Our House

This is a picture of our house in Hikone, Japan.

Come on in and get a tour of our house!  You can see our mailbox is on the right side of the door, it's the rectangle on the bottom.  The kids love to check for the mail from the inside of the house.  Above that is our doorbell that also has a video camera attached.  When the doorbell rings, the video comes on and from a screen inside the house you can see who is at the door and talk to them.  Pretty cool!

You don't wear shoes in the house in Japan, they all stay on the gray floor or the closet (see below).  There is a small step which is nice for the kids to sit on to put their shoes on or off.  It's also nice to keep the dirt by the shoes so it doesn't get tracked into the house.

When you come in, there is a very large closet to the left.  There is no basement, but there are several spacious closets in the house to make up for that. 

Coming up the step you enter into a hallway of doors as I call it.  To the right is the one and only small bathroom in the house.

It can get pretty toasty in here!  There is no air conditioner in the room and it faces west so in the afternoon it gets hot!  On top of that, there is a heated seat on the toilet, which I just figured out how to kinda turn off.  If you leave the lid down like in the picture above, the heated seat feature isn't on.  However, after you lift the lid it starts to heat up.  I know I will love this feature in the winter!

The heated seat is just one of many features of the toilets over here!  This is the control for it, but I have no idea what it says!  There maybe a way to change the heated seat temperature, but I don't know how.  I haven't been brave enough yet to have a seat and start hitting buttons.  I may be pleasantly surprised or scarred for life!

There are also two buttons on the very top right hand side that flush the toilet.  I don't know if one button is specifically for number one and the other is for number two. They both work just fine and I haven't noticed a difference between the two.  Perhaps I will never know! 

Above the door in the bathroom there is another neat storage area.  After leaving the bathroom, there are stairs on the left to go up, a little further down on the left there is a sliding door to the computer room, straight ahead there is a sliding door to the toy/laundry drying room, and to the right there are two sliding doors to the dining room.

Let's continue on to the computer room.

Do you see the darker square lines in the floor above, we will come back to that when we get to the laundry area.  There is another storage shelf in the computer room that has a curtain over it, so you can hide what's up there.

This is where we will dry the laundry on rainy days or in the winter time.  It is also the kids play area.  The door walls over here can open from either side.  The screen door slides from side to side too, so you can move the screen along with the door and not worry about bugs coming in.  All of the windows and door walls here are textured.  It's not a clear smooth glass that you can see through, it's more like a shower door.  It lets the light in, but I can't see out.  It doesn't bother me too much now because we keep the curtains shut during the day to keep the house cooler.  It is also nice because the neighbors can't see in, but I miss being able to look outside.  I have no idea what the weather is out, unless I go outside or open up one of the windows.  

There is a large closet in the playroom for all of their toys. I love how deep the closets are, you can fit a ton of stuff in them!

Except for the bathroom and bedroom doors, all of the rest of the doors are sliding doors.  It's possible to change what room is open to another room just by sliding the doors.  It's hard to explain and show in pictures, but I will give it a try.

In this picture, I am standing in front of the door wall in the play room.  I slid the three doors mostly shut, so you can see a bit of the computer room.  I can slide all the doors to the right and this is what you see then...

The kids enjoy sliding the doors open and closed and we've only had a few fingers pinched when we first moved in.  They are pretty good about it now.  We keep the doors to the hallway closed usually.  Only certain rooms have an air conditioner/heater unit in them.  There isn't one in the hallway or the bathroom, so we keep the doors closed to keep the main rooms cooler.  Each bedroom has an air conditioner/heater, thank goodness!

To continue the tour, we will next go to the family room.

The sliding doors by the couch lead to the playroom.  Here's another view of the family room.

The family room is open to the dining room and the kitchen.

There is not much counter space for cooking, but we are getting by.  There is no oven, but we do have a gas cook top and a microwave oven/toaster.  We also have a rice cooker that plays "Twinkle twinkle little star" when you turn it on.  The top section of the refrigerator can open from either side.  The middle compartment is the freezer and the bottom is more refrigerator. 

