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So I'm thinking of moving...
In the last month or two I've been thinking of moving, for various reasons. For one, I don't like being tied to GEOS housing. For two, I keep complaining about having such a tiny place in the middle of nowhere in Saitama.
So today I went and looked at a possible place to rent. It's owned by a friend of mine, who is willing to rent it to me without the ridiculous key money and other such hurdles people usually have to go through to rent a place in Japan. (Dunno if I should mention who, since this is a public entry.)
The place is HUGE for Japan, for one person to live in, anyway. It's a HOUSE. A 2-story house. The first floor has a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a bath room, and a toilet room. The second floor has two rooms. And seriously, the living room alone is the size of my current apartment, no joke. And the rent would be basically the same as what I'm paying now (actually a little less, but I think my GEOS rent subsidy goes away if I move out of GEOS housing).
Anyway, so the deal is:
House:
Pro: Amazing amount of space. I could totally HOST BOARD GAME NIGHTS or various other small parties since there'd actually be a dining room with a TABLE. I could seriously offer for people to come crash at my place and it would be POSSIBLE and I could even offer them a spare room to stay in rather than "you can crash on that pillow in the corner". The friend who owns the house even was like "You could have a roomate if you wanted. This place used to be a dorm for 5 or 6 people, after all."
The kitchen even has a small dishwasher, and there is also actual counter space! Maybe that is a con, I wouldn't have any excuse not to cook anymore :)
Con: I would have to CLEAN said space all the time and try hard not to let it become too dusty and full of bugs and all. (It is currently REALLY dusty and full of bugs, although my friend said they'd get it cleaned up if I was moving in.) Other vague con is that the house is like 40-50 years old and totally an old wooden Japanese house so supposedly shakes a lot in earthquakes but is apparently more likely to burn down than to collapse. I don't smoke so I'm not worried about the burning much, although maybe there are electrical snafus I should be more concerned over. I am worried more that I don't know how to properly take care of an old Japanese house. I suppose in actuality it is not all that different than the 100-year-old house I lived in in Seattle though?
Oh yeah, and the bath room is like a Japanese bath room with a small tub in the corner and washing areas outside of it with a stone floor. I would need to rig some way to make the showerhead go up high enough for me to take a shower. My friend also said there has been some trouble in the past with the water flow... I am a little concerned about that too, like whether there are any other issues I'm forgetting to ask about.
Location
Pro: It's in Akabane, on the west side. Which is a major pro. I could walk to work in like... 10 minutes. And Akabane is a LOT more connected to the rest of the world via trains. AND on days when there are train problems, I would not be stranded in Akabane waiting to get home on a train!
Con: It's on top of a hill and the ways to get to it are to either climb a huge set of stairs or go uphill for like 1km. Not too bad for day-to-day going back and forth to the station, I would just walk, but pretty awful for the purpose of bike riding in general.
Con: I thought my Saitama neighborhood was residential, but this one is even MORESO, with very few shops or much of anything beyond houses. I walked around the top-of-the-hill area after work tonight for like an hour and it was just dead dark.
Also con: I could NOT find a laundromat ANYWHERE, so I would need to get a laundry machine.
Also con: I didn't see any supermarkets, really, which means I would be grocery shopping at Ito Yokado or somewhere at the bottom of the hill.
I would basically lose my ability to ride my bike to minor-league stadiums, and I would lose having malls in biking distance as well (like how I can currently WALK to Diamond City, the one with the Jusco and Krispy Kreme and all), and I would lose the nearby 24-hour groceries, and the super-modern laundromat 2 blocks away with the big big combined machines. The first few things aren't such a big deal really, although I'm a bit worried about not having laundromats or 24-hour grocery stores nearby.
And I would GAIN being 10 minutes from a huge Tokyo train station that goes EVERYWHERE. It would cut down my travel time to a lot of places significantly, because it takes me 25-30 minutes from home to "getting on a new train at Akabane" right now. The other great thing is that my last train at night would be later, a lot of the big lines terminate in Akabane for their last trains. And in a pinch, I could totally ride my bike down to Ikebukuro or somewhere else if necessary... and to be fair I don't even know what else I could reach by bike towards the west, because I didn't have a bike to try. I remember that I thought my neighborhood in Saitama was pretty boring/awful/residential when I first moved here, and then I started biking around and discovered a ton of stuff. Seems likely that could happen again.
I guess I am more inclined to go ahead and move there, because my god, walking to work would be pretty awesome, and if/when I switch jobs someday I would also be closer to all the appropriate train lines. And there's no way I will ever be able to get that much space for so low a rent price IN TOKYO by someone willing to rent to foreigners otherwise. AND it would be an interesting change to have a landlord that actually speaks English and is contactable when I have questions/concerns about stuff (although it might be weird to have to bug a friend for help with the house).
EDIT> Thanks to the wonder of Google Maps and walking around on my dinner break, I found a laundromat that is a 2-minute walk from the base of the huge staircase leading to the house... so there's one concern... and seems like there's a LOT of stuff at the bottom of the hill further out, I just need to go looking, I think. It's just going to be difficult deciding where to have my bike, really.
So today I went and looked at a possible place to rent. It's owned by a friend of mine, who is willing to rent it to me without the ridiculous key money and other such hurdles people usually have to go through to rent a place in Japan. (Dunno if I should mention who, since this is a public entry.)
