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.

A Glimpse of Fire

We got our first estimate for the wood stove, including the six-meter high exterior chimney and installation. It came in about 120,000 yen less than we expected, which is a thrill when everything else seems to be going up every time you turn around. It’s a very small stove—even with the warming shelves on either side it’s only 810 centimeters across. But it should easily do the job of heating the house except, very likely, M’s salon at the opposite side of the house down the hall. We don’t expect to be using the stove much on sunny days, even on the coldest days of winter, considering the huge windows. I heard from a friend nearby that they use theirs for a few hours in the morning, then let it go cold until the sun goes down.

The stove’s a Vermont Castings Intrepid II, which features a catalytic combustion system that burns the residue in the smoke from the first burn, so it’s very clean. I not sure about the name; it sounds like we’re going to war with the elements, and it makes me wonder what happened to Intrepid I. (I guess it’s a rugged New England thing: the Vermong Castings company’s other stoves include the Defiant, the Vigilant, the Resolute Acclaim. )

We’ve had all kinds of advice about the stove placement. The architect first had it in the middle of the dining room—the first thing you saw when you entered the house. M’s mom, without seeing the design, had the same idea. But we know how little we’ll probably be using it, and this is a beach house, not a mountain house, so it’s going in a corner—a prominent corner, but a corner all the same. I just can’t see making a heating system, no matter how appealing, the center of this place. I can appreciate the romance of a hearth but I’m more interested in its function. After all, we've got the sunset, all 6000C degrees of it, setting just out the window.