We decided to plaster the walls with a Japanese product called Shikkui plaster. For days and nights in a row, Dutchie managed to do this job all by himself. Shikkui Plaster is a traditional and innovative Japanese lime plaster made of slaked lime of high calcium purity. It contains materials like seaweed extracts, natural plant fibre and other natural aggregates such as eggshell powder. It has been widely used throughout Japan for both internal and external walls of houses, temples and castles, as well as for ceilings and decorative purposes for over one thousand years.  

It truly started to look like an oiled machine. Once Dutchie would finish plastering a part of the downstairs floor, team ‘Floor’ followed him to put the wooden finished floor down. Since it is hard to find a proper wooden floor in Japan we decided upon buying a blank floor which we oiled ourselves. At the start of November Bart, Merijns brother in law came over as crowd renovator. By offering his skills for 2 weeks he has definitely added an important share to the lodge, for which we are very grateful! And of course also to Merijns sister, who stayed at home with their two little girls.

The area in the house that was completed at first is the kitchen. Knowing Dutchie, this is not surprising, although the main reason for this was so that Merel could start her preparations for the season right after she arrived half October. One of the most important pieces of equipment in the kitchen is the commercial steam oven. Especially considering it is 200 kilo and it took 5 people and two wooden beams to lift it inside.

Once the floors and walls were finished the fire department came in to check our lodge. This check is part of the pension license process. Every accommodation in Japan needs to be in possession of this license in order to be officially recognized. During their visit, they check whether or not you used fireproof material, e.g. paint, carpets, curtains, plaster, etc.  Of course, a properly working fire alarm, fire extinguishers and emergency exit signs also needed to be checked off the list. And, since our system was very much outdated, much had to be replaced. Luckily after inspection, only a few minor things needed to be changed and after this, we managed to pass the fire inspection! Next up: health and safety inspection.

The coming blog we will spend on the finishing touches of the downstairs floor, the upgrades of the ensuites and the guest rooms. Below a few pics of our other crowd renovators working hard and enjoying the fireplace in the lounge after. Thank you guys!

Naena Waterfall

During the renovations we still had plenty of time to enjoy the surroundings we took a hike up towards Naena waterfall. Where most people just do the easy 10-minute walk to get to the stunning waterfall, of course, we had to explore further up. This led us to a spot where we skied during winter, after a skin up Kurohime Kogen. The 55m waterfall is a great piece of nature and it is worth going there several times a year since it looks surprisingly different during every season.

Madarao Kogen Hotel

Madarao Kogen Hotel is the biggest hotel in Madarao and situated right at the slopes. It has a great onsen with an indoor and an outdoor bath which is also open for the public. On top of that, it was one of the few restaurants that would sometimes be open during weekends in Madarao during the summer (off)season. You can choose to either eat from a buffet or order a traditional Japanese menu. Of course, we went for the traditional Japanse menu. This was also the farewell dinner of Annie’s parents, our crowd renovators that came over in September. 

The post #5 Crowd renovators appeared first on Japan Snowsports.

Since the entire floors got stripped (see #2 Demolition), the entire floor surface of the ground floor had to be redone, starting with floor joys. A fluffy layer of glass wool in between the joys will keep our feet nice and warm coming winter.

Before we covered the insolation and floor joys with floorboards we took this opportunity to move all water pipes under the floor. No more pipes on the ceiling!!

Let’s move to the walls. To prevent the moist coming back in and after seeking advice from some local experts, we decided on a solid construction for all exterior walls, existing off:

• Foamboard
• Air layer
• A wooden frame
• A vapour barrier behind the wooden frame
• Glass wool within this wooden frame
• Fireproof gip board (which declares the beautiful pink colour:))

In total, this construction added 10 CM on the inside of the exterior walls!

Although we demolished a few walls, we have also built up a new one. We created a dividing wall between the new laundry room (that gives access to the boiler room) and the common area.

With all this amazing hard work being done, the walls were ready for some plastering! More about this in a later blog….

Downhill mountain biking

A summer activity you see in many ski resorts around the world is downhill mountain biking. Since the lift infrastructure is there it’s an awesome way to create some business in summer as well. In Japan, ski resorts slowly but surely start to realize this. Our friend Sam (www.gomyoko.com) is developing the region Madarao and Myoko region as a whole year around the tourist area. One of the things he is trying to draw more attention to is downhill mountain biking. The good thing about Madarao is that there already is a track and a bike rental! We definitely see a lot of potential for an awesome summer activity! Of course, we had to try it out ourselves first, so we hopped on the chair lift and zipped down the trail. A nice cooling down afterwards in lake Nojiri made it a perfect day off!

