Akiya Renovation: First Look and First Steps

We’re in the process of buying this house! It’s a great little house with a big garage and lots of potential! It was built 70 years ago (1953) and has been vacant for 10 years. The house is situated in a great location for attracting tourists as they ride their bicycles along the Shimanami Kaido, and it’s a short distance away from other akiya abandoned houses we’re very interested in renovating, along with many options for farmland and areas for honeybees.

Japan has an estimated 8.5 million akiya (abandoned homes), and we’re in the process of buying this one, prior to receiving our residency status. The purchase price is ¥1 Million ($7500 USD). We have our work cut out for us! The house is in a great location for attracting tourists as they ride their bicycles along the Shimanami Kaido, so we currently intend to renovate it into a guesthouse rental. We will renovate a second nearby akiya for our own homestead, and restore nearby farmland that’s been sitting unused for over a decade. We’re in the process of applying for a Startup Visa, which will then allow us to apply for Business Manager Visa, and essentially sponsor our own residency in Japan.

Our YouTube video, giving you a first look inside this ¥1 Million ($7500 USD) house ⌄

We decided the first step would be to clean the garage, which would give us a nice covered area to work, while we renovate the house. We’ll be bringing some big items into the garage (notably, the kitchen cupboards, and some large furniture pieces) because I don’t want those sitting in the driveway, creating an eye sore for the neighbors. And, we’ll also be using the garage as our workshop to build beehives. So this was a natural first step.

It took us 7 work days to clean the garage and sort the items into: keep, repair, donate, recycle, and garbage (which was then further sorted into special bags labeled burnable and non-burnable for municipal trash pickup). There’s still a lot more work to do, but our dream is to turn this abandoned garage into a roadside farm stand, and renovate the house into a guesthouse rental, while we build our own homestead just up the road!

And yes, I’ll say again, we started the purchase process prior to receiving residency. Buying a house in Japan is one of the few things we can actually do as tourists. We weighed the low cost of the house against the huge benefit of having extra months to start working on renovations, and we decided it was clearly worth the calculated risk to move forward. We hope to rebuild our whole life and homestead here on Omishima, so the sooner we start, the better.

I’m documenting literally everything, with photography, as well as our rough attempts at learning to incorporate video. Please stick with me through this learning process! In the meantime, if you’re curious about looking behind-the-scenes, I’m sharing pretty much daily updates on our Benton Homestead “stories” on social media.