counterpoint

This is the dining room of the old house, with the table that we got at an old man's workshop in the Northern Alps. The table is not big enough really to work as a dining room table in the new place, and we were stumped for a place to use it, until the idea came up of using the top as a counter between the kitchen and the dining room. Kind of a place to pass things over as well as being a place where you could pull out a stool and have a cup of coffee. When we got to the site today, the master carpenter had done a master job--and he seemed as excited at showing it to us as we were with his work.
Somehow he'd grooved the post and slid the table into the wall, so tightly that it doesn't even need a leg to hold it up. He put all his weight on it, and then convinced m to climb up on it . . .. . . and though you can see it juts out quite a ways from the wall, it held her with no problem. He had to cut one quarter of the table off because on the kitchen side we have an old cupboard that we want against the wall, and he offered to make a little chair of the piece he cut off. (In the shot above, that's Suzuki-san, the carpenter, in the blurry background with m at his feet, sweeping up piles of sawdust and scraps from his saw that she wants to bring home.)

It was a hell of a job. If you look closely (which might be hard to do as I was completely ignoring the camera focus when I shot these pictures), you can see that the mountain craftsman had left the natural curve in the wood. There is no completely level surface, and the bottom side has waves in it that match the sea outside our window on a breezeless day. But every joint is perfect, and M and I are overjoyed at having reality kick our expectation's ass.