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When we last left our heroes they had just given up on building a house in Miharu-chou Yokosuka (though we didn’t mention where it was last time).

Well the canceling of their plan for building a house was a disappointment to this story’s hearty protagonists, but they had gotten the first taste and were not about to give up the hunt at this point. Well, truth be told, UltraBob was somewhat terrified with the prospect of buying a house and was not completely averse to the notion of giving up the hunt, but UltraGirl being stout of heart and slender of hip steadfastly refused to give up the chase.

After giving up on the plan for building the house in Miharu-chou, Karate Uncle seemed to lose interest in building a house for us. I think he thought we had put our house building plans on the back burner as that would explain the sense of surprise he showed when we started asking him to look at some houses that we were interested in, but that is a different story for another time. Without Karate Uncle to guide us through the process of looking for a house, we now had to set out on our own. When I say we, I mostly mean UltraGirl as she did most of the work at this stage: contacting real estate agencies, inquiring about pieces of property, and arranging appointments to go and look at places.

After a couple of half-day long excursions to look at places it occurred to me that the places were mostly starting to run together in our minds, and that we needed some record of what we had looked at and what we thought about them. Luckily, I already had a wiki set up on the Akatombo Media server for some work I was doing on some other things, so I set up a section of the wiki to keep records of house hunt related records:

Exhibit A. This particular page of the wiki is read only because I want to keep its integrity as a record of what we looked at and thought. The Cool House Stuff page is open for you to improve upon as you see fit. In fact I would like to take this opportunity to do so, particularly with links to any cool DIY projects that you think would be of interest to a new homeowner. We plan to do a lot of the interior decoration, furniture construction, etc. ourselves to really make the house feel like our place. My first project will be building a fence around the yard unless I find a project that I can work on before we move.

There I go getting distracted again, can you tell I’m getting increasingly excited about having a place that actually belongs to us. Truth be told, the main reason we bought a house is because we weren’t allowed to drive a nail into the wall at our apartment to hang our Simpsons poster.

Some of the earlier places that we looked at are detailed on the archives page¹. Next time I’ll talk about some of the best places we looked at but this time I’ll just discuss a few of the criteria that we were looking for in a house. Both of us of course had the constraint that the house was within our budget.’ We wanted to pay less on our mortgage for the house than we are currently paying in rent for our apartment. Without that constraint the house hunt would have been much much easier, so we highly recommend winning or inheriting a very sizable chunk of money before setting out to buy a house (you could earn/save it too I guess, but that makes for much less interesting stories).

My criteria were very simple, but fairly hard to achieve. My first item was location: most of my sales are done in Tokyo and if I were ever to start working for someone else again it is highly likely that I would find a job in Tokyo. I have already had a few years of experience with a 1.5 – 2 hour commute to work each way on a crowded train, and I’m acutely aware that it possesses a great deal of suckage. Therefore I didn’t want to get any farther away from Tokyo than we already are. Zushi station is the starting point for many trains on the Yokosuka line heading for Tokyo, and on trains that originate farther away there are usually a few cars added at Zushi which makes it fairly likely that you’ll get a seat. It is quite a bit more pleasant to sit for a 1.5 hour commute than to stand holding on to the handles.² The house we got is a bit farther from Zushi station than our current apartment, but it is within walking distance of 4 different train stations, schools, convenience stores, grocery stores, the city recreation center, the community swimming pool, and the ocean.

My other requirement was that I have a space outside big enough for barbecuing or sitting outside at a table with my laptop. A yard or a decent sized balcony was acceptable, but I felt that it was important that I had some space outside that I could call my own. I ended up getting both the yard and the balcony so I’m happy with that.

Some of UltraGirl’s requirements were slightly less tangible than mine, but just as important. Her biggest concern was environment. She wanted the house to be in an area that FELT good. She has fallen in love with Zushi since we have been here, and she was not eager to leave even though Zushi and Kamakura tend to be a bit on the expensive side. She also wanted the house, and particularly the living/dining room to be as big as possible.

The house is pretty big for a house in Japan, but I don’t think the dining/living room are quite as big as she had hoped. Hopefully having a little yard opening off the living room will make up for that.

Well, that’s all the time we have for today boys and girls. Join us next time, same Ultra-time, same Ultra-channel.

How cool would it be if UltraMom and I were both posting on here on the same days?

It has gotten too late today to post more on the house saga, but as part of an ongoing effort to try to blog a bit more frequently, I’ll write a few thoughts from the day here.

