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Turning a crazy cheap country Japanese house into a home — Step 1: Tegowashi【SoraHouse】

Casey Baseel Jun 27, 2022
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”This is gonna be tegowashi.”

Last fall, we bought a house in the Japanese countryside for just one million yen (roughly US$9,100 at the time, and about US$7,460 with the current exchange rate). So who’s been living there in the months since?

Nobody. See, part of the reason the SoraHouse was so cheap is because it’s a fixer-upper, but we haven’t had time to fix it up very much yet (though we did manage to set up 44 bubble machines on the roof and install a swing). With summer here, though, we’ve been thinking we’d like to spend more time relaxing at our bargain-priced mountain home, and our first major project involves the collapsed storage shed that’s on the property.

▼ Hey, don’t blame us! It was like this when we got here.

Following our treasure hunt that uncovered some retro electronics and a frankly shocking number of frying pans inside the shed, we’ve come to the decision that the structure is beyond repair, and that demolishing it and clearing it away is the best thing to do. So we contacted Hobien, a construction firm located near the SoraHouse in Saitama Prefecture, to come take a look at the shed and see what they could do.

After Takanori Ogawa, Hobien’s friendly project manager, arrived at the SoraHouse, we guided him around to the shed. After examining it from every angle and running some mental calculations, he quietly murmured, “This is gonna be tegowashi.”

▼ Ogawa

We’d been braced for a reaction like this. It’s a big job, and so we weren’t shocked that Ogawa, an industry veteran, could tell right away that it was going to be tegowai, meaning “difficult” or “a tough problem.”

“Yep, definitely tegowashi,” he repeated, and – wait, tegowashi? Not tegowai?

“Because of how your property is situated, we’re not going to be able to get any heavy machinery back here, so the only way to do this project is tegowashi,” Ogawa explained, and that’s when we finally understood what he’d been telling us.

In other words, the storage shed structure is going to need to be demolished by hand!

As you can probably guess from the price we paid for the house, we’re hoping to renovate it in the most budget-friendly way we can. “I’ll send two or three of the younger guys we have on staff out here for the job, and if you can provide, say, three people from your side too, I think that’ll be best,” Ogawa told us, after taking into consideration how much we were looking to spend and when we hoped to have the job done.

So it looks like we’ll be rolling up our sleeves and getting to work soon, but it’ll feel good to be taking the first steps towards making the SoraHouse feel like a real home.

Related: Hobien
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[ Read in Japanese ]