Hello world, where I'm from in Japan this is what my home is like
Hey guys, Greg here
this is how we furnished our new Japanese home
and behind me is the genkan
and the genkan, it is the Japanese entrance
and that's where you leave all your shoes,
and then you step into the clean area up the steps over there
Okay, so let's turn on over this way
and the first room we find is the bathroom
so this has an automatic light, you saw how it turned on and I did not flip the switch for that
so we have a fan up there, a little window
towel rack, in case you need to use the sink<
on top of the toilet, although we don't use it so we have no towel there
and then we have a double roll of toilet paper, which I didn't think was quite necessary
but honestly, it helps your anxiety to know that when you need toilet paper, it's going to be there
and
lets see... our kind of laundry room, washroom, I don't even know what to call it
I always wonder what to call it in Japanese, the sink room?
who knows? because behind us, that, I would call a toilet room
this is where our bath is so I'd call that the bathroom
but anyways, so this is our laundry room. I'll just walk out to get a better view
and we installed that rack ourselves, above the washing machine/dryer
over in this side we have all different sorts of towels, nothing matches whatsoever
and below we have our garbage bin and plastic bin
and our laundry baskets
so we're going into this room here, and we have an orange lighting here
kind of more relaxing for your bath, and this is my favorite room in the whole place
uh, Japanese bath tubs ah just so relaxing
and this one was, is bigger and just kind of better designed than our last bathroom
so we could really relax in here a lot better and there's a place to sit down if you want
it also came with some built in shelves, but we did add some of our own, right down below there
so a couple of those are our own shelves
but pretty much everything comes kind of like this, so we didn't have to add much
and uh, let me just show you our fan
which is up here, and you have your remote control for your fan
over here. And it's actually more than a fan it can be used as a heater as well
all right, so let's check out the other room on this floor which is our spare room
and that's just over this way
hey Aiko, show us the secret spot
okay
so this is the secret spot
what is in there?
wow this is underground the house
what do you store under there
nothing
i hope so
whoah that's scary
alright so let's check the other room on this floor which is our spare room
and that's just over this way
okay, so this room we just use for storage
so we have uh, emergency earthquake kit above
some tools down below
that's just some bags and then our, pretty much all our Costco stuff
so we go to Costco, buy stuff in bulk, and that's where we store it all
so yeah, this is our spare room
and, um, what we also did in this house
is we had to install this aircon (air conditioner)
which acts as a heater and an air conditioner
um, so we did have to install that in the room, it did not come with it
and then we have our controls for everything right over there in the corner
okay, so let's go on upstairs now
alright, so this is our living room on the second floor
and it's not usually this clean, but I did clean it up
um, one thing I did though, because both the kids and the wife like to throw things on the floor
is I went to Ikea and got these bins
and you can just throw the junk in there and get it clean fairly fast
and now that we have all the furniture in place, it's actually not that bad to clean things up
because we have these things you can just hide stuff in, so we have these cabinets over here
and over there, and even
and even these chairs, you can lift up the seat and hide things under there as well
so that's where they keep their school bags
and I'll just show you kind of what the cabinet looks like inside
it's not crazy messy or anything like that, but yeah you just throw stuff in there to make it a little neater
so on any given day, the place probably looks like this, a bit untidy
but then, magically, it's all gone
so it's nice being able to make things disappear
unless you're just throwing it on the ground
so this is the other side of the living room, what it looks like
and you can see on the floor there's the mat
and this mat, people like sitting on the floor in Japan so that's so people can go and do that
so something that doesn't come with the Japanese home are the blinds so I had to purchase and install those silver railings above
as well as kind of the inner blinds and the outer blinds
so you can take a look
pretty much no Japanese new home comes with that
another new thing are these lights here, so this was all blank, no lights in there, we had to purchase that ourselves
something else that doesn't come with new homes are these bug screens
so we had to buy one for everything single window, I think there's like 22 in our house?
so, um it cost about 800 dollars or so I think for all the bug screens
now something that does come with the house are these racks
for the laundry poles, except only on this second floor balcony
but on the third floor, we have to pay to install a second set of these
so I think this living room is probably a bit bigger than the average living room in japanese homes
although for new homes, larger LDK which stands for living room, dining room, kitchen areas
uhh that's a trend to have them bigger and bigger
and over here we have the kitchen and I really like this design because you can be in the kitchen
and look out over the rest of the rooms
let me hop on around and show that
so we had to buy all of these little things to store the dishes
there's no dishwasher in here
and when it's full of stuff drying that's kinda what it looks like
and because there's not a lot of room for drying dishes
we'll actually just leave pots and pans to dry there
so those are clean, but they're just... left that way
so this wall you're looking at right now
that used to be completely blank when we moved in
when we moved in, we brought in our old fridge from our old place
and in the middle we brought this brand new unit
and we're so happy we bought this unit because um...
here let's step on over here and check it out
it can have all of the Japanese uhh...
regular appliances that you need
so this is a microwave oven, this is a rice cooker
toaster oven, hot water heater,
and this is not normally in a Japanese kitchen, but that's a blender
and a cutting board that comes out like this
another reason I'm happy we bought this unit was because of the high quality of it
so open this up, close it, it goes pretty smooth, even has a stop to it
so you see? it stops automatically right there
and I can even use umm... well here
I can even kick it with my foot like that, closes fine
Now these are what came with the house
So I do that, I kick it, see it's not as smooth, right?
It like, yeah.
Now the last thing we bought for our new home is this kind of tower
So I really like this because it hides all of our recycling, makes it super organized and easy
to do at the end of the day