27 posts tagged “dream house”
Sometimes it almost seems as if our new house is alive, and that it’s watching me. It knows where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m about to do next, and how I’m feeling. The lights in some parts of the house have motion sensors, that turn the lights on or off as they sense you enter or leave a room. Upon entering the washroom, not only does a light and an air circulation fan, and a heater inside the toilet seat turn on, to make sure that it’s nice and warm by the time your seat makes contact with the toilet’s. The heater shuts off automatically, as soon as the toilet senses you stand up. I’m glad that we didn’t get the model that lifts its lid when it senses you’re near. Some of the offices where I work have those, and it always freaks me out when I see a flash of white light out of the corner of my eye, as I walk by empty toilet stalls. Anyway, our bathtub has a sensor that monitors your heart rate, and adjusts the temperature of the bath water, to a safe and comfortable temperature. The house also speaks to us at times. When we turn on the water heater, turn on the stove, or change the thermostat setting, we hear voices. You can even hear the house breathing. The air filtration system is left on 24 hours a day, and sometimes when you’re just sitting quietly alone in the house, the movement of air in and out of the vents, sounds as if the house is inhaling and exhaling. The constant movement of air causes the movement of other things in the house. Doors often seem to close by themselves, or sheets of paper fly off of a counter and through the air, as if they were manipulated by a ghost.
What a busy day! Amy and I left for school just a few minutes before the moving trucks rolled up to our apartment. While I was taking Amy to school, Aki was doing some last minute packing, and was supervising the loading of our furniture and boxes onto the trucks. After I left Amy’s school, I rushed to our new home for an appointment with people from the electrical company. While our belongings were in transit, I rushed back to Amy’s school to pick her up, and get back to our new house in order to open the door for the movers when they arrived. At the same time, Aki was meeting with our landlord to give back our keys, and negotiate with him over how much of our security deposit he would return to us.
It was quite an experience watching the Japanese movers at work. First of all, the crew chief opened up a package of new tube socks and started handing pairs of them out to all of his crewmembers. People traditionally don’t wear shoes inside Japanese homes, and to ensure the cleanliness of our floors, and to prevent us from being grossed out by someone wearing grungy, moth eaten socks, he had his whole crew change socks before entering our house. Each time the movers left the house they had to put on their shoes to go to the truck, and they had to take their shoes off again when they reentered the house; which is quite a feat if you can’t use your hands because your carrying a 190 cm tall refrigerator.
But before they brought anything in, the movers lined every inch of wall in our house with a thick boards that looked like corrugated cardboard, but were in fact made of plastic. That way, no damage would be done to the paint and wallpaper in case the sofa, bed or wardrobe brushed up against the walls, as they carried the furniture through hallways which were barely wider than the furniture itself. Most pieces of furniture were covered from top to bottom, in giant, elasticized socks. The sock material which proected the furniture itself from being scratched while moving, and because it covered the feet of things like the sofa and my desk, the movers could just slide the furniture around on our floors until they had gotten it just where we wanted it, without scratching up the floors.
While the movers were brining in boxes and furniture, a team of five guys came to set up our fiber optic phone and internet system, and install our satellite TV system. Soon after the they had left, and the team of six movers had gone home, an engineer from my internet provider made a house call to come and hook up my computer the internet, and set up my new mail account for me. We finally sat down for a sushi dinner with the Aki’s parents, 12 hours after the moving process had started, at a little after 8 p.m.
We had our guided tour of the house today, and we were both happy and relieved to see how the house had turned out. But the tour also left me feeling a bit confused and overwhelmed. Our new house contains the newest of everything from door locks to light switches, to heating and cooling systems. At times the tour felt more like a series of classes in 21st Century housing technology, than just a simple tour, and I felt that I should’ve brought along some paper and a pen to take notes with. If the architect hadn’t shown us how to lock and unlock the burglar proof doors and windows to the house, I would probably never be able to leave the house if I ever managed to figure out how to get into it in the first place. I would never have even found the locks on the windows if the interior decorator hadn’t shown me how to open the curtains and blinds with their newfangled pulleys and switches. A guy from the gas company had to come over to show us how to heat water for the bath. Our hot water heater can actually speak, and it’s Japanese is actually much better than mine. It tells you when it has been turned on. It informs you when your bath water has reached your preferred temperature, and it makes an announcement to inform you when you have shut it off. The gate in front of our driveway even came with an eight page instruction manual, to show us how to open and close it.
Except for the landscaping, our house was finished yesterday. We won’t get to see the finished product until tomorrow, but the builders must have done a good job. The homebuilder’s regional sales manager had heard good things about our house, and asked if he could show it to a family. He had been trying to reel them in for a sale for a while, but the family just couldn’t make up their mind about which company to choose to build their two-family home. Anyway, early this evening we got a phone call from him to thank us for allowing him to show our house to his newest customers. Supposedly the family liked what they saw, and went straight from our house to the homebuilder’s nearest sales office to sign a contract for a new house. I can’t wait to see the house tomorrow, when the architect, interior decorator, construction foreman and salesman, will give us a tour of the house and they take us through a checklist of things, to confirm that everything has been made to our liking.
