open house

THE ELECTRICITY IS on. And it highlights the house in all kinds of ways that we've never seen before. (This is the light fixture for the genkan entrance, the one that we insisted on having even after the architect and electrician said it couldn't be done.) It could, and we think it represents the house exactly, the smooth lines of the design and the rough image of natural materials.

We were in a hurry to get down to the site today. Today and tomorrow are open house days, which the contractor uses to bring potential house builders and others who are in the midst of their building process to come by and see what the results might look like. We had to go down anyway, because not only were the refrigerator and washing machine being delivered, and the air conditioning people and cable TV/internet/phone person coming by, but we had to empty the car of all the cut firewood that M's father had given us so we can pass on the car to its new owner.

Because it was open house day, this was the first time they removed the covering of the wood floors. They also had cleaned the whole place and put up several displays, including posters showing how the wood was harvested in a sustainable way and how the wood is cut using old joinery techniques. They had laid out a display on the floor of all the types of wood posts that were used in the construction and the president of the company was there showing people who dropped by what had gone into making the house. It was a very laid back, relaxed kind of salesmanship, and the president had a great sense of self-deprecating humor that had us appreciating once again our choice of contractor.

It was a long day with a lot of things happening, and we were lucky to have dropped m off at her friend's place. But with the electricity and water and everything working (M was the first to use the toilet), and the warmth that we felt from the setting sun even long after it had receded into the Izu peninsula's horizon, it was very, very hard to leave.

shock and awe

 I FORGOT TO mention. The move is three weeks away. From today.

bowl-a-rama (II)

A rare faux pas by the contractor: for some reason the faucet was stuck in front of the bowl that was created by M's mom, which kind of detracts from the whole (in the tiny upstairs toilet). They didn't imbed the bowl into the wood, which is what we first asked for--but after looking at it, we decided we like the whole bowl sitting there in all its glory. The only problem is that faucet blocking the bowl, so they'll move it behind the bowl in the corner, and fill in the wood with a plug. I guess we can find something to hide the scar, like a soap dish or a hookah.

them apples (II)

We had one of very few free days away from the beach house site that we've been able to have recently, once again making the drive up to Hotaka, Nagano prefecture, where M's parents live. It was, unfortunately, a very short visit, but the occasion was the annual apple picking day, and just like last year, we had a picture perfect day: warm, clear, and full of laughs and apples.

Once again, we were all baffled by the number of apples that can come off of one small tree about my height (177.5cm) but a lot wider by several meters. No one counted them but there surely were close to 500 apples, including the one or two bags of fruit that had been a feast for the birds. ("Those are the best ones," said the orchard owners. "Birds never eat the bad apples.") Of course, it's easy for us, the pickers, who just go up to harvest the ripe fruit. But the orchard people have spent hours with the tree, worrying about the bees polinating them, culling the number of flower stems so the remainders have a chance to be full-blown, fat Fuji fruit, and protecting (most of) them from birds and worms.

The photo above only shows half of the harvest. We were lucky enough to be given a couple of boxes of these crunchy, crisp apples by M's mom and dad, and then got an extra prize: an all-we-could-carry load of apple tree wood and cherry that M's dad had sawn and split to the right dimensions for our wood stove. (Being at the foot of the Northern Alps, his stove takes logs twice the size of what we need, but he was kind enough to cut them to the size of our Intrepid II.)

So we drove back to Tokyo with a Spike full of firewood and Fuji apples, the car hanging low on its axles as we drove through the glittering lights of Omotesando and the new Nike store celebrating shoes as a liberating experience. And M and I had a good laugh on a bet that any of the other cars driving through this area would have the same cargo. I've no idea how we're going to settle that one.

panes in the glass

THE ELECTRICIAN WAS finishing up installing all the fixtures when we got to the site yesterday. And with the washi paper lamp shade (ball?), the tatami room just continues to look more and more like the room in the former house, as in this photo below by friend Ben.

We were also really happy to find that the light we'd picked for the genkan entrance was in place. We'd been told by the architect that it couldn't be put in because it had to be inserted in the wall, and we'd have to pick another one. But we begged and pleaded and there it was. The electrician told us he'd had to cut into the wood beam, but he'd checked with the carpenters and they'd told him it was okay. He looked as happy as we were when he saw how happy we were.

