Japanese flooring & wallpaper (with prices!)

hey guys we're here with samples today and pokey pokey pokey i think i want to start with flooring because we finally got it figured out yep yay last time we did a house update we said we were gonna go with this flooring because it was the most cost effective for what we wanted which was all of these all these blue squares are things that it can like it's good with which included pet stuff and whatnot but when you look at this pattern as a whole like in aggregate when you have a whole bunch of these together there are tons and tons of really like dark black spots and the contrast is so high that june and i felt like we couldn't relax in it i'm so glad that we were able to see the actual real size sample before we yeah so we decided against that and then also the whole this whole time i've been very concerned about the fact that this is laminate wood i don't know if june can focus i think i did very well good job you can see just this very top layer that's kind of white that is the laminate sticker that has this wood pattern on it everything else is just this i don't know what you call this wood is this particle board i don't know some sort of like combination of pressed woods yep but the top is just a print it's basically just a sticker and i've been very against the idea of using a laminate wood like this because that's what we have in this apartment and we've only been living here two years and yet we have torn off the laminate in so many spots we know exactly where these are i know oh my gosh they drive me crazy i know where like every single one is i see it every single time i walk past it i hate it so much it's scratchy too and like the fact that this is just a print means the wood underneath is a completely different color so it's super noticeable when you damage it most places in this floor we've got scratches there are gouges in some places i don't know it's like a desk chair is there are tons of grooves it just keeps showing up it's really really annoying and i don't want a floor that we're gonna destroy within like two years that's ridiculous for the price one of the hardest parts of this whole house building process for me as an american is just seeing the japanese prices that we have to pay for things here compared to what prices would be in america which is so much cheaper we ended up choosing this engineered hardwood it's twice as expensive as this laminate this engineered hardwood is about two hundred dollars per square meter yep it is not cheap at all but this is i think the floor that will have the best longevity for us you can see there's maybe about half a centimeter of actual maple wood yep on top and then it has all of the engineered like pressed wood underneath and this makes it easier to use um floor heating yeah this this is the one that works with the floor heating yeah even though that's uh yeah natural wood as opposed to like fully hardwood floor that it's harder for the heat to transfer through so it makes using like floor heating a little bit less efficient maple is a very very hard wood i didn't know about this i guess june did because apparently baseball bats are made of maple wood they're very hard yeah bowling alleys are made of maple wood i couldn't throw a bowl in it like if i can accidentally throw a bowling ball five feet into the air and it can fall down and land on a bowling alley and not just like shatter the floor i think we'll be okay with this the feeling is wonderful the color is so beautiful this is better for cats to walk on they're not going to slip as easily as this and they have a special coating that we can get here that they basically said it lasts forever i kept asking like i kept giving more and more wild examples of like do we have to replace the coding in 10 years in like 30 years in like 50 years and they said no so i guess technically the coding on this is supposed to last forever and what the coating does is it makes it difficult for the wood to stain it makes it more scratch resistant etc so like this is coffee soy sauce these are both examples of their coding different type of coding but both this is the coating we chose yeah but they both work really well so they left these on the board for 24 hours and then they were still able to fully clean it off if we do do something to damage the wood if we scratch it if we dent it if we stain it which i'm sure will happen eventually anyway um you know that's just how life is the cool thing about real wood is we can like sand it down or if it's a really big groove what she told us you can do is just like basically sand off little bits until we get sawdust and fill the hole with sawdust and glue and then if we need to because that would be like a new spot then just put a little bit of a new coating over that spot but this is something that we can maintain and actually continue to use even though it's crazy expensive compared to western countries and it's twice as expensive as this it's definitely going to last way longer at least i decide not to go with the uh bathroom option i was gonna go which saves a lot of money for this so we try to balance things out too another budget so the other option for flooring is vinyl these are examples of vinyl flooring which is the type of flooring we had in our last apartment and compared to where we live now that floor was not easy to damage so it lasted a surprisingly long time the only issue i had with our last floor was when it was really humid the floor got kind of like wet and sticky just like you think about with like if you think about the word vinyl flooring at least for me it reminds me of that really old where when you walk on it it makes that like sticky tacky noise you guys know what i'm talking about like our last department had a little bit of that feeling but you don't have to get vinyl flooring with that like glossy coat there's vinyl flooring that's really matte now these are other examples of like the vinyl flooring patterns and you can see with the wood it looks super realistic