windows and two sliding doors into the backyard (THERE'S A BACKYARD!!), and the whole place is going to feel really bright and open and roomy, even though it's secretly really small. And for a tiny house, there are a surprising number of surprisingly large closets, too! Sakai-san said he's always wanted to design a house like this. I told him it was a masterpiece.
(I have to take this moment to say that I still don't feel nearly as grown-up as I sound about all of this. Emotionally, I'm still stuck on "Good grief, I'm building a HOUSE! I have no idea what I'm DOING!" But when you're sprawled on your bed looking at pages of colorful little diagrams, it's very, very easy to forget that it's all actually real.)
I, being a nerd, couldn't resist taking pictures of the diagrams. You can look at them on Facebook here. There's just one thing I can't decide, and that's how the kitchen should go. But I'm kind of too excited to think about that right now. SQUEEEEE!!