M & m & m & m

bI'm not quite sure how all the M's and m's are going to take this move. That's Marco and Mario (who are, I'm convinced, a gay couple who've decided to live with us) with M. They don't know about the move yet, although Mario was dragged down to the old house many times before it was torn down. He loved running around the place and chasing bugs and he knows how to chill. Marco is a little more uptight; he was given to us after his owner died, and the owner's husband had pretty much left him in a small cage for a long time--so he stays in the "give me some affection" mode most of the time.
I've had to ask the contractor to leave some openings in the kitchen tile for these depictions of the boys, done in tile by m and her granddad. We also want to fill in a few spaces with some of these pieces of ceramics that wash up on the beach.
We have yet to stain these tesuri, or handrails on the second-floor windows. If you sit on the window sills, these are the perfect height to rest your elbow while looking down the beach and thinking about things to keep you from thinking about the things that you should be thinking of.
m's mom has a chore: to make a ceramic bowl that will become a sink that fits this slab of wood in the second-floor bathroom. We've chosen the glaze, the size, etc.--now it's just up to the clay's acceptance to mold itself into a cool shape in her hands.
A brief glimpse into the future from the second floor atrium: the walls have yet to be finished, the shoji aren't stained, the paper isn't attached and you can't see the floor. But if I squint my eyes, I can kind of see what it will look like in a few weeks.

Saving Inner Space

We have now gotten rid of the post in the middle of the bedroom, and the catwalk across the small atrium. (They're crossed out in the plan above; the sea side is at the top.) Both had been bothering me for some time—the post really intruded into the space where one would walk through the room, and the catwalk seemed awfully solid and heavy for something that would take up about a third of the atrium opening, blocking a lot of the light.

I had dropped by Azby Brown's art lab for a discussion about his book, Just Enough, and I showed him the plans for the house. An architect and professor, he zoomed in on both as problems almost immediately (“students lose points for something like the post,” he said), which convinced me to do something about it. When I brought up finding a way to dispose of the post at our meeting that night, T, the architect, immediately agreed, and chose to use a larger beam across the room to hold up the riser to the roof. He also admitted the catwalk was an irritation, but that he thought we’d need a way to clean and open the windows. He’s right, of course, but I’ll get a very tall ladder to clean them, and we can open them by reaching out over the atrium.

And with that, our final plans should be done on the 26th, ready to be sent out for permits. I'm still concerned about air flow and window placement, but I hope we can straighten the few small points out as we go. We're a month behind schedule, and we haven't even had one hammer on the premises other than my own. They say the permits will take a month at most, which gets us very close to Golden Week, the string of holidays at the end of April which will add up to eight days this year. I'd hate to see them tear the place down, only to have the empty plot sit there over the holidays, while we try to find something to do elsewhere.

Just Another Thinkhole

Ah'm whupped, as we used to say in Tennessee. Spent four and a half hours with the contractor yesterday evening/night. The first bad news was that the soil tests turned out just on the wrong side of the limit, which means they (the soil borers) made a finding that although the soil is hard at between two and three meters in the five places they bored, there was clay in a shallower level. They are suggesting we sink piles, more than fifty of them, in the area of the foundation, which will cost around one million yen. There are other methods of strengthening the land, including mixing concrete in the soil, putting gravel "pillars" in the ground, or some other wild ideas, like putting styrofoam under the foundation, but it's all costly.

But we have a choice. Unlike the Swedish method that these testers used, there is another one using ultrasound equipment. According to the contractor the ultrasound generally is not as tough as the former one. (I also have the sneaking suspicion that since the Swedish one relies on human judgement, and since the company that does the test also does the pile driving, that one might think the humans might slant the test to give themselves business, but then I'm a suspicious bastard.) So we toss more money into the testing hoping that 1) forty thousand yen will save us a mill, 2) we can build the house without pilings, and 3) that it won't sink, one-sided, into the earth, at least until the poles melt and the seas drown us all. The contractor said they will still insure the house, as long as it passes the second test.

After we got past that bit of disappointment, we found out that the costs had ballooned a good ten percent over our budget. After a few hours of trying to find out where--20,000 yen here and 10,000 there--I just decided that we had to make some drastic changes if we were to bring it down. So in spite of the fact that most of the plans were drawn up, we cut chunks of excess in the form of several square meters from the layout. Even though it was painful, and a pain in the ass, it was kind of fun to try to think creatively again. In fact, I'm kind of happier now, not just because we made more of less, but because the atrium is now against the sea side instead of in the middle, and we got rid of the second floor tiny terrace, which had seemed to me to be a bit much considering we can always go downstairs. The wood stove is also in a more efficient place, and we were able to keep the tatami room intact. So what if the toilet is under the stairs? It's a toilet.

So now we get to wait and see how much we were able to lop off of the price. We're getting closer fast to the day we're going to have to start some destruction if we're going to be all moved in by the end of the year.