landscaping

Year Zero (2)

Posted on by catforehead

CIMG3303The landscaping took more than two weeks. It rained off and on, thus making work a bit difficult. We were surprised at how much equipment was needed to do what we had assumed was a fairly simply job, and wondered how they could charge so little when they were using backhoes, steam shovels, and cranes installed on the beds of large trucks. One of the reasons we didn’t order any concrete work was because we didn’t think it was worth the expense, the reason being that you had to hire an outside company with a cement mixer regardless of how much cement you were going to pour, but in any case on a few days there was quite a bit of equipment on the property.

CIMG3478The first order of business was moving the huge mound of dirt displaced by the septic tank. An older man did that and it wasn’t until the second day or so that we realized he was the father of the huge guy in charge of the project. It turned out to be a fairly tedious task. Since carting the dirt away would have cost us more money we asked if he could distribute it evenly along the akamichi–the strip of city-owned dirt road that bordered the southeast side of our property. We didn’t bother asking for permission from the city since it was obvious no public vehicle was ever going to use it. The old guy did as we asked for no extra fee, though to us it looked like extra work, since after depositing the dirt on the road he had to spread it around. In the end he did quite a good job of making it look inconspicuous–except that at the far end of the dirt road, just after it reached past the end of our property, there was a noticeable dip. Read More

Year zero (1)

Posted on by catforehead

CIMG3311Two weeks ago we received a phone call from N, the salesman at A-1 whom we worked with when we built our house. There was a young couple who were thinking of asking A-1 to build a house for them, but they hadn’t yet secured a piece of land. Apparently, their desires are similar to what ours were: an area that had a bit more nature than your average subdivision. They currently lived in Matsudo, which is about 45 minutes west of us.

The request was a surprise. A-1 doesn’t advertise, since advertising adds to their overhead and thus to the cost of their products. They don’t build model homes for the same reason. When a potential customer wants to get an idea firsthand of what their homes are like, they ask past, presumably satisfied customers if they can bring the potential customers in for an inspection. We did it ourselves when we started looking for homes and read about A-1’s philosophy and design concepts, and were impressed, much more so than with any manufacturer’s model home display. In A-1’s case, you get to see how the owner is actually living in the house designed for them.

However, we thought our home may have been too individualistic for this kind of tour. When N called we had just received the property tax bill for the house and land. Since we moved in after January 1, 2014, we didn’t have to worry about a tax bill for the house until this calendar year, and last summer, when a city official came to assess our property, he almost laughed, implying that what we had wasn’t really worth that much. The tax bill seemed to bear out that implication. The estimate for the house came to less than ¥50,000. Of course, that wasn’t based on an assessment of the market value of the house, but nonetheless, even if you take into account the special deduction that reduces the amount due on a building for tax purposes to one-sixth its assessed value, the assessment was much less than what we paid for it a year ago. We’re not sure what that means, but we do understand that our house is unusual and, perhaps, not the kind of thing that would attract the average buyer: the kitchen and bath are on the second floor, the bedroom on the first; few doors and walls. It was designed to be inexpensive and to satisfy our peculiar needs, so it wasn’t exactly marketable, especially when you compare it to the vast majority of Japanese homes, which, we assume, reflect market demand. We had to assume that N was bringing the couple here because of the environment–the surrounding woods and such–which would give them an idea of what A-1 could accomplish in such a place. Read More