The House and Our Loaner Furniture

Now we are as settled as we will be until we get all our stuff that is on the boat. There's a lot of space in our apartment to fill and now I need to work on getting us some furniture - I'm not really sure where to start looking though, Ikea?

Anyways, we went out last night to the pet shelter to look at the dogs and their facilities. Ian doesn't want to adopt a pet while we still have the loaner furniture and I rather agree. So we are going to volunteer for the time being. I'm a little in love with this red shiba inu named Yoshi, he looks just like a fox! - but I need to research the breed a little more. He isn't going to be up for adoption for a little while because he still has his balls and he needs to be quarantined. There was also a lab/rottie mix that was really sweet. She needed to be spade and she'll probably be adopted before we are ready. I'm pretty excited to get a dog, something to keep me company while Ian is at work all day. It's a little hard right now, we don't have internet, so I don't have any music to listen to or anything to really fill the space. I have to walk the 5-10minutes to the library to get on the computer, not to mention the connection is too slow for pandora. Argh, but all in good time.

Here's the house:

This is the building, We are on the top floor, left hand side. Our yard begins on the left side of the staircase, and continues around the side. I'm really excited about planting this summer, though we are not allowed to have vegitables, and we have to get everything preapproved.

This is the rest of the yard. That little shed is where we keep lawn movers, recycling and trashcans. The Japanese are really crazy about recycling. Even trash is sorted for recycling and it's more expensive to throw out trash and not recycle than it is to sort it all out yourself. Wahoo! saving US government money by sorting recycling.

Front door and beautiful hydrangea bush. There are tons of them on base here, and the are all flowering.

Every housing building has a little plaque with the service members name and rank on the front. I'm not really sure what it looks like when two airmen are married...What if they are different ranks? A1C infront of Ian's name means Airmen First Class. SSGT if Staff Sargent.

This is the living room with the loaner furniture. It's a really pretty patterned sofa and chair - I kinda wish we could keep it. The movers came in to deliver the furniture and they took seriously 20 minutes to bring everything in and set it up. The sliding door goes out onto our balcony.

This is our little dining room. It's pretty much perfect for four chairs. though we might be able to squeeze 6 chairs in. The little cut out goes into the kitchen and is super convenient.

 

This is the kitchen. I love the grey tiles, metal counters and grey wood grain cabinets. It's retro without being too noticeable. Plus it's going to be really hard to mess those counters up and get dinged for it when we move out.

The only thing that I was unhappy with was the washer and dryer being essentially in the kitchen. I'm not sure how to keep them clean or camouflage their presence. Any ideas? We don't have a garbage can yet so those plastic bags are garbage and recycling. It's really tough to being on this base without a car. The shuttle doesn't come anywhere near us so we have to carry things home. Slowly we are getting all the necessary home things.

The bathroom is all grey tiles. Other families that PCSed had responsible sponsors that set them up mail boxes before they arrived so they could send themselves boxes of house things before they came. So they wouldn't have to buy all this stuff on base and spend a ton of money. Our Sponsor was non existent and we were lucky just to have someone meet us at the plane. So we've been taking trips down to the BX (like a walmart) to get supplies. Japan is trying hard to save energy after the tsunami. So every building you go into have half their lights on and half off. All hallways are dark, very few offices have air conditioning. We are always told to help save water and electricity. The BX also has a supply problem. Plus it's PCS season so there are a lot of newcomers on base. This means that like half the shelves are empty of the really vital basics that we need to set up house. There were no shower curtains, no phones, I got the last box of Qtips. So we went over to the hardware section and bought plastic sheeting and made our own shower curtain. Needs some improving but it'll get the job done until our stuff gets here. Shopping on base is rough anyways, no selection, all of it is imported and expensive.We don't even have a blanket for the bed because we are trying to wait for our stuff to come. Such is life.

Like I said no blanket, and really crappy sheets - but isn't the loaner furniture pretty? We also have a spare room that I'm turning into my studio. I turned in the paperwork so my home business is legal today! :) I'm going to be teaching classes and trying to sell work, maybe Ian and I will get into the homemade pasta making business. Maybe I'll try and open a gallery - so many possibilities.

View from balcony. The base is really quite pretty if you can get past all the buildings being the same color. Well that's it for now, I need to do a little more research into Japanese scrolls and shiba inus.