The Lamp

Having lived at Nojiriko last winter, guesthouse and restaurant The Lamp was only 500m away from us. A great place run by a nice crew of young people where you can just have a coffee and do some work, have one of their amazing burgers for lunch or go for dinner at night. During summer, being surrounded by the mountains and situated right at the lake, The Lamp appears to be a famous getaway to cool down from the heat, humidity and busy life in the cities. Next to sleeping and eating, they organize a yearly SUP festival and many other activities throughout the year. Join one of their SUP or Kayak tours during summer, or a snowshoe tour during winter. Another must-do on one of your nights during your stay in the mountains around Myoko and Madarao is to have their amazing Nabe (Japanese hotpot, make sure you reserve in advance). Even better, it includes a shuttle service from and to your accommodation which suits perfectly with their all you can drink add- -on;)

While we’re counting down the days until the first snow, there is still some work to do! In the coming weeks we will post more frequently, because the lodge is changing rapidly at the moment. Thanks for showing your interest in our project. We are getting more excited every day and hope to welcome you soon in the Japan Snowsports Lodge! The next blog, Merel will show you around in our kitchen!

The post Blog #4: floors and walls appeared first on Japan Snowsports.

On a side note and in case you are wondering: the lodge did survive the typhoon that hit Japan last week. Since Madarao is situated on 900 m elevation we didn’t get affected substantially, apart from hard wind gusts and rain. However, the valley did suffer from floodings and landslides. We would like to express our deep respect to all the rescue workers and volunteers who are still cleaning up the mess Hagibis left behind. 

Now, back to the Lodge….

We faced the major surprises and made a masterplan. This is what it looks like:

The ground floor, that has a beautiful view, is our breakfast and dining room. Merijn is currently working on a design for a long table made of timber, as we would love to seat our guests along our chef’s table together!

On one side you’ ll find the kitchen, and on the other end, a wood stove and a cosy ensuite lounge to relax after riding and dining. Here you can have beers, chats and watch movies, too.

Being a chef himself, Dutchie could not run a lodge without serving food. Because he will be out on the slopes he will not be able to run the kitchen himself. Therefore, Merel, our friend from the Netherlands will help us out in the lodge as well as in the kitchen. Merel has learned cooking on the job in various well-known restaurants in Amsterdam. Next to that, she runs her own catering company. One of her specialities is baking bread. With her experience baking organic, slow-rise sourdough bread. We will serve homemade bread with breakfast on a daily base. 

Dinners will not be served daily but on a regular base and per request The restaurant will also be open for guests from outside the lodge (e-mail: lodge@jpsnowsports.com for reservations!). Similar to breakfast, dining will be done altogether around a long table that fits 20 guests. No need to worry about what to choose from the menu, because a chef’s menu will be served. Imagine a 6-course meal, with cross-cultural food, local wines and sake and good company. What else can you wish for after a long day on the slopes…..

Sorry….I got carried away daydreaming about the finish line. I can just totally see myself sitting there, zipping my wine next to the fireplace….

Time to wake up! Although it’s good to keep an eye on the dot on the horizon, we are not there yet! 

Dutchie has been renovating houses before and of course, there is me (read: clumsy and slightly uncoordinated) to help out wherever I can. However, this wasn’t a project he could take on by himself. Therefore, a big task during this period was to find people that could help us and collect quotes from them. 

Readers who have experience in renovating most probably know that the first stage of building up is to prepare everything. A very important, but one of the least satisfying jobs since everything you do will not be visible when it’s all finished. After taking out the entire floor we discovered the old piping in the concrete hovering in big holes and many random holes that we didn’t know the purpose of. Nice and breezy and moist under your feet in winter. After a few hours of grinding and many disks later to remove all the old steel piping, it was time to get the concrete mill turning for a few days to fill all holes and level the floor.

We removed all the cladding on the walls and removed a few walls entirely. Armed with a specula and many bags of filler, we smoothed everything out… ready for the next layer! Working on the walls we discovered a few concrete walls were wet due to being underground with lots of water pressing from the outside. After a few failed attempts, we eventually got the right product to waterproof the concrete. Oh yeah, did I mentioned the 4 days on a ladder to remove the foam that was sprayed on the ceiling on the entire ground floor?

When you looked up in the kitchen you travel back in time. Six layers of paint peeling off in different degrees. Two days of choking on dust brought it back to bare concrete again.

Fuji Rock Festival

Whoever finds him or herself in Japan at the end of July should definitely consider going to the 3 days international Fuji Rock Festival. Fuji Rock was held for the first time in 1997. Naeba Ski resort is hosting it since ‘99. On the lineup, this year you find names like The Chemical Brothers, the Lumineers and many other international as well as Japanese artists. Every year, they organize a free night on the night before the actual festival starts. This is how we got to taste a bit of the great atmosphere.

