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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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Wastewater and beyond
Meet our septic system. It takes black water from the toilet and grey water from the rest of the house and processes it into clean water than is sent out into the open drains in the neighborhood. WHAT?! Yep. That’s right. The FujiClean CA-5 is a self-contained wastewater treatment plant. It will turn poop and…
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Ready for paper
The wallpaper team has been working hard in the heavy heat the past two days getting the walls and ceiling ready for paper. They started by taping all the seams, then applied putty. Or as it’s called in Japan, paté. Then they went around again the next day with two or three more coats to…
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Mind your beeswax
How to finish the raw wood in the house has been an ongoing discussion. Stain, oil, wax, nothing? We finally settled on a type of 蜜蝋 mitsuro, that is a mix of beeswax and flax oil. Domestically produced. All natural. Easy to apply, not too difficult to maintain, and it will protect sufficiently without changing…
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