Whence Came One into the Deep End

After spending time looking at housing from the professional side, I now find myself experiencing it as the person making the decisions. From money and land to materials, paperwork and an alarming number of choices, building a home in Japan has plenty to teach a beginner. This is a record of what I learn, what confuses me, and what changes when the observer becomes the customer.

After spending time looking at housing from the professional side, I now find myself experiencing it as the person making the decisions. From money and land to materials, paperwork and an alarming number of choices, building a home in Japan has plenty to teach a beginner. This is a record of what I learn, what confuses me, and what changes when the observer becomes the customer.

I’m building a house.

Working around housing had already planted the idea that I might do it one day, but observing the process from the outside is very different from making decisions with your own money and future attached to them.

Even something as innocent as a front door opens into a world of colours, materials, handles, glass and seemingly endless alternatives. I once assumed more choice meant more fun. I have since fallen rather decisively into the house-building deep end.

Building a home in Japan also involves far more than I imagined: money, land, floor plans, materials, fixtures, contracts and paperwork. Having not grown up here adds another layer, because many parts of the process seem to operate on the assumption that everyone already knows how they work. Things I barely noticed from the professional side suddenly feel very different when I am the person making the decision. Saying “this material has these characteristics” is easy; asking whether I want to see it every morning for years is another matter entirely. Curiously, the more samples I see, the less certain I sometimes become.

I want to record more than the construction of a house. I am interested in what it actually feels like to navigate the process of creating a home while living in Japan: what confused me, what I learned, what I changed my mind about, and which supposedly simple decisions became unexpectedly difficult. I went into this as a housing beginner. Now that I am experiencing the whole thing from the other side, there seems to be plenty worth writing about. The deep end is, apparently, deeper than expected.

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Whence came one to Tohoku ›