Nice legs

In our last meeting with the architect and contractor, we ended up insisting on using the wood slab table that is now down at the old house as a counter between the kitchen and the dining room. It means cutting a section out of the table (about a fourth), but it’s worth it to have a place where this cool piece of wood can be part of daily life. We've been pushing this for the last month or so, and they've seemed reluctant. It doesn't seem to have any structural effect, so I guess it's just the idea of cutting into the wood.

We bought the table from an old man in Nagano who has a little woodworking shack in the forest on the side of the road going up the Alps. It’s a ramshackle place jammed full of slabs of wood that he’s in various stages of work on. You have to slide between, and almost crawl over, huge slices of nara, hinoki, cryptomeria, oak, and various pines. Scattered everywhere are figures that he’s sculpted out of the remains: from buddhas to forest animals. He works all alone and he’s getting pretty old.

We chose a slab of nara and he made the legs out of the outer part of the trunk. He formed them to the shape of the bottom of the table, so it just rests on them, with the weight holding it solid. They look great but don’t leave much room for human legs. If we use the table as a counter, we can’t use the legs, but I’m sure we’ll find some use for them.

10 Months and Counting

The New Year holidays were spent looking at sunsets that seemed, each day, to outdo the one from the previous day. Or it seemed like that in the presence of an evening like the one above. Actually, they were pretty busy: we did the annual cleaning of the Tokyo house, drove up to Nagano for New Year's Eve with M's parents, then down to Akiya for three days. Tokyo was mild, Nagano was cold, but not as bitter as usual, and the days in Akiya were spent once again in shirtsleeves.

I fell out of writing for a while, since there hasn't been any particular movement on the house front, and I wanted to keep this based around that theme. We've got another meet with the contractor set up for next week, and we've sent several revisions based on the scaled-down plans to see what they'll come up with. One of them has the main bedroom moved off of the sea-side, though there will still be windows from the bedroom into the small atrium and beyond, so it will only be eight-feet away. The study would be on the ocean side, which I'm not sure is a good idea if we want to get work done.

Time is starting to become a major factor, which is not what we wanted and why we had started working on this last year with so much to spare. Now we have to finish the architectural plans for approval and start the process of tearing down the two present houses at the same time. We've gone ahead and asked to do the second ground test, this time using ultrasound technology.

The other thing that is starting to dawn on us is that, once the construction starts, it's the end of our weekends at the old house. That is very sad. It means fewer moments for a while of moments with friends like this:









or this:












or this (photo by m):