bedding down

Have been thinking about the bedroom lately (not in a light the candles and get jiggy with it way), but we still haven't got anything set up in the upstairs rooms. Well, the old cheapie bed frame we had before is up, so we are not sleeping on the floor, but otherwise nothing.

I am uncertain what to do about the bedrooms. There are 2 upstairs.

I think I have written before that we co-sleep, but at the moment we have a make-shift side bed for K out of futon mattresses. It doesn't really help, and we end up being squashed in together (with K kicking at ME all night/early morning). I want to get something worked out for the bedrooms before TJ-baby arrives, but realistically, since our latest electricity bill came in, I don't think it is feasible during winter at least, to have seperate bedrooms. So what do we do?

J wants to buy bunk beds for the "kids" room, and a double bed for us, in the main bedroom, probably that has storage underneath it. But I also want the "kids" room to double up as the guest room, at least for now. We still have futons we can use in the third room(downstairs) in a pinch, but for J's parents when they come, and if my parents come for TJ-baby birth, then I think they would be best put up in the 2nd room upstairs. So if we got bunk beds, it would need to be beds that can also be used as singles (not the pipe type) which then cuts out the IKEA bottom is a double bed/top is a single bed bunk bed which I think is really cool (and it always reminds us of a hostel we stayed in at Foz do Iguacu, on the Brazillian border, near Iguassu falls.) Also, I can't see bunk beds being useful until K is a LOT older. I even saw a triple bunk bed (with a trundle bed underneath) that I would like to get, but again, it wouldn't be useful until at least mid-primary school age, I would think.

But if we put a double bed in there(kids room) now, K probably won't sleep there anyway, but will end up still sleeping in with us, so it doesn't really solve any problems, I guess. Even a half of the bunk bed, still means that if someone comes, we need to fiddle around and set up another bed in the room for them.

Do we therefore attempt a family bed in the bedroom? (I already have a cot for TJ-baby, which I am hoping to put beside our bed, for easy night time feedings) which means we will have to also add a single bed to the equation for K, because we can't all fit on the one bed for much longer and still stay sane.......but I then the baby will probably keep K awake during the night AND the room will end up being FILLED with beds, and no space for anything else(I would like to get some built-in cupboards for the room too ....but don't want to end up with no floor space! lol). And I can't find a bed in Japan that floats my boat at all...they all look so BORING and THE SAME.

Aaarrrgghhhhh. Who would have thought just trying to get some zzzz's would be so difficult to work out?

any suggestions?

SIMWPFWTMTOHH

(Slightly Insomniac Married White Pregnant Female
With Too Much Time On Her Hands)

seeks the following:

a cool toilet mat set for downstairs toilet, and funky bathroom mat set for upstairs bathroom and toilet (all in one). No Hello Kitty or Disney, flowers, pastels or shades of brown, thanks.

maternity clothes (mainly tops) that don't look like potato sacks.Oh, and don't cost a fortune. No tunics, no tartan, and no browns.

kitchen storage unit/cabinet/bench top. White, 120cm wide, 47cm~50cm depth.

don't even get me started on finding a bed frame.......

Any suggestions on where to look are welcome. Shimachu, Rooms Taishodo, Homes, Ikea, Nissen and Nitori are just not showing me the goods.

We spent the WHOLE day at home centres trying to find a kitchen cabinet that would fit in the space beside the fridge. As it is where the power point is, it needs to house all the kitchen electric goods, like the microwave-oven, rice cooker (should have one of those pull out shelves for this), and coffee machine, etc, so it needs to be at least 47cm in depth, so the oven doesn't hang off the edge! All the ones we saw were either the right colour, but wrong width, or the right colour, right width, but wrong depth, or the right colour, right width, right depth, but no pull out slidey shelf for rice cooker to sit on. Aaaarrrggghhh. Is going custom made really out of our budget??? lol.

In the end, we came home with impulse buy cushions and a throw rug for the lounge - 7000yen spent only so we would save 260yen on parking and get an hour free for having bought something, lol! At least it was a quick and painless decision, unlike the epics we are having trying to decide on furniture (and bathroom mats). Maybe sometimes it is better just to rip the bandaid off in one quick yank and get it over and done with.

As for maternity clothes, I somehow managed to get away without buying much when pregnant with K, basically because the only time I went out of the house was to take R for walks, so didn't worry too much about how I looked. This time I have playgroups and playdates to think about, so would like to get a few items to tide me over. I bought some jeans back in Oz, and have some other pants from last time, but am in dire need of tops - I seem to be exploding at an exponential rate this pregnancy, and all normal tops are being stretched to breaking point already. Also some comfy around the house trackie pants that don't cut into my bump would be nice! I have been looking at US sites, but few of them post international...and even if they do, the shipping costs are pretty high - I don't know if I can justify paying so much for shipping such cheap clothes, that I will only wear for a few months anyway!?!? Maybe if money wasn't a consideration, but hey, we just put ourselves into 35years of loan repayment hell, who am I kidding, money is so not growing on trees in this neighbourhood!

So the search continues - slowly but surely we will get the house in order. I am just getting really sick of furniture hunting and home centres about now. And despite coming home absolutely slaughtered from a whole day of being on my feet, yet again I find myself up after midnight, with a headache, and unable to think about sleep....... and the skating is on in the background.

I may be up for a while longer yet.

sofa, so good

What a lovely Sunday morning, that I have spent inside on the (NEW!) sofa, veging out after a 5am wake up call. J left again this morning for another business trip - he was home 2nights 1day, lol.

