A tour of our apartment

I know I've given a few video tours so far but for those of you who haven't seen our place yet, I thought I'd give a picture tour.

This is our apartment when you walk up from the street.  Through the front door is the lobby and then you take an elevator up to our floor.

Our floor is number 3 (the first balcony you can see here on the corner).  There are 17 floors total.  Floor 1 is the lobby and floor 2 is bicycle parking so we are on the first residential floor.

This is the view as you walk into our front.  To the right is the shoe closet and to the left is the toilet room.

Here is our closet full of shoes (and some umbrellas and stuff too).  It is against the rules to wear shoes inside the house.

Here is the toilet room.  In Japan, the toilet is separated from the rest of the bathroom.  It is an electonic toilet with a seat warmer and sorts of bells and whistles.  When you flush the water first goes through a faucet on top of the toilet where you can wash your hands while it fills the toilet bowl.

This is the view into our apartment once you leave the entryway.  First is the dining room then the living room and finally the kids room.

To the right of the dining room is the kitchen.  It's pretty small but at least we have an oven this time!  And a dishwasher too, although it's about the same of milk crate.

Going past the kitchen you go down a hallway to the bathroom and the master bedroom.

The bathroom is divided into 2 parts - the outer area with a sink and vanity (and also a washer/dryer behind it) and then further into the bathroom (behind the privacy glass door you see here) is the shower room.

The washer/dryer.  Again, everything is on a small scale.

This is the shower room, which is hands down my favorite part of Japanese living.  This room is totally waterproof, so whether you are taking a bath or shower, it doesn't matter and the bathtub has no overflow drain so you can literally fill it to the top (if it overflows it goes into the shower drain).  The faucet is controlled on the wall with a display where you can choose the water temperature and how far to fill the bathtub.

This is the master bedroom

This is the view from the living room.

This is the kids room with all their futons put away.  At night they open up their closets and unfold their Japanese futons.