There is also a side door in the kitchen which is nice for bringing in groceries, especially since the car is parked on that side of the house.  There are not many attached garages on the houses in Japan.  Most people just park on the side or in front of their house. 

Do you see the plastic bags hanging by the sink?  Those are for our garbage.  The Japanese are big on recycling and we have to separate our garbage before throwing it out.  The bag on the left is for metal, the bag on the right is for plastic and the regular garbage container is for combustible garbage.  There is a drop off location down the street.  We have a calendar with the schedule of what is picked up on what day.  For example, combustible garbage is collected on Tuesdays and Fridays and plastic is on Wednesdays.  We have to put the garbage in special bags when taking them out.

From the kitchen you can go to the laundry room.  That's our washing machine, not very big, but it does the job.  Also, there is only a cold water line, so everything is washed in cold water.  Do you remember the darker square line in the floor of the computer room?  It's actually a storage area in the floor.  There is one in the laundry room as well.  As you can see in the picture above, we keep our laundry soap in it.  It's a really nice feature, good storage without taking up any space!

Next to the washing machine is a sink with a medicine cabinet over it.  All three mirrors open and once again, another nice storage space.  The faucet on the sink can be pulled out and you can change the water flow.  You can have it on the spray mode or push a button and change it to a normal bathroom sink flow (the kitchen one can too).  You can see to the left of the sink is the bathing room.

 

Traditionally the Japanese will shower off in the white area of the bathroom, then once clean, they will soak in the bathtub.  There is a cover for the bathtub, so that the dirty water from your shower won't get into the bathtub.

There is a control panel on the right side over the tub.  You can change the water temperature and have the tub fill up by itself.  When soaking, you can push a button and it will fill the tub with warmer water too.  There is also an intercom system in the control panel to talk to people in the kitchen.  I am sure there are more things the buttons do, we just haven't figured it out yet.

That's everything downstairs, so let's head upstairs.

The stairs here are not as wide as they are in the US.  Perhaps the Japanese have smaller feet, or just different building codes.  It took some getting used to, going up and especially going down.  Thank goodness for that railing!

Upstairs there are two bedrooms, one for the kids and one for Jeff and I.  The kids all share one big room.  Their beds are on the floor, which is perfect for them, if they roll of the bed, they won't get hurt!

There are two doors to their room, a door wall to the balcony (you can see it in the first picture), and in the back corner a little storage area. 

Speaking of doors, there is a strip of a fuzzy fabric that's on the side trim of the door.  It's very quiet when you close the door, if you were to slam it, you wouldn't hear it.  It's nice but sometimes the kids can sneak up on you!  I am waiting for them to get up in the morning or up from their naps and surprise there they are!  I never heard them close the door, but they did.  We keep the bedroom doors closed because there are no air conditioners in the hallways and we want the rooms to stay cool.

 

Our bedroom is just across the hall. It too has a door wall to the balcony.



I absolutely love the view from the bedrooms! There is a rice field behind our house and you can see the mountains off in the distance. I don't think I will ever get tired of the view! It's so beautiful here! In the early evening you can see the bats come out and fly around the rice field. 

If you noticed, there wasn't a clothes dryer in the laundry room, it's because it's up here on the balcony!

Here's another picture of the master bedroom.

You can see Killian hiding in the closet.  The doors slide from side to side along the track which is pretty cool too.  The closets are very deep and have nice shelves for more storage.  There is storage over our dresser too!

That's the tour of the inside of our house. 

This is a picture of the street we live on.  There are no yards with grass, everything is gravel or cement.  There are just a few small trees in front of a few houses.  The houses don't have backyards either.  The house is on the lot and that's it. 

Across the street and one house down is the neighborhood play area.  There are two swings and a slide to play on.

The kids have a great time playing with all of the other kids!

That wraps up the tour of our house in Japan.  If you have any questions or comments, let me know!