We’re just getting started
At the end of last month I posted the first in this new series describing our adventures as we look into our options to move in with my in-laws.
A lot has happened since my wife told me that this was important to her, and while it hasn’t always been fun, we are learning new things every day 🙂
The most important thing I have learned so far is that this is going to take a long time, but the more people I talk to the better I understand our options and what we want. My one piece of advice to others would be not to rush this process. Give yourself a year or so just to get information and compare companies and products. We’re only a month into it, but already I know so much more than I did five weeks ago.
We’ve gone from wanting to build two houses, to one house, to an extension, to renovating the existing house, and now we’re thinking about those options. Some are impractical, some too expensive, and some might not work day to day.
We’ve talked to a number of house builders, and have selected two (for now) to follow up with. I have another two that I intend to contact, and suspect we’ll end up talking to some of the ones we initially dismissed too, just to make sure we are not missing anything.
The first company is a medium-sized company out of Iwate. I first noticed them after seeing one of their houses going up nearby, and taking a leaflet. They focus on insulation, ventilation, and livability (all good things in my eyes). The guy we are talking to turned out to be very competent and responsive once he got through the sales pitch. They talk about passive houses but aren’t able to build to full PassivHaus specifications.
He went to see our property and discovered that the slope at the bottom of the garden counts as a cliff and we may not be able to build near it. The existing house was build 40 years ago when regulations were less stringent, but now it may be impossible to get planning permission for new structures on the plot. Hmmm.
Apparently we’ll need a survey to check the angles and heights of the slope.
Worst case scenario is that we won’t be able to build a new building on the site (but would be able to renovate the existing structure).
He also provided us with our first quote (the picture at the top)!
This is for a two-story, two-family (duplicate kitchen, bathroom, etc.), 45-tsubo house with decent insulation and a ventilation system, solar panels, and various other options that seem slightly too expensive 😉
So the house would be about 36 million, the extras about 4 million, and clearing the land and demolishing the existing house another 5 million or so.
Right now I kind of like this company and would consider them if we were going to build a new house.
However, I would prefer not to be on the hook for 46 million to some bank, so we’re also considering option 2: renovate the existing house so that my wife and I can move in/stay with my in-laws as necessary.
I would probably keep my manshon under this scenario.
We’re also talking to a local, smaller company about renovating the house. They are kind of the opposite to the larger company.
They don’t have the technical knowledge or experience, but instead focus on a very personalized service. Apparently working with them will take several months just to get the design finalized. They are busy with current projects so the earliest they could fit us in would be late next year.
Their ‘thing’ is making a lot of the furniture and fittings from scratch, and using clever little gimmicks to use space more effectively and create a unique home tailored to the client.
They would also be a lot cheaper than the demolish/build from scratch option.
Everything is still up in the air at this point though, particularly with the cliff thing, so I’m not sure how things will turn out.
I’m planning to continue talking to people, getting more information, and of course talking things through with my wife so that we can achieve her goals in a way I am comfortable with.
I will, of course, keep you posted 🙂
Any advice? Are there any questions we should be asking? What do you think of that quote?
I wonder if you can keep the current property tax if you renovate. Building a new house would require a new assessment. I would want to know about that as part of the decision process.
That is a really interesting question… I would guess if the size of the house didn’t change?
I’ll make sure to ask 😀
Average price to demolish and remove a house is closer to 2 million yen. Like you said, keep learning and don’t rush into things. I find real estate agents to be a wealth of information. They seem to know everyone.
I bought land and built house 11 years ago.
My advice is
1) DO the lights yourself.
2) Go to Bic Camera or somewhere similar for the Air conditioners, will be half price
3) get other quotes for solar panels.
4) Buy an electric drill/driver and go to Nitori and buy curtains
The overall quote looks ballpark similar to what I paid for my place in Tokyo a couple of years back.
Good tips here from Chris about looking elsewhere for the options.
For curtains, this is quite deceiving because the amount of curtain actually required to pull across your window is only the width of your windows. But unless you state otherwise, the quote may be for curtains of much wider length. I recall our original curtains were quoted as being twice the window width. They do look kind of good when there is more volume to them, but 1.5 times the window width was perfectly sufficient in our judgement.
We had the housing company just install the curtain rails and got the curtains elsewhere.
As for solar panels, I skipped those altogether. Perhaps this is not just a financial decision but we aren’t big power consumers in the first place and I couldn’t see the investment paying off ever, in our case.
There is not much skimping on the core of the house though, I suspect.
We built the school and bought used for our house…the latter of which is not important in this conversation.
