Leopalace Apartment Check out

Everything comes to an end.

Including my love-hate, or more like love to hate, relationship with my apartment. My kitchen was too small. The burners were IH (UGH!). The storage was inconvenient (in the front hall). There was no storage.  There was less than no space for guests. Well you get the idea.

So ends my time in Suita, Osaka. 

But one thing you have to do before you leave, is check out. Almost like a hotel...almost. You will arrange for someone to meet you at a convenient time to go through the proceedings. But in reality you should be there two hours before, as the gas, water, and electric men will be coming to do the necessary things to shut off you utilities as well as give you a final last bill on the spot. Guess who wasn't there? Well that is besides the point. Unless of course you as well miss your appointment, in which case your employer may or may not be kind enough to have the last bills forwarded to the office to be taken out of your paycheck. 

Well once you meet with the Leopalace representative, you will of course invite them in to what is hopefully your emptied abode and begin the proceedings. They will site you down at the table they provided for you when you first moved in and will ask for your key and possibly some brief, residence related questions, and then they will get to work. They will spend the next 15 minutes walking through your apartment checking every outlet, light switch, window, ladder, aircon, and faucet, making certain everything is intact. They will also be checking for damages. This is the part I was really worried about seeing as I think just about all Japanese apartments use this really cheap wall covering stuff which is extremely easy to scratch and leave damages upon. Lucky for me, I feel like the stuff they use at Leopalace, is exceptionally cheap and super easy to scratch, but a quick tip for those moving out, you can mend the stuff with just a glue stick and a bit of pressing. There is no way it will look perfect, but hopefully passable enough that the representative will not notice that the damages are actually your doing and not some previous tenants. They will also be looking in your cupboards for stains; so another quick tip, store anything that might stain the pantry boards on higher shelves and hopefully they might fail to notice (or simply remove the boards and stack them or turn them upside down). They also poked at my floor at a nice big stain from where I spilled pancake batter. Hey now, no one is perfect. Either the rep thought that was totally removable and did nothing more than a few pokes or decided that either I couldn't have done it and it was someone previous or that he just didn't care enough. Regardless. I got charged exactly nothing more than my cleaning fee of 28500 yen, nearly 30000 yen with tax. This is a basic cleaning fee. You cannot get out of it. I know a girl who hired cleaners for her apartment for pretty much the same price, and it made no difference and they charged her for it all over again. So don't make that mistake. 

After all the checking, he explained to me the basic cleaning fee and that it would be discounted in a way as they would use the left overs of that months pro-rated apartment rent to cover for as much of the cost as it could. Which in my case was about half. The rest of which they would bill me for. 

So I signed a little contract and bowed somewhere around 8 times ( I seriously can't seem to get it right. I don't bow for long enough or the other person is bowing lower. So then I do it again, and once they realized I did it again they go and do it again. It is a vicious cycle...) and left. And that was that. 

This whole process can actually be made a lot shorter if you speak Japanese or the rep speaks English. That is not exactly my case however. And I had no idea to words like "basic cleaning fee" or "pro-rated" in Japanese. So the rep and myself had to do some cell phone translator magic to communicate some certain aspects of the end-contract. 

Also as a warning, this did no happen to myself, but it did happen to another working for the same company as myself: make sure you remove everything from your apartment. Everything. I do not know how it happened, such as if there was an after charge for this, or perhaps she was not present for her checkout, or perhaps it was just a different system. But she left a coat hanger in her closer. A. As in singular. The removal fee of said coat hanger was 3000 yen. 30 bucks. Most expensive coat hanger ever. 

Well I was warned when I first moved in. And now you are too. Leave nothing!