this is the nice final flooring so this is 44 per square meter compared to the 200 for our wood what we're doing with our house is the engineered hardwood for most of the first floor but then for bathrooms for like the storage room and for the extra rooms we're going to be doing vinyl flooring because it's very long lasting and it's way cheaper yeah very reasonable price yeah and there are some really really nice patterns the biggest thing with vinyl flooring is making sure you see images of a lot of the pieces stuck together so you can see what it's going to look like if the pattern repeats how the boards fit together if it looks realistic so that's kind of where we're at right now with trying to decide which vinyl flooring we want to go with and the benefit of vinyl flooring over real tile for bathrooms for example aside from being so much cheaper is that they don't get cold it's like rubber underneath or whatever and they don't just have this for our first floor bathroom we decided to go this floor which is a cushion floor so you can see how thick it is it feels very comfy when you walk on it which is super comfy to walk on it never gets cold and we have a similar thing where we live right now actually i'm pretty sure our bathroom vinyl cushion floors here are from the same company so if you can see this floor in in here this does not look bad at all right the pattern and it's like nice and comfy to walk on our bathrooms in this apartment don't have heating or cooling at all and the floor never feels that cold most of the time that we've lived here in the past two years both rooms have been completely comfortable temperature wise some people mentioned why are we concerned about how cold tile is if we have floor heating because we're not going to use floor heating all year we probably wouldn't use them in the bathrooms anyway just because i don't think we need it we won't have yeah in the bathroom so second floor we're going with carpet yes second the hallway and bedroom yes second and the walk-in closet will be carpet yeah again the floor is going to be really comfy and warm to walk on and um our housing company puts a like a another cushion layer below every flooring on the second floor just as like a sound dampener it makes carpet really cushy to walk on it's super comfortable so that's our flooring situation i feel like almost everything that's made now is not made to last and so it has taken us an extremely long time to pick things out for our house compared to what the normal customer does because um our housing company gives us a catalog that normal people probably just choose everything from so like this is the interior catalog for the housing company that we are going with and we could choose products through them which we would get they're not made by our housing company these are the same companies that make all of the stuff that we have samples from here but if it's in this catalog it means our housing maker gets a really big discount so we could get these a lot cheaper if we went through here but they don't have the ones we wanted like the maple engineered hardwood june decided to go with this this bathroom not this wall but yeah with custom walls just because it's so much cheaper so much another option for interior both as floor and as wall is of course real tile we have a couple samples here um i don't know if we're going with any of these but our gen con floor will be real tile obviously like outside the porch area will be real tile and then there's kind of a cool new tile that this company has that we're going to be putting in some of the bathrooms this series all of these tile are kind of unique because they absorb moisture and then like slowly release it to kind of average out the humidity of the room to about 50 humidity and it also absorbs smells perfect for toilet and bathroom because on our second floor we don't have a door between the bathroom area and the walk-in closet just to prevent some of the humidity from the shower and some of the smells from the toilet from making it in there we're going to use a little bit of this tile which is quite expensive again it's a lot of them are like 130 per square meter but we do have like a friend who is married to an architect who can get a discount that we can order through so we won't have to pay full price for this thank you so much thank you i think this is the tile that i'm going to be using except the more whitish color this is the medium gray here i mean and the amount we're getting is not like yeah it's not a big area a little accent yeah how does the technology work i don't know there's a lot of mysteries to me in japan because if i wanted to figure out the technical information i have to research it in japanese and then translate everything which takes a lot of time so i don't bother doing that for everything so i feel like japan still holds a lot of mysteries for me last thing we have samples on is wallpaper yep one of you guys had a really excellent question for us when we did our last housing video which was to make sure if the drywall that our company could leave behind for us is unfinished or if it's ready for paint and i checked and it is completely unfinished none of the mudding has been done so we would have to do that for the entire house before we could even paint and we are not going to do that so we're just going to do wallpaper just like everyone else in japan rather than us having to do mudding which i don't even know that i would be able to do well apparently mudding it well is kind of a difficult job and if you hire a professional i think it'll actually adds up yeah and we wouldn't be able to do anything up with that until the house is already done and i think we really just want to be able to move in and wallpaper is like 10 bucks per square meter it's not that expensive it's pretty cheap here and that's with this specialty wallpaper if we just went with regular wallpaper through our housing catalog that we showed you it's even cheaper than that they have lots of different patterns