Prologue

I'm Rod.

I'm a freelance translator.

I live in a rented house in Matsuyama, Ehime, Japan with my wife and son.

We want to move out of our rented house and into a house that we have designed and built for us .

We want our house to be earthquake-proof, comfortable to live in, non-polluting, and self-sufficient in terms of energy.

This is actually quite a big challenge, and it has taken a lot of time and energy to research.

I want to share what we have learned, so that anybody else who wants a similar house can benefit from our experience.

I will try to post in simple sentences that can be translated easily into Japanese by Google