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Clean it up
The antique doors in the bedroom needed some attention to smooth out the rough edges and even out their complexion. I took on the task yesterday. The day was very hot and Maru-chan’s yumbo preparing the ground for the concrete pour made it impossible to work outside, so I decided to test out the doma…
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Fritter’s early morning
Fritter spent an hour at dawn loudly trying to get my attention. He sat himself in the bedroom at 4:15 meowing until I got up to see what his problem was. I put a handful of kibble on his plate (that’s usually the problem) but he soon returned to the bedroom for even louder and…
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Look at these floors!
Today the carpenters finished their work, packed up all the tools and lumber, and then we peeled the protective paper off the floors. It’s looking glorious. Everything got a good vacuum and now I am ready to beeswax the floors, railings, and doors. It will be a slow process, but I look forward to making…
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Light & fixtures
Choosing lighting has been a long road. Visits to lighting showrooms, poring over catalogs, and trying to understand each manufacturer’s walled garden of controllers and remotes. We are getting validation for our choices, finally. Last night we drove over to 555 to hang the living room fixtures and survey the lights. It all looks good.…
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OMG, not mould again
In 2006, we bought a new sofa and lived with it for nine years in our Tokyo apartment. It was a great place for naps, long conversations, wine parties, and all sorts of hijinks. In 2015 when we moved to Kamogawa, we gave the sofa to UltraBob. Seven years of family life with a growing…
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Kitchen & pantry plans
On Monday, we finished up the construction of the big counter by attaching the IKEA cabinets together (thanks to the masterful skill of Yoshida-san who figured out some tricky bits) and then screwing them into the beech counter top. The bookcase and the under cabinet lighting are also complete. We made big progress in a…
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Railings
The house continues to unfold itself towards completion. Yesterday, Sasaki-san’s team finished the railings on the 2nd floor. The journey with the railings was a long one. It was a design decision the architect deferred so that we’d have freedom to choose what worked best when we saw the physical space. It was so amorphous…
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Meanwhile, at home
I am tearing the house apart to undo 8 years of accumulated clutter. Even though I regularly declutter, this is an opportunity to assess every single thing I own. And it is a chance for me to bring Tod into the process for our shared things and hopefully reduce them. It is tedious. Flowchart for…
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Little moments
Every day at the genba there are big things and little things happeneing. The little moments are hard to write about at length but still interesting milestones and memories, so here’s a round up of some of them from this week. MONDAY: Stephen wired up the breaker box as we laughed about the Niagara Falls…
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Powered up
Yesterday, TEPCO surprised us with an afternoon visit to install the electrical service. I got back from lunch and there were a bunch of trucks at the bottom of the driveway. YAY! It wasn’t a complete surprise, I guess. They said they’d be coming sometime between Wednesday and the end of the month. It was…
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