the doors, live

At the risk of being repetitive, here's another shot of the former table, now counter between kitchen and dining room. This one's in focus, so--especially if you click on it--it's easier to see the uneven thickness and the waves in the underside of the wood that Suzuki-san, the carpenter, had to deal with in slotting it into place.
A few days from now we'll be staining the wood of all the beams, posts, and ceilings to go with the color of the sliding fusuma, shoji, and ranma that we're using from the old house. They've brought them from storage at the warehouse and stacked them against the wall (above). Now the carpenter is going to have to fine tune all the fittings, rails and lintels that hold them, since--being very old and worn--they all have their idiosyncratic shapes and sizes, to put it mildly. We put one of the doors up against the frame where it will go, and the tone of the old wood just didn't click against the new wood. That was the final grain of sand on the scale that now has tipped firmly on the side of staining the new wood, as beautiful as new cryptomeria can be. It will be interesting to see how close we can come to their aged tone with the natural stain.