The Apartment Search

After two days at the hotel (Kanazawa International Hotel) we went to stay with Doreen and Bruce until we were in an apartment. In the move from the hotel to Doreen's condo, we learned that the original apartment we fell in love with was not going to be ours. It was through a different real estate agent than the school usually uses, and they required basically the deed to the school as collateral for us moving in. Obviously that was not going to happen. More apartment shopping was in order.

We viewed the final six apartments in our general distance from school, size, and price range, and didn't quite like any of them. The best was a townhouse with three bedrooms in the upper level, scary stairs that were very steep and had no handrail, and a couple of real problem areas. The craftsmanship was lovely, and there was a skylight in the upstairs hallway giving a lot of natural lighting. There was also a decent view of the mountains from the upstairs. There was also a gaping view of the street through the living room windows. The living room itself was not very good, as it had the main entrance, stairway, and toilet along one wall. Another wall had closets under the stairs. The third wall was the lovely street view, and the fourth was the kitchen/dining room area, so it had no good places for furniture against the walls. Also, the washroom (separate from the toilets in Japanese houses) was through the kitchen. Which means, every morning, you have to walk down the scary stairs half awake, through the living room where everyone can see in, and through the dining room/kitchen to take a shower. You also have to walk down the scary stairs if you need to use the toilet at 3 am. Somehow I think broken bones might be part of my Japan experience if I had to use those stairs that often.

We told them we'd like to see a couple more, and our real estate agent had no more for us to view. Mamoru, an English teacher who's been helping us out a lot, called around and found another place for us to view. This apartment was definitely older and had some questionable aspects, like the plastic molding on the top of the walls and multiple holes in one of the rooms from hanging things, but has a good layout and an excellent view of the mountains. It's also a second floor (of two) apartment, so we'd look down on the street instead of the street looking into our living room. It has a huge living room/dining room/kitchen open room, a balcony and a sun room (walled in balcony) and two tatami rooms.

Almost all apartments have balconies, as clothes dryers aren't really around in Japan. They have a washer, and then hang everything out on the balcony or in the sun room for it to dry. Some machines are now combination washer/dryers, which is something we're thinking of getting, but many people still just hang their clothes out or use the coin laundries, where there are dryers.

Tatami rooms are traditional Japanese rooms where the floors are covered in tatami mats instead of laminate floors. They don't carpet whole rooms here, the floors are pretty much tatami or wood laminate. In a tatami room, you want to sleep on a futon, a mat you unfold in the evening to sleep on, roll back up in the morning, and keep in a special closet. We slept on one of these at Doreen's and it's actually really warm. The mat and tatami keep the heat in wonderfully. In fact, if you don't roll up the futon, mold begins to grow on the tatami.

We decided to go with the apartment instead of the townhouse, because although Lee like the workmanship of the townhouse a lot more than the quality through the apartment, the layout and view were much better with the apartment. It's also bigger and slightly cheaper. The only real problem with this one is that it has a huge initial payment, so large pieces of furniture will have to wait unil a later date, like when we get reimbursed or our first paycheck.