Context: Bought a land and now working with an architect to plan the house (since September). Construction is scheduled to start soon so final reviews of the plan, interior design, etc will happen over Christmas holidays.
I want to hear from people who have bought or build their homes so I can avoid or double down on some of the last decisions.
15 comments
My house was a prebuilt and there are so many things I wish I could change.
Put in more outlet than you think you will need. I only have two per room and it’s not enough.
Make sure there is proper insulation for both keeping the rooms the temperature you want and for reducing sound. I have a small home theater that I have to be careful of as the noise leaks like crazy.
Make sure the kitchen is built for your size. My back hurt if I do the dishes too often.
Put in solar panels. This will add to the cost of the house but will even out if you get a big enough system. We have a battery and a 9kwh system and produce well more than we use and sell it back to tepco.
Make sure your house design allows you yo easily make changes later. Your tastes and needs may change and it will be nice if you want to add or remove a wall in the future.
I personally hate wallpaper. I’m saving up for when I can rip the stupid stuff off the walls and properly paint my house.
what kind of job do you do to be able to afford to commission a house from the ground up?
They can be expensive to get and install, but having a western oven is still my favorite addition.
Maybe less relevant for some families but get more storage installed. We have some built into the floor in the kitchen and living rooms for example which is a huge addition to storage space, and being underground stays quite cool and dry.
Mentioned by another poster but you can never go wrong with more power outlets than you think you would need.
Cat6 fiber run through the walls with an outlet in every room, all exiting to my office network switch.
Floor heating, I don’t think I could live without anymore. Much more comfortable than aircon and even when turned off the under-floor cement stays warm for so long. We don’t even turn our aircon heating on in winter.
It was a bit niche and expensive but we got a small elevator between floors from the laundry to the roof (3 stories) that’s 60x60x60cm because my wife didn’t want to carry laundry all the way to the roof balcony multiple times a day. I’ve come to appreciate it, especially if we are entertaining guests sending food and drinks up instead of taking 3 flights of stairs with them in hand is great.
Do as much of the kitchen wall surfaces as you can afford with ‘kitchen board’. It’s usually only used a little behind the stove (one small panel), and while it’s a necessity there, the stuff both looks good and endures forever–it’s a breeze to wipe/clean. It has a glossy surface, comes in many different colors (different versions of not-quite-white).
Our kitchen counters are 80cm, the minimum in my opinion. I was once told that good kitchen design puts the sink, the stove/oven, and the refrigerator in a triangle, or U-shape.
Does building a house cost way more money than straight up buying?
Here are some things I would have liked to do:
* Install a fiber optic lighting system that brings sunlight into dark rooms and hallways.
* Install more power outlets with ground.
* Increase the diameter of the hot water pipes so that you don’t freeze in the shower when someone opens the faucet in the kitchen.
I did wire the house for ethernet, though.
It will be more expensive than your worst case scenario 😂.
I wish we bought solar panels immediately. We bought it afterwards and it got mer expensive because of that. I wish we got EcoCute instead of gas heater for water. Floor heating is amazing. We bought some extra strong windows for typhoon protection, I think they might also keep the cold out better. Might think about putting an EV charger in as well.
Oh this is an important one! If you use gas water heater, don’t put the heater outside your bedroom! If it’s cold outside, it will start several times during the night and it’s very noisy. Overall it was such a fun experience for us to design our own house… Good luck.
Oh another thing. I really love our dimmable lights, wish we put more of those.
– make sure you calculate for enough storage space
Is it going to be two or three floors
Decide where your internet gets terminated and run at least 1 cat-6a to each room. More for office and entertainment areas.
– Dedicated lighting in wardrobes
– Cannot emphasise enough on the amount of power sockets, imagine you have a large fan with a short cable and go around your house thinking of areas you think it would be nice to plug in… Grounded sockets where possible
– You want ethernet ports in each floor of the house, or across your house if you have a lot of floor space
– If you have stairs, make sure the steps are the size, or near the size of whoever has the biggest feet
– Height of all sinks and work surfaces is low in Japan by default, check this and make sure you’re happy with it
– If you want to watch TV without paying for cable service, ensure you have a place to construct an aerial with good signal, maybe even ask them to do this for you
– If you’re interested in energy dependance, look into Solar Panels, batteries 蓄電池, EneFarm and HEMS
– If you have a garage, make sure you get a 200V outdoor power socket ran to it to charge EV cars in the future
regrets?
* not having enough time to sit on the builder and make sure everything is done, or done correctly
* not having enough experience in housebuilding to know what good stuff is there and what’s basically impossible/not feasible in Japan
* not enough time to sit on the architect who’s supposed to do cost control and go through the quotes without mistakes or missing stuff
joys?
* having the foresight of hiring a Passivhaus consultant to do the site calculations for shade and solar gain at the design phase
* actually built a house, and the mortgage is the same as my rent was for 3x the space and 10x the quality of life.
To make a perfect house for yourself, you first need to build your house at least once, preferably twice. Then I would like to be unemployed for the whole time from design to building to be able to properly sit on the peeps building the whole thing. Maybe pay for some 3rd party to go over everything once more. Is there insurance for builder’s fuck-ups? The type that is hard and costly to fix for marginal gain but still grate you.
**Things we did right, even though they weren’t standard at the time:**
* Putting in a 100amp service. I think TEPCO charges more per month for bigger services but this wasn’t the case where we built.
* Making sure that wall outlets were wired correctly and not daisy-chained together.
