As an intern at Come on Up I am obligated to have a project that I work on besides the everyday tasks that happen in the office. As I became a resident at the Kita-Ikebukuro share house, I noticed that the house decoration was a little out-dated and felt like it didn’t bring out the true beauty of the Japanese-styled house.
Therefore as one of my personal projects I chose to improve the Kita-Ikebukuro share house interior and a plan to maintain the the house clean as in any other share house. I thought it would be nice to show my process and final results on the blog so that residents or those who are interested can get a look behind the scenes of managing a share house. The before pictures of the house can still be seen on the website now so if you are wondering what it looked like go check it out!
The first thing i wanted to take care of were the storage room and the toilet. There were many items left behind by previous tenants that did not take care of their furniture. My internship guide helped me through all of this, she taught me that in order to throw away larger items here in Japan you have to pay a certain price per item and call the city hall to order a truck that will come pick up the furniture or household items larger than 30 cm.
After cleaning up the storage room the toilet was next, I bought nice decoration in order to make sure anyone can sit on the toilet comfortably, after all its often where people sit for a long time. While I was working on the toilet we had the house deep cleaned, meaning the toilet, bathroom, living room and kitchen were all cleaned up! As it was summer and there are always a lot of bugs everywhere so I proposed to fumigate the house, it was the first time I have ever done this, it is supposed to kill all tiny bugs (getting rid of those pesky summer mosquito and tiny spiders that come inside). I did all of this so I could start working on a clean canvas
Currently my main focus is on the living room, as the house is Japanese styled I want to keep that atmosphere but make it cheerful. Therefore, together with my internship guide I went to a recycle shop! It is called the treasure factory and it indeed has a lot of treasures! I had never been to a recycle shop like this before in the Netherlands or in Japan so it was a fun experience to walk around and see what they have. We bought some furniture for the living room, which we will pick up next week. I am very excited to continue to the living room as it will bring the pieces i’m working on together as a whole!
If you are curious about my project and my progress, there will be updates on the house on this blog but also on our other SNS so be sure to take a look at those as well. I hope you look forward to my next blog about the process on the Kita-Ikebukuro project.
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Rochelle
