In our last meeting with the architect and contractor, we ended up insisting on using the wood slab table that is now down at the old house as a counter between the kitchen and the dining room. It means cutting a section out of the table (about a fourth), but it’s worth it to have a place where this cool piece of wood can be part of daily life. We've been pushing this for the last month or so, and they've seemed reluctant. It doesn't seem to have any structural effect, so I guess it's just the idea of cutting into the wood.
We bought the table from an old man in Nagano who has a little woodworking shack in the forest on the side of the road going up the Alps. It’s a ramshackle place jammed full of slabs of wood that he’s in various stages of work on. You have to slide between, and almost crawl over, huge slices of nara, hinoki, cryptomeria, oak, and various pines. Scattered everywhere are figures that he’s sculpted out of the remains: from buddhas to forest animals. He works all alone and he’s getting pretty old.
We chose a slab of nara and he made the legs out of the outer part of the trunk. He formed them to the shape of the bottom of the table, so it just rests on them, with the weight holding it solid. They look great but don’t leave much room for human legs. If we use the table as a counter, we can’t use the legs, but I’m sure we’ll find some use for them.
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.
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