For the school, our first quote for what we wanted was slightly under ¥40,000,000. The final (first) bill after doing much of the work myself was around ¥26,000,000. I told them point-blank that they were not getting x amount for light fixtures that I could get at the local home center for half the price. I highlighted everything in the detailed bill that was overcharged and asked them to come back with a bill that more closely resembled their expenses. Total came to 23,800,000 (fully paid off in November of this year!!).
Long story short, there’s a lot to be saved if you’re an ass…but you can save that for the end. 🙂
I recently had a very small amount of curtains made. I looked at Nitori, Muji, and Rakuten. In the end Rakuten was about half the price of Nitori. A full house’s worth of order would be a huge pain to type in but I bet they would let you submit a spreadsheet to an agent for simplified ordering.
Good point! We’ve got friends who are estate agents. If we get a bit further along in the process I’ll ask their advice 🙂
Great feedback, thanks! I thought those numbers looked a bit too high 😉
Wow, that number is scary. And probably rounded up more than a bit.
Another thing to consider with a new house or a remodel job: electricity capacity (how many kWs) and the wiring (electricity rates are dependent on the kWs).
For air conditioners, if you can, put them in the ceiling, not on the wall. We have a Daikin brand one in the living/dining area and it works very well for cooling the whole area. Each side is separately adjustable for angle of the fin/flap (?), but not the temperature. The hose goes through the space between floors and the condenser is on the balcony (yes, there is still a hole in the wall).
We have just finished building a house and my only regret was not visiting the building site each week to check on details. We trusted the architect but some of her decisions were just plain weird and it has taken 6 months to rectify the ones we had to change. Nothing was structurally wrong but life can get irritating if there isn’t an electrical outlet where there should be or a door opens out the wrong way.
We didn’t fight too hard on the pricing but we did insist on price comparisons for things like curtains/carpets and other items we could easily see in the stores. That didn’t seem to be an issue.
You are absolutely right to take your time and learn the business. There are so many “misunderstandings” and each time you meet someone you learn something for the next meeting. We took 2 years and it was worth the wait.
I finished building my house with a smaller company in Kagoshima in 2015. I have a LOT to say on this topic, heh. Where to start.
First of all, like many people said, those options are crazy expensive. With the length of time it takes to plan and build (or renovate) a house, you will have plenty of time to get almost everything on your own for less than half the price. Almost every single fixture in the house was bought on our own and provided to the company to be installed.
The exact same toilets were quoted at 120k, and we got them online for 60k with free shipping. Air conditioner quotes were 200k for the living room and 100k for the bedroom; the price we got online was 110k and 60k (and we paid 10k each for installation from a local electrical chain, so we have a guarantee too, which may or may not be simple if it’s installed by the builders). Every single light was bought from a specialist retailer online for less than half the quoted prices.
The curtains were purchased online and installed by myself. The company sent us a huge variety of swatches and a catalogue with instructions on how to get the correct measurements. Installation was very easy. We saved a HUGE amount of money buying everything ourselves.
Some secondary, more challenging ways to save money:
I bought and installed the network wiring by myself. Not everyone can do this. The company offered to wire it themselves for a high price with this complicated panasonic system. I don’t recommend using that system, because it would be very difficult to upgrade it in the future, and you have limited control over it. Either do it yourself, if you are capable (I was an IT guy in a previous life) or just get a really good WiFi router and forego the wired internet jacks completely.
Wall coverings… this is how we saved the most money, but it’s not for the faint of heart. Growing up in Canada with a handyman father, our house had no wallpaper and it was all paint, and that’s what I liked. The housing company quoted something like 400k~500k for wallpaper, at the minimum, and all the samples were awful. We found nothing we liked. When asked for a quote for painted walls, they raised their eyes and were like “Uhm…” When they finally gave us a quote, it was over a million yen for painting all the walls. I did my own research and thought “I could do that”. Buying all the tools, supplies and stuff cost about 200k, less than half the wallpaper cost. The downside was… IT WAS CRAZY HARD. It took me 3 months of every weekend and every day off (and sometimes before and after work) to finish it all. Still, it looks much better than wallpaper (but I can see all my mistakes). Not recommended (but possible).
I’ll continue in another post.
Wow, that is really helpful! If you have much more to write, would you be interested in doing a guest post? Something like: “this is how we did it”. Might be interesting and more people would see it 😀
Solar Panels: DEFINITELY get solar panels.
