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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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Witch’s broom
Amongst the many branches I ran through the chipper last month, I found one that I set aside. It was the perfect shape my my hand and a good length to become a handle for something. After the jichinsai, the bamboo altar was dismantled and tossed on the burn pile. Before burning, I took a
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