Hi from Mashiko

[edmundedgar]

Hi, I found this forum while googling something about wood stoves and signed up it to give me a chance to brag about my insulation.

I'm in Mashiko, which is a pottery town in Tochigi-ken, about 100km from Tokyo.

Fixed up this place last year, it was built by a potter called Nagakura Suiko in the 1960s.

[Wolfsong013]

Hello there! I'm also in Tochigi. The house looks nice! I renovated one in Shioya 5 years ago, and now I'm moving on to rehoming another in Kanuma. Did you find a wood stove to put in your house? I'm thinking of doing one for the new place, but I haven't looked around where to find a stove. Did you have a professional put it in?

[Zasso Nouka]

Welcome to Japan Simple Life folks and thank you very much for taking the time to sign up, we really do appreciate that.

Your house looks pretty good @edmundedgar, do you have any pictures showing what it looks like after the reform ? I'd love to see how it looks now.

Hi, I found this forum while googling something about wood stoves and signed up it to give me a chance to brag about my insulation.

I hope you didn't have to wade through too many pages of Google search results to find us , we're not a very big site I'm afraid. Are you looking to buy a wood stove or do you have one already ?

[edmundedgar]

Thanks for running this site, it's really interesting, and it's great to see the internet working properly instead of everything getting sucked into Facebook.

Your house looks pretty good @edmundedgar, do you have any pictures showing what it looks like after the reform ? I'd love to see how it looks now.

Thanks, here's some more pics, the first one is the outside as it looks now, you should be able to click through to the interior ones as well.





















(The embedding seems to be misbehaving right now - imgur.com/gallery/mkQT5UX )

Are you looking to buy a wood stove or do you have one already ?

No, we've got it, I can't remember what I was googling for now... We got a Nestor Martin one, it's pretty great - when I was a kid we had fires in my house and I remembered them as a kind of an impractical toy sucked in cold air and made the whole place colder, but this really does warm the place up.

[edmundedgar]

Hello there! I'm also in Tochigi. The house looks nice! I renovated one in Shioya 5 years ago, and now I'm moving on to rehoming another in Kanuma. Did you find a wood stove to put in your house? I'm thinking of doing one for the new place, but I haven't looked around where to find a stove. Did you have a professional put it in?

Hi, Kanuma is a great location, that was our other thought if we didn't go for Mashiko.

We got the stove put in professionally - it's probably the most extravagant part of the whole thing. The chimney was also quite expensive, as we were told by the shop and also other people with stoves who have experienced this that if it's not well insulated, the inside gets too cold, and you get a lot of gunk building up inside it. We also had to put in a heatproof board (ケイカル版) behind it to avoid setting fire to the wall, and put in a stone floor around it from a place in Oya (where else).

We got it from a shop called Fireworks which is out on Nikko Kaido a little outside Utsunomiya, close to Romantic Mura.
http://www.fire-works.org/
They were really helpful and sweet, but like I say we paid a lot - it's probably worth trying to haggle them down. They also fitted it, and threw in 700 kg of artificial logs.

[Wolfsong013]

Hello there! I'm also in Tochigi. The house looks nice! I renovated one in Shioya 5 years ago, and now I'm moving on to rehoming another in Kanuma. Did you find a wood stove to put in your house? I'm thinking of doing one for the new place, but I haven't looked around where to find a stove. Did you have a professional put it in?

Hi, Kanuma is a great location, that was our other thought if we didn't go for Mashiko.

We got the stove put in professionally - it's probably the most extravagant part of the whole thing. The chimney was also quite expensive, as we were told by the shop and also other people with stoves who have experienced this that if it's not well insulated, the inside gets too cold, and you get a lot of gunk building up inside it. We also had to put in a heatproof board (ケイカル版) behind it to avoid setting fire to the wall, and put in a stone floor around it from a place in Oya (where else).

We got it from a shop called Fireworks which is out on Nikko Kaido a little outside Utsunomiya, close to Romantic Mura.
http://www.fire-works.org/
They were really helpful and sweet, but like I say we paid a lot - it's probably worth trying to haggle them down. They also fitted it, and threw in 700 kg of artificial logs.