I got some good and some bad news from one of my big clients today, but on the balance I think it is good news, and gives me more impetus to move Akatombo Media in the direction I want to take it. I’m pretty stoked about the possibilities.

I have spent the last couple of days very heavily into Last.fm. It is extremely cool, and offers a service that I never imagined would be possible given the legal climate surrounding music. When you listen to music on your computer you report your listening habits to the site, and it recommends new tracks to you by showing you things not in your list liked by people with similar taste. If you are a member or become one after reading this visit my profile and mark me as a friend. I’ve also added my Top Artist chart to my sidebar over on the right (it is on the right as I write this anyway), but it doesn’t seem to update very often. Seriously, this is one of the coolest things I’ve seen on the web in a very long time and I think you need to go check it out.

Go now.

Well my favorite Mom asked for “more details on the house hunt; your “journey”, your requirements and if or how they evolved; how you finally arrived at this one, of all houses.” so here goes:

The house hunt started for us about a year ago when UltraGirl’s uncle, who is a carpenter, found a good deal on some land in Yokosuka and suggested that we buy it, and have him build a house on it for us.

I was a bit hesitant to do it because the land is farther from Tokyo which is where I most often have to travel for sales and things, and is where I am most likely to have to commute to if I decide to work for someone else again. The price was right however, and we began working with Karate uncle, as we used to refer to him before I could remember Japanese names (he is a Karate master), to draw up the plans for a house. Besides the commuting issues, there were a few more items of concern about building this house.

The first was Karate Uncle himself. While he is a very competent carpenter, and house designer who takes great pride in his work. He is also very, how shall I put this, sure of himself. He has a very well defined idea of how he thinks things should be done, how people should act, and how the world should work. One of those principals about how people should act included his niece not going out with a foreigner, and has led to him not being very nice to me in the past. To be fair, many of his concerns were for the well-being of UltraGirl, and he has been increasingly civil to me over the past year or two as he starts to believe that I’m here to stay. We have a tradition of having a big debate at the family’s annual New Years Party that I really enjoy, and I suspect that he does too, but that freaks the rest of the family out. Anyway I have digressed, this isn’t really about the enmity between Karate Uncle and I. You see his hard-headedness has shown itself in other arenas. UltraGirl’s Mother and Father had Karate Uncle build their house as well, and Tomoko’s mother has been going back and forth on whether she wants her big brother to build our house too. You see the experience was a bit of a nightmare for her, as she had an extremely difficult time getting him do anything the way she wanted him to do it, if it in anyway conflicted with his original ideas about how it would be done. UltraGirl has had the same concerns about having him build the house, and surprisingly (at least to me) in the end I was the one most in favor of asking him to build a house for us.

The problem that ultimately ended our plans for this first house though was something different. The lot that we were looking at buying was one of three lots on a larger piece of land, that Karate Uncle had gotten his hands on, and the owner of the larger section was building on one end lot, her daughter was building on the middle lot, and we were going to build on the other end lot. Karate Uncle was having a lot of problems with the daughter being very difficult to deal with, which I’m sure was half her and half him, but in exasperation he finally told us that she was nuts, and he no longer recommended that we build there. It turns out that it was good that we didn’t build there, as the project would still be in limbo. The daughter (who was actually the one dividing the land into lots and selling it after inheriting it when her father passed away) decided to wait one year to sell the land to observe a period of mourning for her father. I could really respect that decision if it had been made before the land was offered to other people, but since that wasn’t the case, I think it was a pretty irresponsible thing to do.

Well that is all we have time for tonight, tune in next time kiddies for more of the wild and crazy house buying antics of UltraGirl and her sidekick MedioBob.

Click this to know more.

Well, after many months of searching and a few setbacks UltraGirl and I have finally signed the contract to purchase our first house together. It is expected to be finished at the end of May. Now that we’ve got the paperwork signed, I can start to get excited.

The house is a 4LDK (4 rooms besides the living room, dining room, and kitchen) and is on a south-facing corner with a road on the East and South and a small cemetary on the West, meaning that it gets great sunlight. It Appears that we’ll have enough room around the house to park two cars and have a small, and this being Japan I DO mean small, yard. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a few days now, but I’m kind of out of practice with this whole blogging thing, and can’t seem to write much; in fact I’ve kind of run out of steam now too, so tell me in the comments what else you think I should talk about and I’ll write another post shortly.