* Having additional wall outlets put in, though I would do more if doing it over.
* Having conduit run from every room back to my office. Wireless is great but having wired backhaul from APs and having wired connections into each room was a big plus. Sometimes wireless, even today, just doesn’t cut it.
* Having a big enough bath area put in, and a big enough bath. I think this is more common in recent builds but the default for us was a smaller bath area.
* Double-pane glass
* More insulation than was standard at the time. Quite a lot more.
* Running water and a small sink on the balcony. Was super convenient.
* Multiple outdoor power connections. We had two downstairs and one on the balcony upstairs.
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**Things I wish we had done differently:**
* Well first, I wouldn’t have built a house at all. I would have bought something used and renovated it. Far cheaper, and much less of a loss if/when selling down the road. Also possible, if you hunt carefully, to get a bit of land around your place instead of being chocoblock in with all the neighbors.
* I would have considered the timing more carefully and if I should have bought or built at all. Once you’ve committed it becomes a hell of a lot harder to move. Job opportunity in SG (or elsewhere) with far lower taxes? You have to figure out what you’re going to do about the house, and having that anchor in Japan could make it more difficult to claim you’re no longer a Japan tax resident.
* More storage space. You can never have enough.
* Shutters on bedroom windows. We let our designer talk us out of it because they impacted the look of his design but we should have pushed back harder.
* Bigger kitchen with a gas oven, a larger dishwasher, and more counterspace.
* Even better insulation. Our place *was* insulated, it *wasn’t* drafty, and we did have double-pane glass. However it wasn’t really enough. Should have gone with more insulation, or higher grade, or something. Maybe more in the attic area?
* Underfloor heating. It’s magical and we didn’t have it. I’d get it everywhere in the main living areas, including in the toilet rooms and under that bath/senmenjo area.
* More land, somehow. Would want space to park 2 cars if we did it again.
* A proper walk in shed, with power and workspace.
* Gas clothes dryer installed and properly vented.
* Hot & cold water run to the washing machine.
* Water run to the fridge area for an ice machine & chilled/filtered water hookup.
* Space for a bigger fridge in the kitchen, ours was defined by wall shape and not big enough.
* A proper utility room with space for a chest freezer for those Costco runs.
* A small senmenjo (or at least a sink with running water) upstairs in the bedroom area. So nice to not have to go downstairs to get a glass of water in the middle of the night, or to properly wash your hands if needed.
* Would add more light switches to larger rooms. This was a PITA oversight on our living room and dining area.
* I’d make my home office space larger if doing it again. It was 6jo in the place we built, I’d want at least 8jo if doing it over.
* Would make sure the wall mounting points for the TV were set up in advance for exactly where I wanted the TV.
* Recessed shelving in the living room area for books and an audio system would be fantastic.
* If you have space and want a home theatre setup, having conduit run to your planned speaker locations will be a plus.
* Outdoor water connections at the front and back of the house, or however you want to set it up. It’s great to not have to run meter upon meter of hose around the house to get water where you need it.
* Every outlet would be a grounded three-prong outlet. We had quiet a few, but quite a few were not.
I think I could go on for quite a while…
Edit: Adding a few more as they come to mind.
All of the other comments make are such good points.
For the Ethernet, get the highest speed cable you can. And make sure to terminate them somewhere easily accessed, with enough room to house your router and get the contractor to label your patch panel so you know which cable goes to which room. It’s amazing you need to ask for this to happen… Plan on installing wireless access points throughout instead of relying off a single wireless router that ends up being stuck somewhere central.
If I was building today I’d get smart lighting installed throughout most of the house. Don’t bother with complex integration systems, just get off the shelf bulbs which work with your favourite service (Apple, Google, Amazon). If someone tries to sell you on a complex system, say no. They’re horrid to maintain and difficult to integrate in the future.
If you’re into home theatre then plan a room around it and install discreet speakers in the walls/ceilings. get the walls designed and built so you can easily run cables from the display to the source hardware, and put all the source kit in a cupboard or at least in a purpose built space so that you’re not watching a movie with a rack of kit glaring back at you with it’s many LEDs.
We built a house with an architect last year in Hiroshima. We chose the architect cause he was very into thermal efficiency. Our house is comfortable year round without costing us a lot in heating/cooling. Make sure your house is well insulated, uses at least double glazed windows with frames that aren’t aliminium, also try to get a good amount of air-tightness. All these things will also make your house fairly soundproof, meaning you’re not bothered by noises outside, and don’t have to worry about how loud you are in your own house.
If you are going to have gas in the house, I would highly recommend getting a gas line in to where you do laundry so you can either have the builder install a gas dryer, or have one installed later. They are fantastic. If you have gas I’d also suggest a built-in gas oven. They’re great and pre-heat crazy fast.
If you think you will want to run lan cables around your house, have the builder/electrician install ducts(CD管) to where you think you might want ethernet and to a central location where you’ll have your switch/router, and do the pulls yourself later.
Depending on the building codes in your city, lofts can be extremely useful, for example in Hiroshima you can have stairs going up to a loft, so we basically have a 3rd floor, but the building is classified as two storeys.
We went with painted walls over wallpaper. I’m just not a fan of wall paper and how quickly it can tear and look bad.
I’m not sure if they would build houses without an ecocute these days, but if you do have gas an eco one (a more efficient gas/electric hybrid ecocute) would be a good purchase.
Waterproof outlets out the front and back for when you might want lights in the evening in the backyard, or charging an electric bike in out the front. Also an electric car charger maybe useful for the future.