roots and rebar

We drove down to the site yesterday to meet with the foreman; he wanted to show us the formation of the rebars in the foundation before they started pouring the concrete next week. The slab foundation (I remember now: it's called beta kiso) forms were almost complete. They were just dropping in the last few for the inside walls, and adjusting the others. The weather has been relatively cooperative the last few weeks--nothing bad enough to call a halt to the work--so they were pretty far along. Back when I was doing construction work in the seventies, these forms were all done with plywood, and it took an endless amount of time to get them sized right, but now they're all steel and come in standard sizes.

There is a difference between Kagatuma, our contractor, and the big construction companies. There are a lot of little extra things they do that makes them slower and more expensive--like the rebar. The standard spacing for a wooden house is pretty wide, but here they've doubled up on a lot of it. This is done especially where there is crawl space, to strengthen the parts around the openings. I've walked on some rebar grids where there's a lot of give, but this one was rock solid. It's not easily degradable, but in earthquake country we hope it will extend the lifetime of the house far, far beyond the twenty or thirty years of so much of Japan's housing. They're also going to pour the concrete all in one go for the slab and the wall parts, in order to eliminate any cracks for termites to enter.


This shot is looking seaward. M's salon for massage therapy is in the foreground. M thought everything looked suddenly small, and I keep having to remind her that this is a small house we're building. There's no extraneous space, and we're going to have to be very selective in how we live. On the other hand, there's going to be enough of a garden for herbs, etc. If we think of the beach as our front yard, and the hills behind us as our back yard, I'm sure we'll be fine.

The foreman said the well that was drained and filled had been 25 feet deep.

On the way back, we stopped at the site of last year's tree planting, on top of the hills behind the house. Pretty impressive. In just over a year, the little saplings--most of which were 10 or 12 inches high when planted--had grown a lot, even though the growing season has just begun. Some of the species were four feet high, and all the trees looked very healthy. We tried to identify specific trees that we had planted, and m was sure she found at least one. It was a good feeling to see how easily they had found roots in their new home.

the first steps

This is the well that had to be drained and filled. But it's done and so are the first steps for the foundation, including laying the base concrete. Next week they'll start building the frame for the outside of the foundation.

There are two styles of kiso, the concrete foundation, that I know of. One just follows the layout of the walls, but we chose to have the full slab of concrete under the house. Most of the architects and other people I talked to seem to believe the whole connected slab tends to keep the house moving in one piece during an earthquake. One architect who works with reforming a lot of old farmhouses, though, believes that it's the flexibility of the separate bits of foundation that has kept them up for centuries.

The Real Thing

Our original plan was to to keep as much of the old house as possible. The main tatami room--eight mats plus a four-mat sized engawa--has everything that makes the perfect Japanese room. All the colors are variations on earth tones, from the tatami to the wood to the paper shoji doors that absorb the light and pass it on, slightly softened, to the opposite side (which side depends upon the time of day and where the light is coming from). All the walls are shoji or the wooden fusuma, so the room changes its configuration as people open doors or close them. We sleep in the far room on futon and feel spacious in the summer with all the doors open, or cozy in the winter wrapped in a closed door cocoon.

Unfortunately, three different contractors and carpenters told us that the foundation was too weak to build on. We could raise the whole house and put in a new foundation, but the wood columns and walls weren't strong enough to hold a second floor, and reinforcing them would cost a small fortune. We're trying to stay small, under 1500 square feet, and without adding a second floor we'd have to use all the garden space, and having a garden was one reason for moving in the first place. So, after much soul searching, we decided to build new, with the one absolute being that the main tatami room would be copied so carefully that we'd feel just as if nothing had changed. All the architectural plans began around that.