Home Closing
Our home closing was scheduled for Aug. 19, but we would need a few days to prepare the place before moving in. We tried to schedule furniture and appliances to be delivered as quickly as possible, but we had to buy everything since we only brought clothes from home. We repacked our suitcases and left Mie (wife’s parents house) the day before our closing date, for Osaka.
Apartment Hotel
We found an apartment hotel just a few blocks from our new home, and booked ourselves a few nights here. Apartment hotels are mid-length stay furnished apartments that have kitchens and washing machines. The place is meant for up to 3 people, but was pretty cramped at about 33m^2 (~350 sq ft). I felt like I had to move about slowly in the place, for fear of banging toes or knocking stuff over.
Studio living for three?! There is cozy, then there is this.
In hindsight, maybe a normal hotel would have sufficed. We didn’t cook here, but we did make use of the washing machine and it motivated us to prep our new home.
Closing on the new home
On closing day, we went to our real estate broker’s office and met up with our agent. The sellers and their agent were there too, and we spent about 30 minutes signing paperwork and stamping with our ‘inkan’ (personal seal). There was an official there to do the title transfer and file the official docs, and she explained some things about taxes and transferring our official residence addresses.
After our paperwork, we all went to the bank. This was the bank where my wife had an account, which we had transferred our home purchasing money to. There, she made direct transfers to the sellers (4 separate accounts), withdrew cash for the real estate agent’s fees and the title transfer fees. Interestingly, there are no escrow accounts, so all the transactions happen face to face on the closing day. After the monies are counted and receipts are made out, we said good bye to the sellers and headed back to the real estate agent’s office.
We had some loose ends to tie up, and then were handed our keys and headed out with a binder full of papers and receipts! The whole process took about 1.5 hours, so wasn’t too painful. All that stamping and waiting made us hungry, so we grabbed lunch and then headed to Umeda area for some home goods shopping.
More home prep
Nitori has been a useful one stop shop for buying home goods. It’s similar to IKEA, where we can find just about everything, and the quality is maybe just one notch above. So we picked up some cleaning stuff, hangers and bath stuff before heading over to our new home! It’s way better than BBBY too, at least it’s suppliers are still shipping stuff.
Once we arrived at home, my wife and I didn’t feel so great due to the lunch we had. We had eaten at a Vietnamese Pho place, but it was not very good. To top it off, my stomach was hurting and walking around in the heat with a bunch of shopping bags didn’t help either. So we made it a very quick stop at the home to drop things off and then headed back to the hotel to rest. We felt fine after a couple of hours, so maybe it was just a minor food issue.
Air Conditioner Day and Moar Nitori (Sat)
The next day, our real estate agent was gracious enough to coordinate the air conditioner install. It ended up taking all day, so that was a huge help for us. We’re also happy this was done immediately after closing, since we can’t really be in the apartment without A/C during our glorious 90F+ summer days. We had 3 A/C units installed, one for each bedroom (2 bedrooms) and one for the living/dining/kitchen area. We lost some balcony space, due to the compressors sitting out there, but well worth it. I’ve been learning that balconies are for A/C compressors and clothes drying, but ours doesn’t have any bars for clothes drying, so I guess…
We made a few trips to Nitori and Yodobashi Camera (a huge electronics store) over the next couple days. They are in the same building in Umeda, so we have been learning the fastest way to get there from our home, and got it down to about 12 minutes weaving through some department stores and up to the walkway on the 2nd floor connecting various buildings in the area. We ordered some curtains, it turns out they had to be customized due to our window sizes and that will take 3 weeks:(. The larger items we ordered online or at the store to be shipped, but we also carried home quite a few smaller items to give us an unexpected work out. Good thing, cause I haven’t had time to go running the last few days.
Some interesting things caught my eye in Yodobashi Camera, like Tamagotchi is still alive?! I remember cleaning the poop and feeding my very first virtual pet as a kid, then the fad disappeared… or so we thought.
One of the floors is dedicated to plastic models, n-gauge trains, RC cars and they had this nice little race track. It wasn’t just kids building and racing their Tamiya Mini-4WD, ‘otaku’ (nerd) culture is stronger than ever. Don’t ever change!
There is also a nice collection of collectibles in the ‘gatcha’ loot boxes.
While this stuff is more appealing to M than myself, there is nearly a whole floor dedicated to camera gear, so I will have to carve out an afternoon to check that out someday. M has already spent hours playing with the Sylvania Families (Calico Critters in the USA) toys section. Something for everyone it seems, they even have a wine shop:).
Appliance Day (Sun)
Sunday was spent at the new home, waiting on deliveries. We had the new fridge and washing machine installed, coffee machine arrived and a shipment from Yodobashi Camera came with rice cooker, microwave/convection oven, ceiling lights, etc. The A/C was working A-OK.
After unpacking some of our loot, we found a Chinese place that boasted to be the best around. It was decent, but we also spot a dim sum place so we’ll have to check that next time. As for being the best, I think that’s just Osaka hyperbole.
Japanese people love mapo tofu and ’tan-tan men’ (dan dan noodles). That was featured in the menu, so that’s what we got! It was really spicy and yummy, luckily they had a kid’s ramen for M.
They gave us paper aprons, cause of hot chili oil stains!
Moving day is set for Monday (22nd). Will we be ready?