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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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Fairytale Doors
Today the door guys pulled up with a truck full of doors. I have been eager to see the finished product and I am not disappointed. After unloading the doors into their respective rooms, the master craftsman turned the dining room into a workshop and staging area. Metal tracks were set into the floor channels,…
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Goodbye, Pelican
Last week, Sasaki-san and I were looking for stones to use as supports under the deck which will extend along the front of the house. We searched around 555 but without success. Then I remembered that last summer Sakaguchi-san saw a big quarried stone under one of the shipping containers. It was holding up the…
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Finishes are (almost) finished
The wallpaper and tiling started this week. Both are nearly done already, including the kitchen tiles, which arrived a month sooner than expected. Here’s a peek of the work in progress: I am delighted by how the house looks. The palette of colors that we picked is beautiful and subtle. The textures are good. I…
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