More House Pics

Here's more of the roof. There's fish, a couple of pheonix's and some other animals. Bret and I have always admired Japanese architecture and talked about how amazing it would be to actually live in a house like this. Literally every time we'd go for a jog or walk he'd stop at a neat house and be like, "wow! why can't we live in a place like this!?!" It's pretty incredible that after months and months of talking about it, we get to do it!
This is a mini shrine that is built into a compartment of the living room. It's pretty high up, over the mantle. It's meant to house spirits. They can enter and linger there, so it's like, a polite buddihst and/or shinto thing to have in your house for spirits. Bret will probably correct me on some of this information

These are a few of the interesting items remaining in the house currently. They may be removed before we move in, but we put them down on the "If you don't want it, keep it in the house for us, please" list. Young Japanese people laugh at us for liking Japanese antiques (we bought an old antique samurai helmet replica and a carved wooden bear at a shop a few months back) and they say that "only Japanese grandfathers have things like this in their house" but we like them :)

Sweet old globe. Everything on it is so antiquated. It was literally made before they knew the true shape of continents and countries. It's really interesting.


An old Japanese doll is to the left. The real estate guy showing us around said it was very old and traditional, like something you'd see in a Japanese culture museum. To the right is an odd stuffed bird in a case. I couldn't tell if it was real or fake. Or a real bird that had extra decorations and feathers tacked onto it. Experimental taxidermy, anyone?

This is a shot of the front yard. The rocks are really smooth. I don't know what kind they are, but they feel like silt that was pressurized over the years. They are comfy to sit on.

all around us are farms. the houses in the neighborhood are all spaced pretty far apart, to accommodate for the farmland.