Every home should have one

Day 16 Wednesday 25th August 2010

Sadly our balcony is a bit rotten.

In this country, houses and apartments normally come with a balcony. It’s always about half a metre wide so quite useless for anything except hanging out your laundry. I think its more of a status symbol than anything else There is another use however.

Useless and rotten

The average balcony provides a handy space for parking crap you don't want/use anymore.

Fridge broke down? no problem. put it on the balcony. TV sucks? Just shove it on the balcony. Got a rusty old bicycle you don't use anymore..... Apartment buildings here are basically vertical dumps for junked

electronics and machinery.

Now I could try this as a way to deal with some of the junk the last owner left here.

Nobody would blink an eye to see all the crap put there.

But I fear that putting all the rubbish on our balcony will cause it to fall of the side of the house...

We plan on spending the winter in NZ where it will be summer. We won't come back here until its summer again so we really need to do something about this. I suspect water is leaking down the wall and that the studs are going to be rotten as well. What I want to do is take the whole thing off and make the wall water tight as well as repairing any damage to the framing in the wall.  Shizuka called a builder in Osaka and he came here this afternoon and had a look. He did some measuring and quoted us Y60,000. He can start on Monday and it will be done in a day. Its a bit more than it would cost in NZ but its not unreasonable. As I simply don't have the equipment or the contacts to get the materials here I think we will get one more quote from another builder and then go with the best one.