Car park and gate

Our car parking space and gateway was possibly the subject of more intense discussion and revision than the house itself, especially as there was an inclination to scrimp on it. Here is Hidaka-san of Hidaka Planning ... planning. The gateway looks quite nice, even if the people who actually built it didn't exactly follow Hidaka-san's plan to the letter.

The concrete was 'washed out' to make the little stones stand out for a 'natural' look.

The bricks that were left over from coating the house were broken and laid in cement as the path between the gate and the front door.

And apropos of nothing in particular, another beautiful sunset.

Moving house

So at last, on March 24, we moved into our new house.

The long-lasting pattern of fine weather on weekdays and miserable weather at the weekend held true, and Friday's sunshine gave way to squalls of rain and wind. We chose a cheap and cheerful mover who boasted a lot of experience at moving pianos, and everything went smoothly. Even the rain cooperated by not falling when the important things were being moved.

Moving house is a tiresome business, with frantic tidying and arranging at both ends, followed by days of not really knowing where anything is. I shoved my camera-PC cable into a running shoe for safe-keeping at the last minute, and couldn't find it again for two weeks.

But taking a bath in the evening made it all seem worthwhile. The water stayed warm right to the end, rather than palpably losing a degree of heat every minute in the old house. And when we got out, there was no running in a desperate naked crouch to get in front of the smelly kitchen stove. Instead, we could stroll about in comfort, remarking on how pleasant it all seemed.

Open day

Today Selco Home held an open day at our house the weekend before we move in next week, to show the public the finished item. But it's not really finished. The kitchen lacks a cooker, the solar hasn't been connected, and the balcony is still just a steel frame.

The wooden parts around the ground floor roof are being stained white to match the top roof.

The cardboard is finally off the front door. It's a Tostem aluminium door made to look like wood. And indeed, it looks like wood.

The protective boards have been taken off the floor, and the pine wood flooring has been waxed. We were surprised at the brightness of the interior, with the light reflecting off the floor and walls. The colours are very easy on the eyes.


The lights have also been installed. We choose lights with an antique, Taisho-ero look. The light manufacturers have only a limited selection of types that accept fluorescent bulbs, so our choices involved some compromise. I'm satisfied with them. The missus says they look cheap. I reckon that when they get some dust sitting on them, they'll look just dandy.

One of the problems with building and furnishing a house in the Provinces is that the makers don't really care about the requirements of yokels for style. If you want something, you have to pick it out of a catalogue, and you have to judge by just one small photograph. The lights on the stairs looked odd to me in the picture, and in fact, they are a bit odd. Myself, the missus, the young master, and Kawabe-san the builder spent many minutes figuring out whether they looked best facing up or facing down. The jury is still out.

"Antiques"

We've been looking for nice furniture to replace some of our heavily worn and frankly broken sticks. We put up with our kitchen chairs while they were still spattered with breast milk, but when the backs broke and I glued them together as best I could ... we still put up with them, although we took care not to lean back too hard and get impaled on the broken stumps. But up with that we will no longer put.

There is a nice antique shop at the bottom of the hill that specializes in English 'antiques'. Most of it is stuff from the 60s of the kind that I was brought up with, although they do have some older things. The owners are very engaging and talkative folks and the master of the shop frankly told me, "We make our living from other people's rubbish". I was quite taken with some of their rubbish and purchased a piece.


I don't think they are quite as familiar with English furniture as me, nor as aware of the history of materials. This item they reckoned was '1930s'. But it cries out '1970s!' (or thereabouts). The wooden frame is held together with hex head nuts which weren't used in furniture until fairly recently. And that 'leather' has a distinctly composite look. Indeed, where its slightly ripped, it has a fabric backing that says 'leatherette' to me. Also, to clean it up, I used some Redwing boot fluid on it, and it didn't drink it up like real leather does. Oh, and the leatherette cushion is attached with Velcro, invented in 1941.


Still, it's an exceedingly comfy slouch chair, especially with a slouchy off-center posture, with one leg cast over the side. I'm not sure that 1930s furniture was built to allow slouching quite like that.

We were also looking to replace our battered kitchen chairs, and looked at some real antiques. But most of them were ricketty, especially when they were in sets. Today we bought a fake antique oak chair at a big discount in a sale, and we're hoping to round out the set with three more (a bargain, even at the full price).

