The Dynamic Duo

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.

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FOOTNOTES
1 I created an archive page because with all the images the main page was becoming way too heavy.↩
2 or whatever those things are called. I swear there was a proper name for them, but I cannot think of it for the life of me.↩