I’m not sure how much it has changed since our house was built, but it’s always a net gain. In 2014 you could install under 10kw and get a 10 year contract to sell back surplus (unused) power, or install OVER 10kw and get a 20 year contract and sell ALL the power (but the house can’t touch that power). In both cases, over the duration of the 10 or 20 year contract, you’ll definitely make back the money you paid for the panels. After 10/20 years, you might not be able to sell any more power, but you’ll be able to use the panels to charge an electric car, for example, or charge a “home battery” (see Tesla Powerwall for an example), which should be much cheaper in 10 years. More panels means more money for the first 10/20 years, as well as more power for AC, electric cars, etc…
The 20 year contract system might be gone, actually. Kyushu electric “paused” applications the day after ours was submitted, so we just squeaked in under the wire. This system basically means your roof becomes a solar farm feeding the grid, completely separate from your house. The electric company pays me cash every month for the power, and I have to buy electricity as if my house had no solar panels at all (the solar panels aren’t connected to the internal house electrics). The good thing, for now, is that I’m selling electricity at a far higher rate than I’m buying it at. about 35 yen per kwh to sell, and buying back at 14 or less. I make an average of 60k per month selling, and pay less than 10k for usage. Also, the panels will be paid off in less than 10 years, so I’ll have at least another 10 years of just straight profit.
Other points:
Going with a smaller company allows a lot more flexibility. We were able to adapt plans very easily and get exactly what we wanted. When we tried with a large company like Ishin Home, it was very limited. We had to mostly stick to the set plans in their catalogue and it wasn’t possible to just say “Hey, let’s put the toilet over here instead of there”. The smaller company let us create plans from scratch, and restart several times until we were 100% happy with it.
Another tip is that companies often charge based on total floorspace, without looking too carefully at how complicated a plan is. A complicated 45 tsubo house might be similarly priced to a simple 45 tsubo house. We managed to save money by reducing the tsubo count by having the upstairs much smaller than the space would allow. Essentially we made a small loft and balcony upstairs, and that’s it. But, if you knock down one wall, you can easily add another full room upstairs. This meant our house was sold as 35 tsubo, but as the kids get older I’ll be able to pick up some plywood and drywall and expand the upstairs by another 5 tsubo or more for a fraction of the cost.
Finally, and this is perhaps the most important part, David is 100% right. Visit the house AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE while it is being built. I can’t stress this enough. Study and learn your house blueprint inside and out, bring it with you when you visit, and check EVERYTHING. I found, literally, DOZENS of major mistakes or issues in the months in took to build the house.
In some cases, the issue was that something was not written on the plan, like the height of a shelf or exact placement of a hanger bar, and the carpenters just made their own judgement on placement. This happened far more than I expected, and resulted in carpenters constantly removing and reinstalling bits properly, with me watching over them. You’ll be living here a long time, make sure it’s the way YOU want it. The carpenters will be annoyed, but you’ll never have to see them again once the house is finished.
In other cases, there were major mistakes. We have a sink in our genkan, for washing hands when we (especially the kids) get home, and it’s also for the nearby toilet. The plumbing had to be embedded in the concrete when the foundation was being poured, due to it’s location near the door. The day they were pouring the concrete foundation, I was on my way to work and decided I’d swing by to watch for a few minutes. I was incredibly lucky, because the cement mixer was getting ready to start, and I found that the sink plumbing was in the completely wrong place! It would have come up into the shoe closet, and not next to the toilet! Disaster was avoided by literally just minutes! Other issues were caught because I visited almost every day. The loft stairs had to be completely rebuilt as well, as they failed inspection (due to being too steep), even though I asked repeatedly to make sure the angle was reduced. Light switches and outlets had to be moved, light fixtures were often not centered in the room or lined up properly with other lights, one archway had to be reinstalled, etc… etc… VISIT EVERY DAY and complain complain complain until it’s right.
Regarding renovating. My father in law (who worked for a construction supplier) said that it does save money on taxes, somehow, but I’m not sure if it’s related to the land tax or construction tax.
Oh, I forgot to mention: Get the house fully insulated, and get double pane windows and doors, it’ll save a lot of money for heating and cooling over the long term.
I also recommend a skylight. They aren’t popular in Japan, but we got one and it was probably the best decision we made. The living room is bright and comfortable all day, without any lights on. Just get one that is completely sealed (doesn’t open). It’s cheaper and safer.
Finally, watch “Before After” (https://www.asahi.co.jp/beforeafter/) if you can find it on TV where you live (or look for youtube vids). You’ll get some good ideas, see how things are built, and also see plenty of mistake get corrected. They only do full house remodeling, usually, but it’s useful for people looking at building a new house too.