The place is HUGE for Japan, for one person to live in, anyway. It's a HOUSE. A 2-story house. The first floor has a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a bath room, and a toilet room. The second floor has two rooms. And seriously, the living room alone is the size of my current apartment, no joke. And the rent would be basically the same as what I'm paying now (actually a little less, but I think my GEOS rent subsidy goes away if I move out of GEOS housing).
Anyway, so the deal is:
House:
Pro: Amazing amount of space. I could totally HOST BOARD GAME NIGHTS or various other small parties since there'd actually be a dining room with a TABLE. I could seriously offer for people to come crash at my place and it would be POSSIBLE and I could even offer them a spare room to stay in rather than "you can crash on that pillow in the corner". The friend who owns the house even was like "You could have a roomate if you wanted. This place used to be a dorm for 5 or 6 people, after all."
The kitchen even has a small dishwasher, and there is also actual counter space! Maybe that is a con, I wouldn't have any excuse not to cook anymore :)
Con: I would have to CLEAN said space all the time and try hard not to let it become too dusty and full of bugs and all. (It is currently REALLY dusty and full of bugs, although my friend said they'd get it cleaned up if I was moving in.) Other vague con is that the house is like 40-50 years old and totally an old wooden Japanese house so supposedly shakes a lot in earthquakes but is apparently more likely to burn down than to collapse. I don't smoke so I'm not worried about the burning much, although maybe there are electrical snafus I should be more concerned over. I am worried more that I don't know how to properly take care of an old Japanese house. I suppose in actuality it is not all that different than the 100-year-old house I lived in in Seattle though?
Oh yeah, and the bath room is like a Japanese bath room with a small tub in the corner and washing areas outside of it with a stone floor. I would need to rig some way to make the showerhead go up high enough for me to take a shower. My friend also said there has been some trouble in the past with the water flow... I am a little concerned about that too, like whether there are any other issues I'm forgetting to ask about.
Location
Pro: It's in Akabane, on the west side. Which is a major pro. I could walk to work in like... 10 minutes. And Akabane is a LOT more connected to the rest of the world via trains. AND on days when there are train problems, I would not be stranded in Akabane waiting to get home on a train!
Con: It's on top of a hill and the ways to get to it are to either climb a huge set of stairs or go uphill for like 1km. Not too bad for day-to-day going back and forth to the station, I would just walk, but pretty awful for the purpose of bike riding in general.
Con: I thought my Saitama neighborhood was residential, but this one is even MORESO, with very few shops or much of anything beyond houses. I walked around the top-of-the-hill area after work tonight for like an hour and it was just dead dark.
Also con: I could NOT find a laundromat ANYWHERE, so I would need to get a laundry machine.
Also con: I didn't see any supermarkets, really, which means I would be grocery shopping at Ito Yokado or somewhere at the bottom of the hill.
I would basically lose my ability to ride my bike to minor-league stadiums, and I would lose having malls in biking distance as well (like how I can currently WALK to Diamond City, the one with the Jusco and Krispy Kreme and all), and I would lose the nearby 24-hour groceries, and the super-modern laundromat 2 blocks away with the big big combined machines. The first few things aren't such a big deal really, although I'm a bit worried about not having laundromats or 24-hour grocery stores nearby.
And I would GAIN being 10 minutes from a huge Tokyo train station that goes EVERYWHERE. It would cut down my travel time to a lot of places significantly, because it takes me 25-30 minutes from home to "getting on a new train at Akabane" right now. The other great thing is that my last train at night would be later, a lot of the big lines terminate in Akabane for their last trains. And in a pinch, I could totally ride my bike down to Ikebukuro or somewhere else if necessary... and to be fair I don't even know what else I could reach by bike towards the west, because I didn't have a bike to try. I remember that I thought my neighborhood in Saitama was pretty boring/awful/residential when I first moved here, and then I started biking around and discovered a ton of stuff. Seems likely that could happen again.
I guess I am more inclined to go ahead and move there, because my god, walking to work would be pretty awesome, and if/when I switch jobs someday I would also be closer to all the appropriate train lines. And there's no way I will ever be able to get that much space for so low a rent price IN TOKYO by someone willing to rent to foreigners otherwise. AND it would be an interesting change to have a landlord that actually speaks English and is contactable when I have questions/concerns about stuff (although it might be weird to have to bug a friend for help with the house).
EDIT> Thanks to the wonder of Google Maps and walking around on my dinner break, I found a laundromat that is a 2-minute walk from the base of the huge staircase leading to the house... so there's one concern... and seems like there's a LOT of stuff at the bottom of the hill further out, I just need to go looking, I think. It's just going to be difficult deciding where to have my bike, really.
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(Um, by the way, I'm also moving away from much in the way of groceries :)
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Maybe because I am an evening-bather instead of a morning one?
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I live in the basement of a friend's mother's house. And it is kind of weird. I've had a hole in my bathroom wall for, oh, 2 years now, that I've kept kind of randomly patching because I didn't want to inconvenience them, that I've just now told them about. Not a concern I would have had with a real landlord.
At the same time, a real landlord probably wouldn't have said 'Wow, that sucks, I'm sorry. We'll try to find a convenient time for you to have a contractor in to fix it.' They'd have just told me when it was happening and I could deal. A real landlord would also not have mentioned that I could use the shower in the main house at any point if it was necessary.
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