A typical festival snack you see a lot on Japanese festivals is Fish on a Stick (see picture above). As a matter of fact: we happen to know the guy who you see working behind this stand. Our friend and former boss Patrick (Snowcountry Instructors) helps out his brother in law and owner of the Takahan Ryokan every year, selling thousands of fishes a day! Takahan is the oldest Ryokan in town and beautifully located. Definitely worth staying at if you are visiting lively Yuzawa.

In our coming episode, we will write about: floors and walls! Stay tuned and, as always, leave a comment if you like.

The post #3 Preparation appeared first on Japan Snowsports.

It appeared the previous owners did a very good job of making things look nice…from the outside. The better we looked, the more we discovered neglected maintenance. Instead of solving problems and attacking the cause of it, they’ve been hiding problems by covering it up. A few examples:

To cover up the moist problems of some of the walls in the downstairs toilet they screwed thin plywood against it with wallpaper on top. The plywood got fully saturated with moist and the wallpaper started to peel off. To solve this, they patched the wall with plastic sheeting. Nothing to see!

Instead of replacing the carpet on the downstairs floor, they just put another carpet on top…and another one…and another one…

When we first viewed the lodge, the owner told us they hadn’t been running the lodge for 3, maybe 4 years. When we started talking to the neighbours, they carefully mentioned it was more likely to be 10 …..Surprise!! During those years they took a smaller boiler that catered just for the couple that still lived there. Of course, they just left the old boiler in the boiler room. Way too much hassle to get that thing out!

Another fun little fact the neighbours told us is, they barely saw a window open. Which makes us suspect that to save energy, ventilation as well as heating was probably only done in their own residential area. One of the causes, we think, that the outside walls on the downstairs floor suffered from moist problems, e.g. condensation on concrete walls and exposed water pipes, and groundwater pushing through the outside walls. Apparently, this is a common problem in buildings built in this area from around the same period. 

During this period (1970’s/’80s) the economy of Japan was booming. Ski resorts were built all over Japan and the ski industry skyrocketed in popularity and so did ski accommodation. A remarkable fact, and a result from that period: 

Japan comes second in the world when counting ski resorts with more than 4 lifts.

This figure originates from the International Report on Snow & Mountain Tourism, 2019.

It was obvious that, like many other lodge owners in this region, the previous owners of April Wine were hit by the significant economic downturn that hit Japan during the early ’90s. During this period, real estate was affected hard and many ski resorts had difficulties maintaining their huge facilities. Lodge owners simply didn’t have enough business to keep their facilities running neither did they have the funds to maintain the building. As a result, many of them started gambling, drinking and smoking away their sorrows (the poor guy that owned our lodge was suffering from stage 4 lung cancer). All-in-all, quite a sad story and we see it as our duty to bring back the spirit into their lifework. We basically had to STOP WHINING and start demolishing!

Slowly but surely our plan of attack for the first winter became clear:

• Fully rip out and renovate the downstairs floor with dining room, lounge, playroom and kitchen.
• Update the guest rooms on the first floor and have 7 rooms operating.
• Use the four rooms on the top floor for staff residency.

Below floor plans show how the lodge will become after our renovations this year.

The most radical changes will take place on the downstairs floor. A few major tasks:

• Ripping out all the carpets, floorboards and floor joys.
• Replace all water piping and move them under the new floor instead of over the ceiling.
• Reinsulate all outside walls.
• Removing a few walls to open up the entire space and create an open playroom. 
• Install a new heating system. 
• Add a boiler for sufficient hot water system. 

The video below shows the situation of the ground floor after most of the demolition was done.

We hope you will still book with us after having watched this;). We promise it will become nicer then it was!!

Akakura Kanko Resort

This week, our activity, as well as our food-related topic, take place at the same location: Akakura Kanko Resort. A hotel, beautifully situated on the middle of the main slope of Akakura Kanko Ski Resort. It has a terrace with amazing views, an in house bakery, good food and one of the most beautiful onsens in the area. Although the onsen is only accessible for guests, they often have a good package deal that combines lunch and an onsen visit. A good suggestion for a lazy afternoon, after a morning of riding powder.

Nano Yoga

Our good friend Nanaco, who provides Yoga lessons for skiers and snowboarders in winter, keeps running her classes in summer too. She always manages to select great locations with awesome mountain views.

The terrace of Kanko Hotel is one of them. Mostly on Sunday mornings, you will be able to enjoy her class here, as well as the great views from the Kanko terrace. For us, this was a great way to recover our bodies during the heavy demolition job.

