Designing our house

We recently wrapped up the design of our house. I will share how it went in this post.

Read more

Ichijo friend referral

Ichijo, as most major house makers, offer a friend referral system.

Read more

Why we chose to own our home instead of renting

Back in January 2023 I wrote a post on the renting vs buying decision in Tokyo concluding that the two options have comparable financial outcomes (assuming the renter invests the additional money into a diversified portfolio). Yet we decided to build our house. In this post I’ll share the reasons that contributed to this decision.

Read more

The cost of our Ichijo house

We are building a house in Tokyo with Ichijo 一条工務店. In a previous post I covered the costs associated with buying the land, and in this post I’ll talk about the cost of our house built by Ichijo. There will be additional fees (e.g. garden, registration, etc.) that I will write about in a separate post once we move in. This post is only about the money we pay to Ichijo for the building itself.

Read more

Ichijo's smart home options

We are building a house in Tokyo with Ichijo 一条工務店. In previous apartments I always had a limited smart home setup, so now that we got to design the whole house, I wanted to consider every available options and add them if they make sense. I’ll review what we ended up adding to our design in this post.

Read more