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Nama-con #1
Yesterday was the first pour of concrete. This is just a few centimeters deep to form a base for the rebar and the 2nd pour of the pad. Those will be done at the end of next week. From now until Friday, the concrete sets and there’s not much else to see. This first pour…
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Shades of boxwood
As I go through the process myself, I get flashes of memories from when my parents built their house in the Valley of Lakes. Yesterday, I recalled the boxwood. Their lot was wooded with a variety of deciduous trees. One of them was a boxwood. It wasn’t a small shrub, this was a 10′ tree…
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Foundational
Yesterday morning, work began on the foundations. It started with a lot of neon pink string, checking and rechecking measurements at ground level, then building a fence, moving the strings to waist level and rechecking to make sure everything was square and tidy. By midday, trenching had begun. Maru-chan dug the ground down to the…
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Sunset wine
I am sort of disappointed in my life at the moment. I haven’t fulfilled my potential; I keep delaying my ideas until I can realise them fully. But at 56, time is running short for grand plans and I feel a slight sense of urgency to act on my dreams. Maybe I can do something…
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All by myself
I went up to 555 this morning expecting to see the Monaca Doken crew on this sunny day but nobody was there. As it turned out, they got a call for another job with some urgency and went off in the big blue dump truck to take care of it. This did not deter me…
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It’s cat blanket weather
We are in that best-of-year period where days are temperate and nights are chilly. The low temperature this morning was a single digit (8) for the first time this season. It won’t last forever, so I will savor all of these lovely days. Last night, I grabbed an extra blanket for the bed. In the…
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Milk Cement
Today, a company called Something or maybe it is Some Thing, bored 45 holes in the space that will be our house and filled them with “milk cement,” which I think we’d call cement slurry in America. This was done to solidify and reinforce the soft spots that were uncovered in a Swedish sounding test…
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The mystery hole
Today we went back into ujiko mode. The next big step for Monaca Doken is to set the drains around the barn. It’s going to involve a lot of hand-digging and after the mess of groundwater yesterday, I think we all want this to go well. But a piece of information about the height and…
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Too much water
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…
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Kitchen stairs
The Monaca Doken guys surprised me twice on Tuesday. Once by moving a boulder to form The Giant’s Teeth, and again when they built me a staircase of foundation stones. The stairs sit at the northwest corner of the house, which will be the kitchen. They reach from the end of the retaining wall up…
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