There’s only a month until moving day, and construction on the new house seems to be going along smoothly. The hardwood flooring has been installed, and so has a rather special heating and cooling system. Central heating and cooling systems are still fairly new and unusual in Japanese homes, offices and shops. Most buildings have a different air conditioner or heater for each room, and a lot of people have never seen a central air conditioner or furnace. Moreover, our new home will have two independent central air and furnace systems. Unlike most two-generation family homes, in which a lot of rooms are shared, the upstairs and downstairs floors in our house, are separate, independent units; each with its own bathroom, thermostat, and heating bills. We figured that would promote more harmonious relations between the older and younger generations in the house. However, we never expected dual heating and cooling systems in a single house, to be such an amazing feet of engineering, and we never expected to receive requests for tours of our house. Over the past couple of weeks, the homebuilder has asked for our permission a handful of times, to allow salespeople to show-off our house’s ductwork to prospective clients. It seems rather incredible to me that people would want to come from all over town, just to see our ductwork, but according to my father-in-law proudly says that they have in fact been doing just that.
For about the last month, much of the work done on our house has been on the exterior, and the work being done inside the house, like wiring and duct work, wasn't all that interesting to look at for very long. So up until now, whenever we've visited the house, we were always on the outside of the structure, and peered inside a little bit, through spaces between beams, or through windows after they and the drywall had been installed. But in the past week, carpenters have built the walls around and within rooms, and workmen have installed complete bathroom units on both floors. From now on, we have a reason to look inside, and the foreman told us it was safe to go inside, so we got a copy of the keys to the house, and this afternoon the three of us and Aki's parents went to take a peek inside. To most people it probably wouldn't have been very exciting. The interior is still very basic, and every square inch of space outside of the bathroom, is all the same, faint yellow wood tone. However, we could see the potential of our dreams starting to become reality, and we could imagine what the finished product will look like in about four weeks time. We could also easily imagine what furnishings will fit in the new house, and what won't, which is really important now as we are in the process of deciding what to pack up and what to sell off before our move.
With only about a month left to go before moving day, we invited representatives from three moving companies to come to our apartment today, to pitch their services and give us estimates for the cost of our upcoming move. Until I got married and moved into our current apartment, I had never owned more stuff than I could carry with my own two hands, and I was able to move from one place to another by lugging things on several bus and train trips across town. Now that I’ve got real furniture that can’t be disassembled, and appliances like a full-sized fridge, I’m going to need a lot more than just a suitcase, a backpack and some twine to make this move. Anyway, they came, they saw and they quoted prices that were a lot more reasonable than I had expected. I guess that will make up for having to by a new fridge. After looking at the blueprints for our new home, all of the movers said that even though the staircase and hallways in our new home will be considerably wider than those found in the average Japanese home, they wouldn’t be able to carry our bed and sofa up the stairs and through the hallways. They said that they would have to lift them up to the second floor by rope and pulley, and fit them in through a balcony window. They also told us that there was no way to get our current fridge up to the second floor and advised us to buy a new one that’s at least an inch narrower. Fortunately we’ll have the time to go looking for one. It appears that the movers will actually do most of the packing for us on moving day, and after our apartment has been emptied out, a cleaning crew will come in and clean up our apartment for the next tenants, so we won’t have to. That was a nice surprise, but I was a little shocked at first to hear that the movers would need three trucks to move the contents of our 2 bedroom apartment. The again, Japanese moving trucks here aren’t the size of the tractor trailers used in North America. They are only about the same size as a UPS courier truck. Anything larger than a two ton truck wouldn’t fit on the streets in our neighborhood, which are less than four metres wide.
It seems like things are moving along smoothly with the construction of our new house. It’s a bit difficult to see, because the structure is surrounded by scaffolding, and the outside of the scaffolding is covered by gray, translucent fabric, on all sides but one. Because there is literally only a few inches between houses, it’s very easy for workmen to inadvertently brush up against your neighbor’s house, while working on yours. For example, if a workman were to swing his hammer back too far, it could easily strike your neighbor’s wall behind him. Likewise, if a shingle fell off the roof, it could crash into your neighbor’s window on the way down. The cloth layer covering the scaffolding around the building under construction, separates it from nearby buildings, and protects them from damage. When we visited the construction site today, we could only see the side of the house facing the garden and the car port. The wooden walls and roof had been covered with a black layer of protective paper, and I imagine that they’ll start covering them with shingles and stucco next week. While we were there, we saw a sign saying that the expected date for the removal of the cloth, and the dismantling of the scaffolding, is September 5th. That will also mean the completion of construction on the exterior of the house.
We now have a roof on our house. It was built in sections at a factory with the insulation already stuffed inside of them. The pieces were loaded onto a truck, and were delivered to the construction site. Then they were lowered into place by crane, and were fastened to the frame of the house. For the next week there won't be any really noticeable changes to the house, as the construction crew works on setting up the electric wiring, as well as the gas and water pipes, inside the structure.
I dropped by the construction site of our house today, to see that with the help of a crane, the workmen had already managed to raise the entire frame of the house, and had filled in all of the spaces between the 2x4's, with plywood. You no longer have to imagine where the living room and the dinning room might be, because now you can see the actual walls that surround and divide the house up into rooms. Some rooms and spaces are turning out to be a little bigger, a little smaller, or a little different than I had imagined, but even so, it all looks good so far; except for the fact that it still needs a roof.
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