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Turning a crazy cheap country Japanese house into a home Season 2: So much poo!【SoraHouse】

Casey Baseel Jun 17, 2023
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The SoraHouse project is back, and first things first: there are entirely too many dead bugs and animal droppings in our country home.

It’s been a long time since our last major update on the SoraHouse, the house we bought in the Japanese countryside for the amazingly low price of 1 million yen (US$9,100 yen by exchange rates at the time of purchase). We needed a bit of breather after the many days we spent last year clearing away the vegetation that had closed in on the house and carting off the debris that had piled up in the surrounding property since the former residents vacated the house.

But with the weather getting warmer, we’re heading back up into the mountains of Saitama Prefecture and getting back to work turning the house into a home, and so without further ado, today is the start of Season 2 of the SoraHouse restoration project!

It’s time for us to start focusing on getting the house’s interior into livable condition, and our Japanese-language reporter Go Hatori has set his sights on the second floor. Let’s head on up the stairs and see what we’re staring with…

…yeah. It had been a while since we’d been up here, and we’d forgotten how filthy the place is. OK, the little plastic bubble-blowers are a result of us not putting away our toys after the bubble party we threw for ourselves a while back, so they’re more “messy” than “dirty.” The rest of the stuff you see on the floor, though, is pretty gross.

See, even though nobody is living at the SoraHouse right now, that doesn’t mean nothing is living there…or dying there. Those black specks all over the tatami reed floors? Most of them are the carcasses of stink bugs, hornets, and other insectoid squatters.

The stuff that’s not dead bugs, meanwhile, is poop. We’re not sure what kind of poop, exactly, since we haven’t caught any crapping critters in the act. According to the previous owner, though, it’s probably tanuki or racoon poop, but regardless of the anuses of origin, it’s most definitely poop, though thankfully dried by the passage of time and exposure to the elements.

Things don’t look much better if you avert your eyes from the floor, either. There are three rooms on the second floor of the SoraHouse, and parts of the ceiling have rotted and collapsed in two of them.

Clearly, Go had his work cut out for him. And yet, on this day he only had three pieces of equipment, a broom, a dustpan, and a mask.

▼ The mask is especially important because, remember, he’s going to be sweeping up gigantic piles of dead bugs and animal droppings.

You might be wondering why Go is doing the sweeping by himself, but rest assured that the reason is not that, as professional writers, the SoraNews24 staff are all adept at making up excuses to get out of doing chores. On the contrary, Go wanted to do this by himself, to see just how much of an improvement he could make on his own in two hours.

It was a busy two hours, as Go scooped, swept, and tore off pieces of hanging ceiling, as you can see in this high-speed video of his endeavors.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Go Hatori （GO羽鳥） (@mamiyak46)

And when time was up?

Things were looking a lot better!

▼ Before/after comparisons

Okay, so it’s not spotless. If you were to, say, check into a hotel and your room looked like this, you’d probably want to have a word with the manager, and maybe a refund.

But compared to how the place looked before Go’s sweeping session? It’s a thousand time better, and also contains about a thousand fewer dead bugs.

Then came Go’s moment of triumph, as SoraNews24 founder Yoshio and fellow reporter Ikuna Kamezawa came up the stairs to see the results of his two hours of cleaning.

▼ You’ll heat a lot of **“Suge!”**and “Sugoi!”, both of which mean “Whoa, amazing!”

So while we’ve still got a lot of work to do, SoraHouse Season 2 is off to a great start, and we look forward to the day when we can start staying their overnight, especially now that we’ve got a new resource for finding cool places to go in Saitama.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]