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.

death with brush (3)

Since m's daycare center had shut down from the pig flu epidemic, we decided I'd take the day off on Friday and we'd all go down and finish off the staining. M's sister Y came with us. (Thanks for the photos, Y, and for spending all that time with m.) When we got there, the tategu-ya--the door craftsman--was working on the main entrance door. Unlike the old interior doors, these doors are rather tall, so my brother-in-law Jim, who is six-nine and has sworn he won't come and visit unless I provide him with a hard-hat, would approve. (Although since to get into the house proper, he'd have to duck through a shoji door that's about five-ten, he'd probably whack me with his hard-hat.)
The tategu-ya is responsible for all the doors, including shoji, sliding doors, hinged doors, and all the doors to the various cabinets and closets around the house. It's a narrow specialty, since the carpenters have already built all the cabinet structures except for the doors, for example. He was working pretty much the entire day fitting these large doors, working with both a sander and a traditional plane. He'd put them up, take them down, take a few millimeters off here and there and put them back up and eyeball them again. He's going to be doing that for a few days, so we won't be able to stain them until next week.
The kitchen tiles had been laid down, though the grout had yet to been put in. This will definitely be the most Western-style of all the rooms.
And, while M did all the hard stuff, like the frames around the windows and doors, I applied myself to the big beams that cross the ceiling of the main bedroom. It was easy compared to the ceilings downstairs, but there was more area than I'd expected. We are now officially ready for the application of the keisodo plaster walls (downstairs) and keisodo cloth walls (upstairs) that will wrap up the interior finish.
I climbed out on the scaffolding to find this beautifully shaped piece connecting the gutter to the down spout. Yamada-san had told me they had found a gutter series that had been designed by an architect that they could get cheaply, but . . . damn, this is nice. Yes, a fine gutter that could change the reputations of gutters in general.
m had found a way to spruce up her eyebrows with the wood stain. She told me she looks just like a popular TV star that has huge eyebrows.
I guess it's the last time I'll be viewing the sun set into the Izu peninsula horizon through the scaffolding. It goes down on Monday--the scaffolding as well as the sun--so next week we'll be looking at a fairly complete exterior, naked to the world. It will be a birth of sorts, and I wonder if it will look anything like what we'd imagined. Though come to think of it, that's what I was wondering at the last birth I attended, and that turned out okay.

the doors, live

At the risk of being repetitive, here's another shot of the former table, now counter between kitchen and dining room. This one's in focus, so--especially if you click on it--it's easier to see the uneven thickness and the waves in the underside of the wood that Suzuki-san, the carpenter, had to deal with in slotting it into place.
A few days from now we'll be staining the wood of all the beams, posts, and ceilings to go with the color of the sliding fusuma, shoji, and ranma that we're using from the old house. They've brought them from storage at the warehouse and stacked them against the wall (above). Now the carpenter is going to have to fine tune all the fittings, rails and lintels that hold them, since--being very old and worn--they all have their idiosyncratic shapes and sizes, to put it mildly. We put one of the doors up against the frame where it will go, and the tone of the old wood just didn't click against the new wood. That was the final grain of sand on the scale that now has tipped firmly on the side of staining the new wood, as beautiful as new cryptomeria can be. It will be interesting to see how close we can come to their aged tone with the natural stain.

The wrath of the acorn people

I'm sure that, like myself, many have wondered what kind of damage can be done to a traditional Japanese house by 13 four- and five-year-olds. Several weekends ago, we invited m's entire class, the Acorns, from the day care center to visit. The parents sat outside and we barbequed up a feast, while the kids played pretty much unsupervised inside, since it had gotten pretty windy on the beach. (We would never have been so forgiving, of course, had we not known that this was all scheduled for destruction.) Above is the aftermath of two kids going on a deliberate paper poking session with the shoji doors. I do offer in their defense the fact that we already had a few holes that we had not repaired, so it may have looked like the proper thing to do, and most of the kids, unfortunately, had no idea what shoji is. On the other hand, it did get me to start thinking that with the same number of kids a few years older, we might be able to save a huge amount of money on tearing this place down.

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.