women at work

I got an e-mail message from the site foreman, saying that if we were planning to stain the front door, we should do it soon, since the glass strips are ready to be inserted . So we decided to run down today--on a Halloween hangover--to finish it. (We don't want to be the excuse for any delays.) Even in the natural untouched state (above), it looked elegant, but the inside of the genkan entranceway is stained, and we're planning to do the clapboard siding as well. The stain has surprised us with the way it matches the old houses color, so we're going full speed ahead.

M brought her brand of concentration to the job . . .
. . . as did m, who as you can see takes after her mom.

Between the three of us, we were done in no time with was what was a more difficult job than expected--well, not difficult but rather painstaking in having to do all the places where the glass panels will slide into place. But it was great fun working together. There is still plenty of staining to do, but the only part that has to be done before we move in are the new shoji doors, three full-size doors and two window panels, which have to be done before the paper is attached.

But anyway, the front door is done, and it looks great, and the glass can go in with no time wasted.

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.

death with brush (2)

Thank you, Yumiko, Cathy, Kiho, the Komiya family, Usui-san, Andrew for the hours spent staining the wood on Sunday. And Yamada-san of Kagatsuma, who suggested we do it ourselves and then arranged all the tools etc., that made the job go as fast as it did--and spent the whole days with us, teaching, directing, staining and rubbing. We finished almost everything, and the only reason we stopped was that we ran out of stain--so there are a few bits on the second floor that still have to be done. But that's a piece of cake compared to what got done.

We got started at ten, and fifteen minutes later had a pretty good idea of how much pain the job was. But everyone just kept steadily working, and by lunchtime almost all of the difficult ceiling sections had been done.We had picked up some fat mackeral at the fishing village of Sajima, and M had made some snacks. Usui-san barbecued the fish and we dug in over controlled amounts of beer and cold tea. It was another amazing fall day, hot enough to use the beach umbrellas, but cool enough to take them down after the offshore wind picked up.
After lunch, everyone got right back to work doing railings, window sills, all the little spots that we could find. Andrew and I focused on the genkan entranceway, and I left the tall guy with most of the hard work of doing the ceiling. It was very absorbant and you needed to slather on the stain--not a little of which, thanks to gravity, ended up on Andrew's upturned face. But he wrapped it up, and it looks superb (that's it at the top of the post).
The photo below illustrates the difference between the raw and stained wood. When we'd finished the first floor, I could believe that there's a very good chance this is going to look very similar to the room in the old house. When I held up one of the old ranma lattice pieces against the newly stained wood, it looked like they belonged together.M and I should be able to finish the second floor next weekend, after the contractor gets more stain. They'll already have started the plastering of the first floor walls, so we have to finish in order to let them move upstairs.

Again, thanks to all our friends that made the day go by so quickly and productively and enjoyably.

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.