Today, after almost a week of break due to rain, Maru-chan levelled the lot by scraping away all of the yamasuna down to the cinders of the old house.
It is neatly piled up like a mountain of gelato. With the top layer of soil removed and the ground bare, the drilling can begin next week for the “milk cement” and then the foundations.
But, as Maru-chan cleared away the dirt near the ujiko, he uncovered a problem…water. It seems that the water from the mountain behind us comes down under the gabion, under the freshly built drainage channels, and pools right next to them. Oops.
Shimizu-san and I (mostly him) dug out a trench all along the edge of the ujiko and then laid in perforated plastic pipe. We connected it to the square junction box at the southwest end where it can drain away to the wide-area network of drainage the crisscrosses the property.
This felt like a “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” moment. I was so disappointed that the planned water management does work the way I expected, but the tidy concrete drains will collect rainwater and runoff from the roof, so they are still useful. Unlike the movie, this had a relatively easy and inexpensive (ish) fix.