Myoko Wine Festival

Another activity to take our mind off the renovations was the Myoko Wine Festival, where you can taste local and international wines. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Japanese festival if there were food stalls included as well.

Next to a relaxing purpose, we were there to decide on which wines to serve in the lodge. Curious about the ones we picked? Come and join dinner at our lodge and you will find out!

Thanks for making it till the end! Leave your comments or questions below! In the next blog post we will write about one of the least satisfying but oh so important preparation jobs: levelling floors and prepping walls.

The post #2 Demolition appeared first on Japan Snowsports.

Welcome to our blog and thanks for taking the time to read our first post! The first post of a series where we take you through our adventure of purchasing a ski lodge and starting a company in Japan. For the ones who haven’t met us somewhere in the snow yet: who are we?

Nice to meet you! We are Annemiek (Annie) and Merijn (Dutchie), a couple from The Netherlands. Regardless of the flat character of our home country, together we have 19 years of experience teaching skiing and snowboarding.

While following the snow, Annie works remotely as a ‘digital snowmad’, developing e-learning courses for companies all over the world. Dutchie has been teaching in lots of different outdoor sports since 2000 and passionate about teaching. He is always searching for new ways to make your turns feel better. His off snow career is located in the kitchen working as a chef for several restaurants in Amsterdam. Read more at the ‘About us’ page.

After having ‘lived the live’ in the ski industry all around the world, we had reached that age that you feel you have to decide what to do with your grown-up life. Since the snow is our happy place, it was clear that we wanted to stay in the industry. To be able to survive in the ski industry for longer than 1 gap year you have a few options:

1. You are good enough to become a trainer/examiner for the ski association.
2. You have to start your own business.

It was obvious for us we had to go for the second option. Another clear fact was that Japan was part of the long term plan. Japan Snowsports was born!

Part of the dream was to have our own place in Japan. Especially, since purchasing real estate in Japan was a better shot for us than buying a house in Amsterdam (yes, it’s ridiculously affordable but don’t spread the word please). The place would be a place to live in for ourselves, big enough to host friends and family visiting, and maybe some of our own customers. Wait a minute, what went wrong there? We fell in love with a lodge…

Sooner than expected an opportunity came up. It wasn’t just a house though but a lodge, with 11 rooms, in Madarao ski resort. We didn’t particularly focus on Madarao however when we started looking into the location we realized it is ideally located, centred in between the resorts where we like to take our customers. On top of that, the walking distance to the slopes of Madarao ski resort was a big plus. We decided to do an offer. Meanwhile, we set up a crowdfunding initiative amongst close friends and family. This went better as expected (for which we are incredibly thankful!!!) and before we realised we gathered enough to be able to buy the lodge! After having seen it in real life, the decision was easy. LET’S DO IT.

On the 20^th of June 2019, the previous owner handed us the key and we could enter our new home in Japan. The adventure began! Although, and most probably because we are coming to Japan for several years now, we knew this journey was going to become a challenging one for sure. Starting up a company and renovating a lodge in a country where you don’t speak the language, and where running from desk to desk to authorize some paperwork still provides many people full-time jobs. This is the journey we would like to take you on during these blog posts. Next to writing about the progress of the renovations, we will add in other information, like outdoor activities, culture and food we discovered in our little free time during our first summer here in Japan.

Hiking Madarao Peak

We have found out summer in Japan can be wet, hot and humid. Especially June and July. And then out of nothing, when August hits, it turns hot and dry. This is also when the Japanese schools have their holiday (Obon), the time of festivals (Matsuri) and the time to enjoy the outdoors.

Having the mountains in our back yard we had to enjoy those few sunny days in July. You can climb Madarao Peak from different angles. It’s an easy short hike and your effort gets well rewarded with awesome views over Lake Nojiriko.

El Bosco, Nojiriko

This week we highlight Hotel Restaurant El Bosco in Nojiriko. Surrounded by the forest and located right on the lakeside of lake Nojiri this hotel is a peaceful getaway from the city. The big windows all over the building allow you to fully absorb the beauty of the nature around it. The kitchen of the restaurant is lead by a Japanese chef who serves good quality French-style cuisine food, with a touch of Japan by using local seasonal ingredients. A perfect location to celebrate Annie’s birthday!

During the coming months while we are waiting for the snow to fall we will keep you updated of the progress on a regular base. The next post will be about: Demolition. We would love to hear a word from you in the comments below. Do you have a question about the renovation, the lodge, the snowsports school, or anything else? Post a comment, send us an e-mail or contact us via one of our social media channels.

The post #1 The purchase appeared first on Japan Snowsports.