yeah you can you can make it look western too i don't think we're using any of these dark colors anymore this one's kind of cool it's like a little bit shiny gold yep it is it looks kind of japanese there are a lot of really awesome wallpapers here that are still only just ten dollars per square meter i don't know how much wallpaper is in america for all i know it's even cheaper there and people are going to be shocked at the price here for us like compared to everything else with their house 10 per square meter is so cheap lots of beautiful blues this is glow in the dark wallpaper oh this one which i tweeted about i don't think we've shown it in a video yet close up i can see yep yeah from far away it just looks like standard white wallpaper yep but here let's see if i can charge this up easily we have this light is it all the way up yes darkness darkness beautiful here back up so they can see the whole thing can they yeah so imagine if we put this on our i think we still want to put it in our fukinuke ceiling right yeah on the ceiling in like the main living space how cool will that be it's gonna be the coolest thing ever and this one's still just ten dollars per square meter it's not more expensive so maybe we don't have great floor halloween flooring but we have great wallpaper maybe we're going to have great flooring because we're doing the engineered hardware sorry what i mean is like the price and whatnot i also need to look up the number of the pattern to make sure it's jis approved otherwise we can't use it so we just found out about this but we can only use products in our house that are japan industrial standard certified because our company the housing company we chose is a very very high standard company for japan like one of the highest and because we're building a house through them since everything will be jis certified we'll get some sort of like tax incentive rebate yeah i think so yeah from the government because it like reaches this level of like environmental yeah standards or whatever but because of that we don't get to use just any product we're actually kind of having problems with like the ikea kitchen that we wanted to pick out because i really hope it'll work i want to save yeah money there because they're having a really hard time trying to figure out if like the ikea in japan is pronounced ikea apparently that's more similar to the original pronunciation so that's why i call it ikea now but um they're having a really hard time figuring out if their kitchen products are like jis certified and unless they are we can't use them i guess i don't know they're working on it we'll make another video about it this is our pile of things that we have decided on which is so important to us these look holy to me because it took us so long to get here and honestly the only reason we made it to this point is because again we got some really good comments about using eka kitchen products um someone who worked for ikea before or had like a lot of experience with it recommended we use actual ikea kitchen products over their wardrobe shelves because they're like so much more sturdy or whatever so we went back to ikea to look through that and then we didn't know if we could use it because june has very specific appliances that he wants to use in the kitchen and you can only use them if you have like a custom kitchen build my height and yeah the hood i don't want to hit my head so we didn't know if it would work but i designed an ikea kitchen based around like us being able to independently get those appliances and put them in that kitchen and then we went and talked to the ikea kitchen planning service and they told us they can't do like all the customization that we need but they work with this renovation company that might be able to so we made an appointment with this renovation company and we're working now with a woman who used to work in this renovation company and also used to work in the ikea kitchen department and now she runs her own business but technically we're still just paying the renovation company i don't know how she's working with them since she doesn't work for them anymore but that's what's going on and she's very very experienced and very helpful her own kitchen is an ikea kitchen and she customized the cabinet fronts which i didn't know if we could do here in japan because unlike america and europe which has all of these companies that make custom cabinet friends for ikea kitchens japan does not have that but the person we're working with she knows about this company that we didn't know about which can do custom things and we're so excited to find this company i cannot express to you because this solves so many problems that jean and i were worried about i looked up so many different companies that can do custom things and this never showed up in the search results i don't know why and even the person we're working with was like yeah i don't you can't find it by googling why this would have saved us so much time if we had found them sooner but again some of their products are not jis certified so we don't know if we can use everything from them our housing company is checking right now it's a whole big mess you guys this whole house process this house building process so much that goes into it thank you so much for your advice you ever heard oh yeah all of you guys who gave us advice for those of you who are we i don't know that we would have made it to this like weird place that we ended up in if we hadn't like reinvestigated the ikea situation because of but if that would work then thanks to you guys we will be able to save literally thousands of dollars so we went to this company and i'll put some like low quality camera photos in here so you can see but like i mentioned they have all of these different melamine fronts that they can put on basically any sort of furniture board or countertop and so we picked out the ones that we liked and then we took these samples to the wallpaper slash flooring store and then just like held it up to every