But it was an eventful day yesterday - he suggested we head off furniture shopping again. I have to admit that I was SOOOOO over Ikea and didn't want to go, but there was a rug there that he liked, and wanted to buy, as well as some more bits and pieces, so we went along. Turned out to be the right decision, as we came back with a great sofa, at a great bargain! It was reduced in price as it was the last in the range. Oh, and probably because of the colour - it is turquoise blue!!!!!!!! Sooooooo not what we were thinking of at ALL, but suprisingly, when I saw it out of the corner of my eye in the store, I thought it looked cool, and so did J. Now having it in the living room, I think it looks really good - a definate "feature". And I think it compliments the rug that we had in mind too, and goes with the black/brown tv and display cabinets. So all is good.

Getting it home was a bit of a nightmare though - it comes in 2 pieces, and while one fit in the back of the van, one had to be thrown onto the roof-racks - we got it up there, only to realise that the car wouldn't be able to get out of the carpark, so had to get it down again, drive the car around to the loading bay outside and throw it up again! In front of everyone eating their Ikea hot dogs! I am sure it was a great spectacle to watch.

Got the smaller part of the lounge upstairs somehow, but the bigger part was not gonna fit up the stairs, so J had the bright idea of us lifting it up the slope at the side of the house, which is like a super steep grassy slope, and in through the living room window. I was shit-scared of doing this, as I had vision of me letting go and J tumbling to the ground only to be squashed by a big turquoise lounge suite. Anyway, as luck would have it, the house next door has been sold, and there were workmen in there yesterday (landscaping the back yard, making a wood deck, by the looks of it) and when they saw us about to pull the lounge off the roof, they kindly offered to help lift it up! Sure saved me! So now I am comfortably sitting/lying on lounge (it is a corner sofa).

Also got a new fridge last night - it will arrive probably next Saturday. Again, I think we got a pretty good bargain. It is a 475L fridge (compared to our current "bar fridge" at a measly 183L). I am *so* excited to have a fridge so large. It was the largest fridge that we could fit up the stairs (it is one of the narrow makes). Anything bigger and it would have to be lifted up over the balcony, at an extra 30,000yen or more.

Once the fridge comes, we will have more of an idea of how much extra space we have in the kitchen to put some sort of crockery cabinet and one of those Japanese space saving cabinets with the sliding bench for the microwave oven/coffee maker/ blender and whatever other electrical appliances there are.

It is kinda amazing how quickly you can fill a whole house, lol!

correct protocol?

I am wondering what the correct protocol is when a repairman is here re-wallpapering the roof in the kitchen. Obviously, I can't get into the kitchen, but I am getting cabin fever sitting in the adjacent living room (which is crazy because if there was no repairman here, I would happily be sitting on the sofa all day with no worries what so ever.)

I would like to get upstairs and do some cleaning, but I wonder if it is ok to be out of sight (or, let them out of my site...) or should I just embrace the moment and watch some more Lipstick Jungle - my latest US Drama addiction!

.......TV wins. Cleaning can wait.

the joys of buying a house

just a few random observations from the last 8 months of house hunting:

we were in no rush to buy. We thought we would take a year or so to look around and find a good place. But seriously, after even 2 months of looking (which is maybe 2-3 weekends of going out and actually looking at houses, but also spending every night looking on the internet for houses) we got a bit disillusioned. It has been a LONG 8 months, and we were ready to give up several times - usually since all the "good" houses are snapped up so fast.

sometimes looking at a house on paper it is perfect (or crap) but actually seeing the place changed how we thought of it. Many times we were disappointed by the environmental factors - like being up behind a factory (reeking of oil), on a main road, basically no sunlight....
The house we are buying, truthfully wasn't on our list of houses to see. we didn't like the room layout, so we had culled it. But J added it on at the last minute, basically because it was so close to the station. When we got there, the overall balance of the house/yard/close to station/environment (close to park, station, quiet road, no houses in front of it) outweighed the fact that it wasn't our ideal 間取り.
I guess what we learned from house hunting was that as much as a pain it is, going to see lots of houses is the only way. And not to skip over houses just because of their room layout (which in the end was not one of our deciding factors)

best to go look at houses on Saturday morning.
Usually when we went on Sunday mornings, and found a place we liked, the RE agent would ring the "central property hotline" (seems to be a number that controls all these things) only to be told that someone had already put a bid in (申し込み） on that house.
So it is only a bid, you say, BUT the thing is, in this climate, with the house market at such a low price, houses are selling like hotcakes. It is a buyer's market. A lot of houses have dropped their prices, are selling fast, and the number of houses on the market has fallen by 2/3rds since this time last year. So, in effect: too many people trying to buy too few houses. A day makes a difference.

Also, banks are lending money out more easily, so in our experience, the houses that had a bid on them generally went to sale. Once or twice we put the second "dibs" on a house, but always the first bidder got it.

we had an initial list of conditions we wanted in a house. Wanted a counter kitchen, 2 story house, 4 rooms - one should be a washitsu off the side of the living room, 2 car parking, ....etc etc. In the end, the house we bought matched hardly any criteria. We changed our way of thinking after seeing houses, and added more criteria. I guess there were some things that we wouldn't budge on though, like NO buses, at least within 15min (10min better) walk to station. Oh, and it had to be a carpark that I could reverse the car into! (some of the places the car parks are sooooo tiny, I would never have been able to maneuver around them)

the time taken from when we put the bid in, until the loan came through, and we collect the keys has been 7 and 3/4weeks. And we have pushed them all the way. Nearly every week we were asked to collect more documents, furikomi money (for house inspection) yada-yada, and we did it all in the fastest turn around time possible...but still it took a month for the loan approval to come through. We obviously had more of a reason to push the process, what with all of us leaving the country as it turns out 4 days after moving in (5 days after getting the key in our hot little hands)....but it was a frustrating 2 months and lots of paper pushing.

So we have 2 more days until we are proud home owners. It has been a long haul. Hope owning a house is worth it......