Thanks for the link! We will look into Fireworks and shop around a little. When I rehomed my place in Shioya, we only had a month to put in floors, redo windows, repair the roof, so we went simple. But we have lots of time in Kanuma to make the place perfect, so luckily there is time to shop for a stove.

[Zasso Nouka]

Thanks for running this site, it's really interesting, and it's great to see the internet working properly instead of everything getting sucked into Facebook.

Thank you so much, sadly too much gets sucked into Facebook and then disappears under a ton of posts and can't be easily found later.

The embedding seems to be misbehaving right now

Sorry phpBB sometimes has issues with imgur galleries/albums and then sometimes it's fine. I took the liberty of copying your pictures into your post separately, let me know if you'd like it reverted to your original post now that the gallery seems to be working fine.

Your reforming work looks absolutely amazing, it's totally transformed the house. You've really done a nice job there and it must be very satisfying to live in now.

No, we've got it, I can't remember what I was googling for now... We got a Nestor Martin one, it's pretty great - when I was a kid we had fires in my house and I remembered them as a kind of an impractical toy sucked in cold air and made the whole place colder, but this really does warm the place up.

Ha ha, we have a Nestor Martin too and love it, looks like your cat also really enjoys it as well . I really like the controllability you get on Nestor Martin's, packing it full of wood just before you hit the sack and turning the air down low so it's still going when you wake up in the morning and the house is still toasty and warm. Also the fact that it can burn softwood cleanly without clogging up the chimney is a definite bonus.

[VanillaEssence]

Wow your place looks fantastic. I’m wavering slightly on whether or not a kominka is the go and whether or not I can convince my wife but your place just list the spark again. If you don’t mind me asking what we’re your costs? Thanks!

[farmingnoob]

Hello from next door in Ibaraki. The house looks amazing!

[edmundedgar]

Wow your place looks fantastic. I’m wavering slightly on whether or not a kominka is the go and whether or not I can convince my wife but your place just list the spark again. If you don’t mind me asking what we’re your costs? Thanks!

So it was like 7 million yen for the land and buildings, closer to 8 million with fees and taxes and things. That includes 300 tsubos of land (about 1000 square metres), the house itself, and also another building you can just see that I'm going to turn into my office, and a garage cut into the rock at the bottom. Apparently the existence of the buildings probably knocked about 1 million yen off the value of the place, because a normal person would have paid that to knock them down and start again.

Then we spent probably about 12 million yen on repairs and carpentry. That's redoing the ground floor floor and internal walls and stairs, new windows, new roof tiles, replacing all the rotten bits of wood, fitting all the internal wooden stuff including internal sliding doors, closets and and shelving, flooring, new electrics, septic tank, new plumbing. new plaster on the outside etc. It also includes pouring concrete underneath to help with damp and putting in an extra skin with insulation all over the place. (See the insulation thread.) Without that last part it would have been several million yen cheaper, but cold. This was mostly done professionally, except that my wife did all the internal plastering (that house has a *lot* of plaster) and we did other easy surface stuff like painting, oiling the floors etc.

Finally, there's maybe 3 million for the fireplace and chimney, boilers, the bath and shower booth, air conditioners, the kitchen counter etc, the gas range, cutting down trees and various miscellaneous stuff.

So we're talking definitely over 20 million yen total, maybe like 22 or 23 million, depending what you count. We could have built quite a nice new energy-efficient house for that in this area, with good earthquake-proofing, but smaller, less interesting, and lacking the psychic power of Nagakura Suiko. IIUC it would be pretty much impossible to get a mortgage for a project like this, so you pretty much have to have the cash, although I guess you could lease the land instead of buying it.

We dealt directly with the carpenter who did a lot of the work - he'd built a bunch of friends' houses. We did talk to a more professional building company with show houses and salespeople, and they quoted us 27 million for the renovation - which I guess wouldn't have covered the stuff in the "finally" part, so it's basically twice what we paid. I'm not really sure whether we got a great deal because we're all friends and my wife and the carpenter share a love of frogs, or whether we paid more than we needed to because we didn't try to haggle, or what, so YMMV, a lot.

Anyhow feel free to ping me if you'd like to drop by some time and show the Mrs. If you're somewhere in Kanto then Mashiko makes for a great day trip.