Moving the compost

By the simple expedient of throwing all our kitchen waste into a palisade of bamboo and waste fencewood, we reduced our weekly rubbish output by more than half. I believe the Medievals called these 'middens', but nowadays we call it 'the compost'. I built the enclosure one afternoon to the undemanding ISO Good Enough gardening standard, and it served very well for several years.


Over more than two years, it never actually produced any compost that I could use regularly, even though I chucked in huge quantities of food waste, autumn tomato vines, fallen leaves, and Special Lignin Breakdown Fluid. However, when it came time to dismantle the midden, the bottom half was nearly-black organic matter with worms holding little orgies in pockets here and there. They all went into my plastic bags for transfer to Hojo. Besides worms, there were fruit flies, and soldier flies, earwigs, and woodlice were well represented. I regret to say that in the summer, there were also mosquitoes. There were also a number of spiders, slugs, milipedes, and great big white beetle lavae.


The dark composty bits at the bottom of the heap are now gracing the tops of my beds in Hojo. Carrying really big bags of compost up and down steps is a little bit knackering.

Sweet liberation

Ever since I came to Japan, we have had to rely on kerosene for heating and sometimes for hot water. You either have to go and get it, or wait around for somebody to bring it to you. And it stinks, as liquid and as exhaust. It is a very un-ideal heat source. And we're going to be free of it in two weeks' time.

In our current house, we have two jerry cans for decanting into kerosene fan heaters, and a tank round the back of the house for hot water. The tank has to be kept filled, which means going behind the house and checking the kero level gauge. Forget about it and your water will suddenly go cold on you (we never let this happen, primarily because the compost heap which I visit daily is located next to the tank, so it was easy to check it). When somebody is using hot water, the metal boiler emits a stinky exhaust which blows in through any open window. Nice!


Every Saturday, a smelly kerosene truck comes round playing a loud, obnoxious jingle with a child singing about huddling around the bonfire. A very obsequious young man pumps out the Devil's Tea into your jerry cans and boiler tank while you stand around shivering. If you happen to want to be somewhere else between 10 and 11 am on Saturday morning, well, too bad.

The first of several bird boxes

Today we made our first bird box out of wood scraps from the house. The young master cut the wood in a somewhat unmasterly fashion, and I hammered the bits together. The result is reminiscent of a Normandy pillbox, but I hope the little birds won't be bothered by its stark lines.

We stuffed some straw inside in the confident expectation that birds who are happy with a jerry-built home also have no objection to pre-installed straw.

We'll have to find somewhere a bit higher than this stump to install it.

It occurred to me that a free bird-box with every home purchased would be a surefire, environmentally-sensitive marketing tool for any builder, so I took the liberty of branding our box.

Something with a nice sloped roof and a cute little round hole would obviously be better suited as a sales draw. And it would probably appeal to more customers if it didn't have the root of a thornbush nailed crudely to the side of it as a perch.

Inside the house, the carpenters have done an excellent job with the built-in fixtures. (Although I'm sure I heard one of them snort when they saw our bird-box...)

My office. A huge slab of wood for a desk, with holes for cables, a slot for two computers, and a raised dais for my monitor. The architect seems to believe that I consult a lot of books in my daily work, so generous provision has been made for a library.

The young master's room. This one isn't half bad either. It faces south and seems to be the sunniest room on the ground floor.

I keep showing pictures of this. I guess I'm just really pleased to have a chin-up bar in my house - I can't fathom why every house doesn't have such an obviously essential feature. Now I'm especially tickled by the fact that my head-slot has elegant casing running round it. This is the view from the little shoes 'n coat room next to the entrance. I'm sure it'll become a habit just to bang off a few chin-ups when entering and leaving the house.

We have the power

Solar's up now. Unlike Al Gore, we have gone to the expense of putting some panels on our house.


The advertisement for Sharp will have to come off, as it's our house and not Sharp's.


While the panels aren't exactly in keeping with the Georgian style, they do blend in with the roof a little better than I'd expected

Talking of Georgian style, the brickies have been busy grouting between the bricks to make it look reely reely authentic.

Inside, the plaster board is now on everywhere, and the carpenters have been burning the midnight oil to put up shelves and casing. They also put in a very nice piece of pipe for me to do pull-ups on, with a little niche for my head to fit into in case I get muscular enough to bang my skull on the ceiling. Great stuff.


