One of the many exciting aspects of living in a traditional Japanese house was experiencing the process (and challenges) of renovating it. The modern Japanese apartment we’d lived in for four years prior in Kyushu strictly didn’t allow any modifications (as with most, if not all, apartments in Japan), and the transition into an old house such as ours was a new, exciting opportunity to peel back the layers and see what it would take to renovate a home in Japan.
With the approval of our house’s owners, we started immediately to update our akiya house in the Japanese countryside. We’ve undertaken various tasks, such as replacing a rotting beam on the engawa balcony, repairing the shoji screen doors, and upgrading our toilet to a water-flush outhouse to make our vacant ‘akiya’ house feel more inviting and homely during our stay here.
It’s been a year since we first moved into our Japanese house in the countryside. Here’s a house tour and what renovations we’ve done so far in the past year to our little home:
First, a tour of our countryside house in Japan
One good thing about this renovation project is that the house is small, with a layout of about 650 square feet or 60 meters square, and a solid roof, meaning we could focus on smaller renovation projects that fit within our tiny renovation budget.
The Doma (土間)
We typically enter the house through the kitchen door. It has a doma (土間), a transitional space that acts as an indoor/outdoor space where we remove our shoes before entering the rest of the house. Traditionally, the doma has an earthen floor, though ours is laid with more modern cement.
Across from the kitchen is our bedroom/living room. In the winter, this turns into our bedroom since it’s the warmest room in the house due to its proximity to the kitchen’s wood-burning stove. These two rooms are used most in the coldest months while we close the rest of the house.
The engawa (縁側)
In the warmer months, we open the rest of the house up and move our bedroom into the airier living space. This also has my favourite view from the house, overlooking the rice fields and mountains, where we sit and drink coffee in the morning.
The genkan (玄関)
We also have a genkan (玄関), a traditional house entryway. However, it’s pretty narrow, and during our renovation process, it’s functioning more as a storage space.
We also have a few swallow nests in the genkan. Swallows had gotten in during the seven years that house sat empty. It’s considered good luck when swallows nest under the eaves of your home. We’re not sure what we’ll do with these, but for now, the nests have their place in our genkan.
The outdoor bath and toilet
Finally, we have a bath and toilet located in a separate outbuilding. Our outdoor bath is also heated with a wood stove. Heating the bath takes a bit of pre-planning, including filling the tub, setting the fire, then regularly checking the water, taking about an hour and a half to get it ready from start to finish.
Our toilet is an outhouse. While we thought this was a dealbreaker for a move-in ready house, it’s a surprisingly fresh-aired experience if correctly vented. Seriously.
We replaced the engawa beam of the house
The most urgent repair was the northeast corner of the house. For weeks, our house was lovingly referred to as the “Blue House” by the neighbors due to the blue tarp we hung up during our renovation of that corner. We weren’t overly keen on that nickname sticking, so we made sure to prioritize the restoration.
We have an engawa (縁側), a covered corridor along the outer perimeter of many traditional Japanese houses, and my personal favorite spot to drink coffee in the morning. These wooden beams that hold up the engawa had been exposed to the wind, rain, and time, slowly eroding the wooden beams and joints past the point of no return.
We decided to reuse as much of the old beam as we could. The original beam was made from chestnut wood, and scraping it felt like a shame.
First, Jesse removed the beam from the corner and cross-braced the opening so that the house wouldn’t shift. Then, he cut the beam back to clean sound wood. After cutting down the beam, he added a new piece of wood to make it the right length, attempting a complicated network of joinery. Once the beam was re-installed, Jesse began to splice in a new section for the bottom of the corner post. Once all the pieces were ready, he could re-assemble the entire corner, remove the temporary bracing and re-install the sliding glass doors.
The whole process took about a month while balancing work, resources, and time. But the effort was well worth it, not only for the piece of mind of having stronger support for the house but as an attractive base to admire those great views of the rice fields!
We repaired 15 shoji screen doors
Restoring the houses’ original shoji screens was less structurally relevant but aesthetically important.
While Jesse worked on fixing the engawa beam, I started to work on improving the 15 shoji screens in the house. The first four newer shoji doors were in much better shape and the easiest to fix. The remaining 11 were older, with more delicate slates, requiring more patience and time to return them to their former glory.
We spliced in a wood where needed, re-gluing the joints and replacing the paper. Overall, it took several weekends of dedicated work to complete all 15 shoji screens. But, once done, they were the most significant change to the aesthetics of the house we’ve done so far.
We installed a new flushing toilet for our outhouse
Other than the structural concerns with the northeast corner, our toilet was the most pressing change that needed to be confronted.
One of the less glamorous aspects of living this far out in the countryside is the occasional lack of communal sewage infrastructure. Most of the houses in the area have outhouses. I know this doesn’t sound great, but luckily, there are ways to make them close to the comfortable modern bathroom experience we are accustomed to.
We vented the holding tank with a pipe higher than the outhouse roofline. The top of the pipe has an extraction fan to continuously draw air out of the top of the vent. We also created a custom cement form for our new toilet.
Next, we attached an extraction fan to the top of the pipe to create a continuous air current that draws down through the toilet and up out the top of the vent pipe.
Finally, we changed the toilet from a literal hole in the ground to a proper porcelain throne, complete with a partial flush. These changes were massive, even if the space was still tiny.
We replaced the rotting plywood with new drywall and vapour barrier
One of the ongoing projects of our house renovation has been replacing the interior walls. Aside from the disintegrating walls, there were large gaps between the floor and walls, inviting all sorts of critters onto our beds.
The house structure is timber framed, and the walls are sheeted with metal siding on the outside. There isn’t any insulation or any weather-fighting envelope.
We have been slowly changing the old sheeting material and dissolving plywood into fresh drywall with a proper vapour barrier.
While you may be wondering if we added insulation, the truth is that there are not a lot of exterior walls to worry about, with the vast majority of the exterior being occupied by sliding doors and windows. So instead, we focused on installing a vapour seal to combat the humidity of Japan’s climate.
We also took this opportunity to add our bathroom vanity. We installed the vanity in our kitchen since our outdoor bathroom isn’t the most practical, especially when you want to go brush your teeth in the darkness of night.
There are still many more walls to replace, but we’ll gradually finish it throughout the year. But for now, we have a functional kitchen space. There are still much more walls to replace, but we’ll gradually get it done throughout the year.
What’s the plan for our Japanese house renovation this year?
It’s important to note that we rent this house, do not own it, and have no plans to purchase it. This might surprise many — after all, why put in all that work if you’re not going to keep it? — but everything we’re doing is strictly for our own pleasure and learning, making the house a little less damp in the summer, less cold in the winter, and keeping renovations within the very minimal budget. We’re also tempering our long-term expectations, knowing that our living situations, especially in a foreign country, can change quickly.
For now, as long as we’re gaining valuable insight into Japanese house restoration, we’re happy to continue doing small jobs here and there to the house. We’re happy to continue doing small renovation jobs as long as we’re gaining valuable insight into Japanese house restoration.
Do you have any questions about the renovation process I missed? Let me know in the comments below!