Our house

Let’s visit our house today!

This is the apartment we have rented for the next 6 months. Where it is and what we have around us we have talked about in an earlier post.

This time we are taking you inside.

From the door

Shoes… the slippers are behind.

Lots of slippers waiting

When you open the door you find an essential part of a Japanese home: the place where we take our shoes off and get into our slippers.

Slippers is an essential item. In a normal day you may have to use 4 pairs of different slippers: the home slippers and the bathroom slippers (see further on), and at work, the room slippers and the corridor slippers.

Should I add that finding these in size 11 (45) is quite impossible here?

The kitchen and dining room

The stove. If something starts beeping… panic

The knives are ready

You then enter into our kitchen: obviously everything is in Japanese. For some machines we have understood what is up and down, hotter and colder. For others, not yet.
An interesting problem is that most machines are designed specifically for Japanese: on the web, you can find photographs of the machine and instructions in Japanese, but that model will not be sold overseas. So you can’t just download the English version…

What a mess!

The main room is… our bedroom. No photos! Just one big bed and two chairs which can be used to rest.

We do have wifi, but no television.

The « all combined » loo, wash basin and shower+bath. Yes, the loo is very un-Japanese

The famous bathroom slippers

The bathroom must measure one square meter at the most. Because it is so small, it gets wet as soon as you have a shower. You therefore need « bathroom slippers » to not get your socks wet!

These are of course of a unique size and some of us can’t really walk with them.

A dressing room allows to reach the bathroom. This is where the impressive washing machine stands!

The washing machine

The closet

Scales. We could have bought some smaller ones but we were scared of falling off

Luckily we do have a closet in which we have unpacked and put our scales. We went to the shops and decided to buy neither the bluetooth scales, nor the mini-scales. Everything is designed to save space, so there are some which are the size of a pocket book!

The mighty stairs to the attic

Very pretty (the attic)

We also have an attic. It is very pretty but, because of the stairs that lead to it, of little use. But we do store things there and it will certainly be the visitors bedroom when these come…