Insecure Load

Day 22 Tuesday 31^st August 2010

Furniture removal Sumo style

Today was a big day. The builders arrived on time and got right into it. Shortly after the rubbish recycle man showed up with his friend each driving an old kei truck. This will be interesting. A kei truck has a load weight rating of just 350Kgs.

His mate looks like a small sumo wrestler.

He’s cheerful and enthusiastic and we take an instant liking to the guy.

All the furniture is dragged out onto the road and smashed into small pieces and fitted onto these 2 tiny trucks.

By now its 11AM and 33 degrees and everybody is drenched with sweat.

I tell them to have a break and drink something before they fall over.

So they sit down and we have a conversation. These guys are real scratchers and their policy is to do as much business as they can. Always negotiable, they’re unusual kind of Japs. Our kind of people. By now they’ve twigged to the fact that this is a court seized house and assume we are property tycoons. You can see the curiosity and one says to Shizuka that’s he is very interested in how we got this place

By the time they’re finished, these trucks are well overloaded with smashed up furniture and mattress’s and a sofa hanging out of the back. They look like something you would see in Somalia or Bangladesh.

No sweat!

maximum capacity

I take a couple of photos which leads one of them to ask if this is necessary for the court.

Shizuka just tells him no. They’re to show the folks at home and for our blog.

He looks amazed as he contemplates international fame.

The builders have been watching the proceedings with great interest. The young guy’s eyes light up when he sees a surfboard appear from out of the house. He asks his boss to ask us if he can have it. “Sure” we say. I ask him if he’s ever surfed before. He replies no but he’s always wanted to try. The rubbish guys have decided to come back another day for a few things they just can’t fit onto their trucks. Off they go, slowly. The road between here and Osaka is a bit narrow and twisty and I hope they will be OK. At home a cop would throw the book at you if he saw it.

I borrow the builders long ladder to clean out the gutters. Luckily everything is in good shape up there with very little debris to clear. One more job crossed off the list.

Got there eventually

By afternoon the job is just about done. There is not quite enough cladding to cover the hole so they decided to fix a thin metal sheet over the repair. I go down to the village to get some drinks. Driving back up the hill I can’t believe what I am seeing. The metal sheet is white and looks OK but they have cut it into 3 strips to cover the repairs on either side of the window and below it. The bottom one looks good. The left side’s also good. The right side is twice the width of the left one. What the fuck are they thinking? I point out to them that the trims are not symmetrical. The boss replies that the repaired area is wider on the right. I tell him it look like crap and that I want it to look good. He’s not upset, more bemused that I would object on the grounds of appearance. They recut and remount the offending panel. He sheepishly admits that, yes, it looks better that way. Good guys and capable of some good work but they need to be supervised constantly to avoid cock ups like that. He tells me that Japanese people tend to worry more about the interior of the house and don’t really care about the outside appearance. Tell me something I don’t know.

At last the house is empty of crap…..Yahoo. One of the things we completely underestimated in this adventure was the sheer cost and hassle factor of getting rid of all the junk in this house.