The ashiba scaffolding towers, both interior and exterior, are now gone. The atrium is finally visible in its stained, plastered, finished state. But we haven't finished cleaning the windows after the staining, which reminds me that we're going to have to get a long ladder, first to install the blinds on the upper windows, but also to keep all these panes of glass clean.

see spike go

Just got a call from the dealer saying he was looking at our new (used) car that we bought off the internet. He wanted to confirm its condition, and told me that it had a number of scratches, but no dents. This was not good news: dents were the one feature we had specifically asked for since neither I nor M wanted to be the first person to put one in it going in and out of that damn narrow driveway.

The new (old) car is a nine-year-old Honda Vamos, one of the tiny minivans (600cc engine) that were made originally for commercial use, but have increasingly been adopted by people looking for a cheap ride that's easy to navigate down narrow roads. (Every one of the carpenters who worked on the house came in one of these, as did almost every other workman, from plasterer to plumber to electrician. Sometimes the yard would be full of them, all utilitarian white, sitting there at all angles like tossed dice.) Unfortunately, the popularity has kept the price of used ones higher than expected. The photo here is of a new one, and is almost actual size. Ours is dumpier and funkier and dirtier, but tiny like this one.

Since the dimensions and economics are perfect for what we need, we went ahead and sold our two-year-old Honda Spike to our contractor, who needed a car to take his clients around.   I'm sorry to see the Spike go. It's one of the least attractive body designs I've ever seen on an automobile, and reminds me of one of those ugly fish with the protruding bottom lip, but the interior was huge for a small car, and we had no problem filling it to bursting point on the weekend runs to the beach house. It got great gas mileage, and a cult following, so of course they stopped making it this year.

countdown

FOUR WEEKS TO GO. We're to move on December 16, and it's starting to reach critical stage in many areas. Sell the car; buy a smaller one. Recycle all the stuff we won't be taking: bookshelves, beds, kitchen utensils that are duplicated by the stuff we had at the old place and are now in storage at the contractor's warehouse. We're sleeping on the floor on futons now, but it's cold without tatami. Most of the DVDs, books, etc. have been packed except for what I need for work. We're making final arrangments for appliances, since the ones we have now came with the rent (which saves on moving expenses, but means we have to get them somewhere). By next year, it's been announced, the entire country of Japan will have access to high-speed optical fiber cable--everywhere, I guess, except Akiya. So we'll have to have regular cable for phone, internet and TV.

The schedule is tight. We're giving up the Tokyo house completely on the 18th, so we'll have to make sure all the connections are in place in Akiya. The site foreman doesn't want us to have things delivered until after they clean the place thoroughly and have the official final building check, but we're going to have to override him on a couple of things. Like the refrigerator: all the new models have come out, and there's no model that fits our space perfectly. One of last year's series does, and they're disappearing fast and prices are rising, so, sorry Yoshimura-san. There's going to be a big box in the middle of the dining room pretty soon.

entry papers, please

The paper in the shoji doors has been attached by the tategu-ya, and though there's a difference between our old doors and the new ones they made to the old specifications, it's not that noticable. You can see we've used the shoji doors from the genkan entrance of the old house. They are about 177cm, (5'10" or so), and are a big contrast with the tall main door. You can see the high step next to M's feet, which we're hoping people will be making without too much head cracking. But I love the design of these old doors, with the horizontal rectangles and the inserted central windows.

This is the entryway from the interior. Almost everything here is from the old house: the shoji, the wooden closet door on the left, and the ranma lattices at the upper left.

The genkan is the one place where the insulation properties are pretty much the same as one hundred years ago. Both the main door and the shoji doors are sliding, so there will always be gaps--miniscule ones, but gaps--between the doors and the frames. Hopefully the two layers will minimize the effects, so when it came down to aesthetics vs. modern insulation in this case, it was aesthetics, hands down. Ask me again on a windy, gray, bitter January morning, and I hope I have the same conviction.

scott's lot

This is Scott and the house he and his wife Reiko built on a secluded, awesome piece of land they found in the hills of Chiba. They are the only friends I know who made their own place from scratch, and their house is a beautiful mix of Japanese and Western that matches the location perfectly. (There is a small lake out back, and theirs is the only home on it.)

