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Furniture planning
We are to the point in the build where it’s time to figure out what we are moving into each room. I’ve been diagramming the rooms to figure out how we can fit furniture we already have and to see what’s missing. The bedroom gets our bed. That’s pretty much all we have, aside from…
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Concrete and carpet
Yesterday two things happened that I resisted but ended up liking more than I expected. The inubashiri is a concrete walkway all the way around the house – literally it means “dog run”. It’s a common feature of modern Japanese homes in the cities where the law says you need a minimum of 50 cm…
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Internet at 555
Fiber was connected to the barn at the end of July, Stephen pulled the LAN cables last week, and Tod activated the network at 555 yesterday. This milestone makes the house ready to live in, as far as I am concerned. We might not have hot water yet, but we can Google for work-arounds. Tod’s…
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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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