Monday, November 14, 2011

Chapter 46– 9 months later…

I wish I had a handy excuse such as being pregnant for being disconnected for the last few months, but I’ll just fess up and confess that I got a little lazy after reaching the major milestone of moving in.

Today Lara and I met a lovely couple and their kids who are off on their own adventure of building a home in the Tokyo area.  It’s great to see that my documented control-freak habits and panic attacks are actually useful for people. As we talked I felt nostalgic: Ah those feelings of “Wow that’s a big mortgage!”, “How will I get through all that paper work?”, “Where do I begin?”, “What if I mess up and I’m stuck with it till I’m 70?”, “I want to buy this plot now! and move out..no no..must check if there’s something better…slow down”, etc. Yes stressful but looking back, plain old fun.

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Now 9 months later, with hindsight the question is: Is there anything we would have done differently?”. For now I’ll answer that question at a macro level and zoom in to each area of the home over the next few weeks. I guess it’s report card time :)

Location: No regrets here. I still get weekly emails on properties in the area and in terms of location at the right price, I think we timed it perfectly.

Home Design: Our goal was to build a comfortable, functionally and energy efficient with good materials. We can go into the nit picky details a little later on. but very little that I would do over.

Garden: This is a hard one to rate, as our intention has always been to build over time and do it ourselves. Unfortunately our beautiful lawn died of some fungal disease which forced us into a redo of our front door landscaping. More on this later, but at this point we’ll have to wait until next spring for new grass.

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So you’ll get all the grizzly details from the genkan to the loft in the next few weeks. Albeit on a tangent, tonight I roasted our first chicken in our Miele Convection oven/microwave and it was perfect!! All golden on all sides, with that beautiful and delicious crispy and salty skin crust. Yummmmm.

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Feel free to ask questions by leaving a comment.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the update!! And thanks, more generally, for sharing your experience of building a house with the rest of us. A real inspiration!

    I have a couple questions about your appliances - I know you went with Miele for your oven and dishwasher, is your cook top also Miele? Did you go with gas or IH? I'd love to be able to cook a whole chicken in my oven - what are the dimensions of your oven?

    Looking forward to future updates with more nitty gritty details!
    --Cindy (in Kunitachi)

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  2. Hi Cindy,
    Thanks for your comments.

    About your questions:
    Yes our cookttop is also Miele and it's IH. You need to be aware that you may need to buy new pots and pans for them to work with IH. It's different cooking experience and on the whole very positive but does take some adjusting to. It's has some speed settings for rapid boil and that is very handy. Also great that it can be come an extension to your counter while doing prep work.

    The oven is micro and convection. The internal dimension is about H260 X W460. It should fit a 12~15 lbs Turkey.

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