Seeing this place convinced us of the worth of living outside of the city, and hearing about the struggles and joys of building made us believe it was possible. In the train on the way home we decided to go forward with building and moving (and since it was delayed, giving us a three-hour ride, we had plenty of time for it to sink in). That was almost two years ago, and I still have dreams about the slope of the tiled roof, the big living room, the expanse of deck and the water beyond.

goes the sun

IT WAS A VERY GRAY day today, pissing cats and dogs when we got up, and after a pantomime show that m's day care center had arranged (which wasn't as insipid as I expected), we headed down once again to see the on-site situation of the house. m passed out in the car, which gave M and I plenty of time to do some more . . . wait for it . . . staining. And if anyone who's reading this is not as tired of it as we are, they are not human.

When we arrived we found that the glass had been put in the main entrance door, the paper had been applied to the shoji, and we were looking at a completely different house than we had left last weekend. We closed down our staining operation due to darkness about the same time as the chimes of the village loud speakers rang out. The waves were high and still dotted with surfers andM and I took our respective cameras out to record the end of the day.

And suddenly the sky exploded throwing light all over us. As we walked to the car, I looked back at the house and found that the horizontal light had lit the interior as if someone had flipped a switch. (No, the electricity is not even hooked up yet, even if there were fixtures.)

sardinia

AS OF MIDNIGHT tonight, we have five weeks to go before Moving Day, and the beginning of our life in a place where more of our neighbors will belong to the fish community than the

village social structure.

And since today was one of those days where I'd rather be "with the fishes" along with Luca Brazzi than be working "with the humans" at the office, that's something to look forward to.

the "looking down boards"

WE FINISHED A huge part of the staining yesterday--all of the shitami ita clapboard siding that makes up the base of the mountain side of the house. It really soaked up the stain, but we're happy that it still shows the grain of the wood as well as the color shadings. It has the deep reddish tone that I was hoping for, and it really goes with the slightly off-white mortar and the dark brown of the roof, the gutters, the eaves, and the windows, not to mention the main entrance door. We're really happy with how it turned out, and Yamada-san of Kagatsuma said, "It really makes you want to look back at it when you leave."

 

Our fingers recently have been in a perpetual stained state, but there's still quite a bit to do of the interior, so I'll leave my cuticles in their "old brown" condition.

bowl-a-rama

BEFORE WE LEFT TO go down to the site and finish staining the clapboard siding today, we were gifted with the perfect timing of a delivery we've been waiting for. We had asked M's mom some time ago to make a bowl that we could use for a hand sink for the second floor toilet. Last month when we visited M's parents in Nagano, we went by the ceramic workshop and kiln where she makes her pieces and she showed us a number of different works, all done in different glazes, so that we could chose the tone and color of the bowl. (Of course, she let us know that we'd be at the mercy of the firing, since even the same glaze has all kinds of permutations depending on the winds, tides and number of fairies present at the time.) But we picked a glaze that we liked very much for its blue-gray ocean tinge, and gave her the measurements that the small toilet could handle.

And this is what the courier delivered. 

When we got down to the site, we unpacked it and placed it on the wood shelf that has been waiting for it the last few weeks, and saw immediately that it is a beauty! The carpenter will carve a hole  and set it just slightly into the wood, the plumber will attach the fitting for the drain and the faucet. And we'll have a very unique basin to wash our hands in. Guests, of course, will have to use the very pedestrian Toto sink downstairs. (I'm not being unkind, there's just no room in the narrow toilet on the first floor.)

plastered

THIS IS THE INOUE family, sakan-ya (or plasterers) of the finest order. After finishing the outside mortar of our house a while ago, they're back to do the interior walls in keisodo, which--as I think I've explained several times--is a plaster made of clay rich in volcanic ash and fossilized plankton. It been used for centuries as a fire-resistant clay for making stoves and burners. Recently it's been increasingly used as a wall plaster.

It's not an easy application, at least for an amateur. This is one of the son's tool box, where he keeps his entire collection of trowels of all shapes and sizes, and next to it is the palette with the small, narrow size trowel that he let me try. I was able to do an area of a couple square feet, but the plaster is gritty and digs into the edge of the tool. So he stepped back in and took over and the three family members finished about half of the house in one day. (They end up doing two layers, although when finished, it is only 2 or 3 millimeters thick. 

The keisodo absorbs moisture when it is humid and expells it when it's dry. It cuts down on noise, smells, mites, is fire-resistant, and is full of holes 4 nano meters wide that let the walls breath. I'm sure there's something bad about it, but I haven't found any reports yet. 

