I can absolutely see a 1-bedroom loft in Seaport or Faneuil go for $650k or more. In the area I’m in, not far from Cambridge, a 1-bedroom apartment rents for $1500-2000/mo or so.
What I love about this Japanese home is its compact efficiency. So many tiny access panels for meaningful helpful things. I’m especially envious of the bathroom arrangement; Americans tend to be so squeamish about bathroom things that they’re quite utilitarian. “Here’s the toilet bidet to spray yourself, and here’s a tub custom made to bathe with your children,” are phrases you’ll never hear a US realtor say.
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I especially like the realtor’s hand motion for “spray your undercarrieage.”
I admit I have some Japanese apartment envy, especially when it comes to the technology. The one thing I regret not installing when we renovated was a shower control; to be able to set the temperature before getting in to the shower would be so nice, especially on a cold day. As for the fancy Japanese automated heated bidet, we thought about it but ultimately decided it wasn’t essential for our household, even as a Japanese-American household. I did find the bidet nice when visiting Japan though.
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I appreciated his charades as well!
As is typical for the area I live in, my house is around 130 years old, with horsehair-plaster walls and gas fittings; the heat is from fuel oil, pumped into a huge ancient tank in the basement. The wiring’s so convoluted and old that there’s mysterious switches that do nothing and only so many devices can be used at once per room, or the fuses blow. I consider it a successful morning if the bathroom light stays on as I shower; a houseful of control panels is pretty much the opposite of this place. But my house has such character! (and a small yard)
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Because they’d likely be arrested immediately
The US is a rather puritan country, but last time I checked, it isn’t illegal for parents to bathe with their kids.
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It’s probably urban legend. With a 30-year mortgage, you’re paying almost pure interest at first. With 100 years, that payment would be almost exactly the same - but you get 840 more of them.
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I got a 25 year mortgage and chose to front load the interest, I was also offered the option to smooth the interest out over the lifetime of the loan.
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Oh get over yourself. plenty of parents in the US do this very thing.
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I certainly did, until it got awkward around kindergarten. Today it might be a bad idea, I’ll ask him.
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For $400k, I want a little more than a neato magnet that holds my door open and a toilet seat that’s warm and washes my butt.
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Think about Japanese cuisine. They don’t really bake or roast anything.
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OT, but why would you do that? The standard (obviously there are banks and mortgage companies who won’t do this, but it is standard) mortgage agreement includes the ability to pay early without penalty, with the interest being recalculated so that if you pay an extra $50 toward principal each month – as an example – you’ll end up owing tens of thousands of dollars LESS in interest by the final payoff. If you pay off the interest early, you pay all the interest even if you end up paying off the mortgage early. All the fees, no chance at saving any money. And most people DO pay off their mortgages early, in the sense that most people sell the home and move to another one before the 20-25-30 years are up.
Even though banking is different in Japan, I don’t see how paying all the interest up front could ever be advantageous, unless there is a significant savings (a lot more than just a percentage point) and NO way to pay off a mortgage early under any circumstances anyway.
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Especially because those toilets can be bought in the U.S. for a couple of thousand dollars (or less) and door magnets for much less. Retrofit your own home, for a fraction of the cost.
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One more point:
The manual flush option on electrified toilets usually relies on a back-up battery which is good for one flush. If the power stays out for a long time, then you have to do the old-fashioned method of pouring a bucket of water into the bowl to allow gravity to do its thing, the same as with a non-powered toilet.
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Sure, but there’s much more to this house than those two items. Heated floors, built-in storage in all sorts of wacky places, control panels on seemingly every wall, an entire room that’s basically a huge shower stall with a custom bathtub… this is a really sweet setup. Oh, and Tokyo.
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With the emphasis on, “that’s where you cook your fish”, it makes me wonder what kind of functions it has. Can it bake, or is it setup more like a broiler? I also get the feeling bacon, butter, and cheese aren’t exactly the “cheap” staples like they are in American diets. ( Obviously bacon isn’t exactly cheap, but given the amount of pork we raise, I can only imagine its price in the Asian market.)
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NC is pretty big, roughly the same as England and like England a lot of the suburbs are a long way from the capital.
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https://ui.uncc.edu/sites/default/files/NC2012BGmap_MedInc_NC.jpg
Sure… now what about the +90% of the state that doesn’t.
I suppose you could define Cary, NC as suburban… I mean everyone owns a house, probably on at least a 1/2 acre of land, but at the same time you aren’t looking at starter house pricing either. Not to mention a lot of your neighbors are going to be driving current model BMW or Mercedes… Or perhaps Apex, NC? It’s right beside Cary, just across hwy 64 and I lived there for about 5 years. Houses and cars range from modest to nice, yet a newly married couple can find something reasonable without one of them being a lawyer, doctor, investment banker, vet… Or if you want actual land and don’t mind a real commute you can move out to Pittsboro - where you’ll be lucky to get high speed internet.
NC isn’t just RDU and Charlotte. Just because we have a lot of “red” counties doesn’t mean we are all racists, misogynistic, homophobic, assholes…
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Here in the CD we’ve been seeing intense development like this for several years now.
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