I’ve been waiting for weeks to finally finish furnishing my small Japanese apartment, and with (hopefully) last piece of furniture arriving this Friday and everything looking exactly as I wish it to look, I can finally share the fruits of my labour with you. This is how I live now!

(Caption) The main apartment building – レオパレス不動前 (Leopalace Fudoumae) – as you can see it when approaching from the main street.

(Caption) My apartment is on the second floor, apartment number 207. The obvious lack of elevator must’ve been a pleasant surprise for the people who were delivering me a washing machine two weeks ago, for sure.

(Caption) Welcome home! This is the entrance hall with obviously wrongly placed shoes. From right to left, there’s a closet for shoes, entrance to the bathroom, kitchen so small that it took me two weeks just to find it, shelf with kitchen appliances, two trash cans and a lot of empty beer cans.

(Caption) I’m perhaps unreasonably proud for picking and assembling this shelf, but I just love how it looks and how perfectly it fits in there. From top to bottom, left to right, there’s rice cooker, kettle, microwave oven/toaster/regular oven all in one (not kidding) and then just some generic storage. The towels are unfortunately necessary for not damaging the incredibly fragile floor that looks like wood but is not wood at all.

(Caption) The tiniest bathroom of them all! It’s so small I almost don’t have anything to say – except to praise myself for coming up with the idea of buying that thing on the right side. When you lack horizontal space, go vertical I suppose!

(Caption) Followed by the tiniest kitchen of them all. Good only for preparing rice and pizza toasts, as far as I’m concerned.

(Caption) And this is the main (and, well, also the only) living room of this apartment. When working on the laptop, I switch sitting on the ground/laptop on the table with sitting on the ridiculously comfortable chair/laptop on my legs. I’m actually really happy with how this room turned out.

(Caption) Panorama shot! Some things that were not visible in the previous shot include storage closet on the left side, obviously the TV and a TV stand in the middle and Kumi’s cabinet on the left side.

(Caption) Closer look at the TV setup. I only wonder where will I put PlayStation 4 in case I want to purchase it again 🎮

(Caption) The washing machine had to be evicted to the balcony, which apparently is a fairly normal thing to do in Japan. I can imagine it will kind of suck to do laundry when it’s raining (which is almost every day nowadays) but so far, so good. I just hope the washing machine is waterproof. Kumi says it “might be”.

(Caption) And a look from the balcony. Yeah, I suppose the nights will be fairly quiet over here, I especially don’t suspect any noises ever coming from the right side of the photo.

(Caption) Another look into the street. It’s a seriously quiet area, cars are even forbidden from entering the street my apartment is at. Which is even more amazing considering I’m living quite close to the centre of Tokyo.

(Caption) A second floor! Nothing more to add, except that I dismantled the closet that was here right on the first day to make sure the large futon can fit in there nicely.

(Caption) A view from the bed, I suppose.

(Caption) Finally, two photos from “before it looked like a place where one could reasonably live”. This, for example, is Kumi trying to fit into a microwave oven box.

(Caption) And this demonstrates that the nice and tidy apartment can be surprisingly quickly transformed into a pile of 💩 and garbage. Really, living the first two weeks without a furniture was… not exactly easy. Looking back, I’m not sure how I was able to survive for three months without a furniture in Texas back in the day.