It has a very rough texture, almost like adobe, and it looks great against wood. It's bright white, but when the late winter sun hit it this afternoon as everyone was cleaning up, it turned the walls into yellow gold.

 

day and not-so day

Above and below is why, as much as I love mountains, the shore never ceases to intrigue me, despite the fact that I don't surf or sail--though I do like to swim and body surf. But the way the view can change so dramatically in a matter of minutes is probably closer to my emotional makeup than the more stately change that takes place in mountainous areas. Though I'm sure that there are hordes of hill people that would disagree.

In the actual sequence, "below" came before "above."

whitewalls

The keisodo cloth has been applied to all the walls and ceilings upstairs, as well as the ceilings of the kitchen and M's studio. The rest of the house will be done in the keisodo plaster, starting on Saturday. It's applied with a trowel and leaves rough swirls in the texture of the wall, and I want to know how to do it, so that I can reapply it in places that suffer from accidents, cats running at high speed into walls, or even daily use. So I've convinced the plasterer to let us "help" in places that won't be too noticable. You can't tell from the photo above, but the cloth also has a pattern that looks as if it's applied as plaster (but it comes at a much lower price). As I've written before, though, both the cloth and the plaster is supposed to prevent sick house syndrome, absorb humidity, and let walls breathe.

chilling

It's finally gotten chilly, with hints of winter. The wind was picking up the other day, blowing the stones off the tarp and exposing my stash of materials for living with a wood stove. On top was the log slice that we carried down from Nagano, after M's dad insisted we select one from the shop that is doing the arrangements for putting in our stove. I haven't even got a splitting axe yet, but I've got this great slab to do it on.

Underneath are some posts from the old house that I'll use to build a frame to stack the wood fuel. M's dad has already cut and aged a pile of apple wood that we'll pick up later this month when we go up to help pick the apples from their tree, and that should help us get our stove life up and running.

they're baaaaaack

A bare two weeks after typhoon Melor, the kanna have proved me wrong once again (yes, I'm getting used to it), and have poked their heads out of the sand and are reaching upward to grace the sea wall separating us from the beach. Their hardiness is inspiring; I need to inject some of their DNA to help survive the long daily commute to work after our move.

look ma, no scaffold

The ashiba scaffolding is gone--at least most of it. There's still a corner left, which they'll use to put in the chimney for the wood stove. But other than that, the exterior is at the mercy of the public view, and--just as we suspected--it's a bit of a schizophrenic exhibition. On the mountain side we have what I think of as much of the goodness of Japanese architecture: sloping gentle roofs, large eaves supported by posts and beams, an entrance way that is welcoming without being pretentious.
On the sea side is what I consider to be the less appealing side of modern Japanese architecture: a slab of wall with little to distinguish it, and I have no one to blame but me. But I beg any passersby on the beach to be forgiving. This was done with very little thought of its appearance from outside, despite the fact that more people will stare up at us from the sea side than from the road. As opposed to the other side of the house, almost all of the aethetic selections were made purely through the effect they would have on those in the house's interior.
And judging from our first house guest (and I'm not including former inhabitants such as the ubiquitous spiders and wasps), the view from the inside--think wall over the atrium--was of great value. Despite the open windows and my urging, he was the first of what we hope to be not too many guests who refuse to leave.

women at work

I got an e-mail message from the site foreman, saying that if we were planning to stain the front door, we should do it soon, since the glass strips are ready to be inserted . So we decided to run down today--on a Halloween hangover--to finish it. (We don't want to be the excuse for any delays.) Even in the natural untouched state (above), it looked elegant, but the inside of the genkan entranceway is stained, and we're planning to do the clapboard siding as well. The stain has surprised us with the way it matches the old houses color, so we're going full speed ahead.

M brought her brand of concentration to the job . . .
. . . as did m, who as you can see takes after her mom.

Between the three of us, we were done in no time with was what was a more difficult job than expected--well, not difficult but rather painstaking in having to do all the places where the glass panels will slide into place. But it was great fun working together. There is still plenty of staining to do, but the only part that has to be done before we move in are the new shoji doors, three full-size doors and two window panels, which have to be done before the paper is attached.

But anyway, the front door is done, and it looks great, and the glass can go in with no time wasted.