Fold in Your Mirrors and Pray

A three-day weekend, which we'll be spending partly down at Akiya, partly up in Hodaka, at the foot of the Northern Alps, where M's parents have retired after building their own place. We've got to go to Akiya and start going through things that can be saved and stuff that will have to go. By February or March they'll start tearing down the pre-fab structure where the obaasan, our landlady, lived next door. It's part of the property, an unremarkable place, and pretty ugly, but it will be even hard to see that go.

Three years ago, when Akakura-san was 94, she finally allowed her sons to talk her out of living alone and moving into a home. When we heard that, our first thought was, "Why?" She was still getting around, even putting make-up on every day to go down to the bus stop and take an hour roundtrip ride to do some grocery shopping. Our second thought was, "Well, that's the end of our weekends at the beach." We were sure that her sons, who she told us were not at all interested in the property, would want to sell it, and we knew that market prices were way beyond our reach.

But thanks to her, they were pretty much told to try to sell it to us at what we could afford, and we ended up doing the buy directly, even dodging the need for a real estate agent.

The prefab house is basically two rooms and a kitchen and bath. But it's got steel beams in its structure that will have to be struggled with. The one drawback of the property is a very narrow driveway. I mean, "fold in your mirrors and pray" narrow, so it's going to be hard to get much bigger equipment than the smallest back hoe into the space. That means destruction by hand, and loading and unloading trucks parked in the street, and that's also added cost to the whole operation.

We'll drive up to Hotaka tonight, after the Akiya chores. It's going to be cold, I'm sure, but the wood stove keeps the big house comfortable, and I'm going to try to get M's dad to give me tips on how to keep a wood stove operation affordable, since we're going that route in Akiya as well. He gets a lot of his wood from the apple orchards that surround his place, and the winters there are so cold that the wood stacks run almost all the way around the house. But it's a beautiful place, built in a kind of Nagano style, with 10-meter ceilings and dark beams everywhere. Hearing about their experience building it did get us thinking of doing something similar.