The Dynamic Duo

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.