single option they had and then found some unexpected nice combinations like this i never would have picked out this floor but the sample that i picked out from this company worked so well with this floor that we ended up going in a completely different direction than we had originally intended for the first floor bathroom so it's gonna have this floor and then two walls that are white the wall behind this will be this like lovely blue and all of these colors go together and then we're gonna have one wall of those uh like moisture absorbing tiles and it's just gonna be wonderful yeah like it just fell into place as soon as we tour this company yeah as soon as we found this company things just started falling into place and we finally made decisions and we are so much less stressed out than we have been these past few months although we're still waiting for positive feedback about the kitchen stuff and like we haven't had these specific colors that we picked out approved yet have we no okay still waiting for that as well second floor bathroom area this is like a chevron pattern we're doing this for the bathroom floor i'm gonna have one little accent wall behind the toilet on the second floor with this pretty pattern the rest is just gonna be this white color and i'm again i'm going to have some of that fancy moisture absorbing tile and then that's done this is the floor that you're going with in the storage room i think so this is again a chevron pattern more reasonable sturdy to be put on it anyway i don't know what i want to do with this yet but isn't this pattern beautiful i want to put this somewhere okay it's gorgeous anyway this is where we have ended up we are in much higher spirits than probably the last time you guys saw us we're very excited to finally be making decisions and we should be able to show more of our actual place in the future as well i'm finally at the point where i'm not just worried about our house i'm actually excited now should we toast this moment with the authentic snacks now toast this moment with our sponsor thank you so much bulk soup for sponsoring this video and helping us build our house and pay for our unnecessarily expensive engineered hardwood floor for part of the first floor and for them the cats the lovely cat house is a japanese snack box subscription service they mail a completely different snack box every single month this one has a super cute little like sakura patterned box because it's a seasonal oh everything's pink everything is sakura of course the everything is sakura yes what was it last month strawberry which is super exciting look how adorable all of these little pink sakura snacks are again we have a special tea pairing for each box gourmet flavored chips yep there's also season of uma too tastes delicious and this is super adorable [Music] i've never seen this with like strawberry flavored chocolate yep i like this there that sounds really good okay i'm gonna eat these now okay the map is a cute sakura pink this time if you haven't been around for our other videos with boku in it they have a cute little map that shows you where their snacks are from so you can get them all over japan where's this from this looks amazing which one it's really good the texture of this is really satisfying oh my god isn't it good it's so good sometimes they like put too much sakura flavor but this is pretty like a delicate and nice and goes with tea right don't you think yeah yeah every single time we get a box i don't know why i'm still impressed with like the quality of the snacks flavor is amazing let me find them oh yeah it has tea of course it goes well too sakura mochi hey it's vegetarian oh yeah oh look at that this one is that's this okay all right i'm gonna crush it was really soft oh wow this flavor the cream the cream almost tastes like the flavor of the icing for strawberry pop tarts yeah pop that right strawberry pop there like i feel like i'm have had a summer pool but it's not that strong isn't it no and puffy is very very soft and together with the bread it really goes well we should try to slowly enjoy it not everything i don't eat everything in one day june does because they're so freaking good we'll split it half and half and then june will just down all of his and then he'll get hungry later because he doesn't have any more and then he'll come and bring me one from my stash and he's like rachel can i hold this and i'm like sure for the ones that you say you know and then everything is gone in a week and i didn't eat anything else from it you exaggerate it by 1.2 percent just laying by a slice that's really what happens every single time just put those everything put those back in a box before i steal them please this box ships straight from japan and if you would like to try your own authentic japanese snack box you can get 10 off and save up to 47 using our link and code in the description box thank you guys so much for watching thank you excited now about building our house we're finally we're finally on the up we should have some like much more exciting videos coming up and um can't wait to show you our actual land and we have so much to say we've met a bunch of our neighbors and they're so nice and amazing things have been really good for us recently yep thank you guys so much for being so supportive with us uh especially with how stressed out we've been like the past few months and making 500 million sponsored videos so we can afford things like 200 per square meter engineered maple hardwood floor that's very specific but thank you so much and also crazy catwalk everywhere yes crazy catwalks everywhere glow-in-the-dark wallpaper for our ceiling anyway thank you guys we'll see you again soon bye rachel's working on something i think i can steal some of these [Music] you

Channel: Rachel & Jun's Adventures!

Views: 338,345

Keywords: japan, japanese, rachel, jun, rachel and jun, rachel & jun, vlog, blog, daily, life

Id: rr9yBSRHRE8

Length: 27min 26sec (1646 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021