Akiya Renovation: Sorting Items Left Behind

We’re only in the very beginning stages of renovating 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. As you can see from the photos below, many rooms are in nice condition, just needing cleaning and minor updates. Note that the kitchen needs fully remodeled.

However, today we’re looking at three rooms of the house that were filled floor to ceiling with the previous owner’s items. This is one of the reasons the house was so affordable; we are responsible for cleaning and disposing of all these items properly, which can be time-consuming, and sometimes costly. To keep costs low, Evan and I are willing to do the dirty work ourselves, as you’ll see in the video! I’ve already mentioned many times, we plan to restore and use as many of these belongings as we can. We’ve found lots of useful items, including many perfectly usable hand tools, power tools, lumber, beautiful antique furniture, housewares, cookware, vintage Showa era decorations, lots of “old tech” cassette tape players and CRT televisions, and even pickling equipment!

The three rooms were a later addition, and they weren’t built to the same quality standard as the rest of the house. To be clear: these are the only rooms that have damage to the traditional Japanese style walls, resulting in a hole to the outside, as well as wood floor rot, which fortunately, was built on top of perfectly good cement floor. The rooms seem to have been used as a workshop, storage, and apparently, a pickling space.

We began by emptying the rooms into the garage, where we cleaned and sorted. The items we plan to reuse and restore will be safe here while we renovate. I’m quite pleased that it only took us seven work days to clean the garage, and five work days to clean these rooms. Of course, this is only “phase one” of cleaning, so we still have lots and lots of work ahead of us! But one thing is certain: we won’t ever need to buy any more dishes.