When I climbed up the scaffolding to look at the solar, I was struck by what a mess my garden plot looks like. It looks like landscaping care of early humankind.

Clover seed

Today we went to Tokiwa Garland, an excellent garden centre in Matsuyama, and bought 5 litres of white clover at 1,500 yen per litre. The seed is unfortunately produced in New Zealand as Japanese farmers, who used to plant clover in their winter rice paddies, have stopped using it. Clover grows on nearly every kind of soil, fixes nitrogen, makes bees happy, provides good ground cover, and can be slashed to make green manure. Feb~Mar is the planting season (if you didn't plant it in autumn. I broadcast a load of seed over the food garden where I haven't made raised beds to protect the soil. In the recent rain, the top layer of soil had already formed a hard crust of little stones that had to be broken.

The seed is finer than sand, and more slippery, so broadcasting it by hand is an interesting excercise in not letting it all slip through your fingers in one place. I also had to wait for blasts of the February wind to finish before I started each new patch.

I was pleased to see that our rainwater butt has arrived, and even though it holds 1,000 litres and is blue, it isn't as big nor as ugly as I'd expected. More on this later when it's installed.

Inside the house, the insulation is now nearly all covered with plaster board. The 2-by-6 construction with plaster board makes a satisfyingly thick wall.

On the outside, the brickies have been busy and nearly all the brick facing is on. This makes the walls even thicker. The bricks present a different face under the varied lighting conditions. The finished house should look rather smart, if I do say so myself.

Glancing light

In the glare of the westering sun

The kitchen stuff has also arrived, and apart from the unnecessarily gold handles on everything, it's pleasantly subdued. The carpenters also seem to be doing a good job.

Bricks

The digger and truck team finished their work, and in place of huge chunks of concrete and asphalt in solid clay, I now have lots of fragments of concrete and asphalt distributed in powdered clay. This is an improvement, but still requires work. This part belongs to my wife's uncle, and he's picking up the tab for the waste disposal. Hopefully he'll be able to charge it to the estate agent that sold it to him as 'housing land' without mentioning the construction waste buried in it.


There's so much space here that I've decided to dig a pond on this part too. Hopefully it will attract birds and amphibians that will eat slugs and insects, and it may help to keep plants watered too.

Today the 'brickies' were in. While young 'snowboard-type' lads cut steel railings and nailed them to slats nailed to the walls, some older men attached and bonded the brick facing to the railings.
The gap between the steel rails and the walls should also provide a certain amount of insulation.

As with everything else, the work is being done quickly, efficiently, and tidily. Each task takes far less time than I expect.

Grouting will be used to fill in the gaps and hide the metal underneath, making the house appear to be built of brick rather than wood. It should make the house quite nicely fireproof too, from the outside at least. Most people seem to favour white grouting for a gaudy, harlequin look, but we're having grey for something a bit more subdued.


The unit bathroom has also been put in. One wall is made to look like dark wood with a glossy finish, and the effect is quite pleasing. Unit bathrooms have come a long way in the 16 years I've been studying them.

Yesterday the young master and I dug a pond, and today I added two smart new rows, duly photographing the developments. Unfortunately, I mistakenly deleted them from my camera before downloading them. This Alzheimer's like behaviour is a bit upsetting.

Hello regular visitors!

I'd like to say hello and thanks to my regular visitors around the world. I often wonder who you are...

Concrete disposal

Today I got up at an un-weekend-like 7 am to rush to an 8 am rendezvous with a digger-and-truck team to implement a final solution to the concrete under my soil. I was wary on the roads because I expected the ice-melt from Friday's snowfall to be still frozen. It wasn't. Local word has it that the weather is different on either side of the tunnel between Matsuyama and Hojo, and it seems to be true - there was no snow on the ground on the Hojo side.

My uncle had called a friend in Hojo who called another friend who runs the Hojo Dosha earth-moving company located within view of our house. They were there with a 2-ton skip truck and light digger. We worked from 8:30 am to 5 pm and still the waste concrete and asphalt was not out of the ground. We got most of the gross stuff out, but I'm going to have go over it inch by inch to get out the little lumps of asphalt. The soil itself is clay with bits of quartz, and it compacts into a very hard mass when weight is applied. We applied several tons of weight to it today. The gents are coming again on Monday to finish the job.


On Friday I read an interview with Roscoe Bartlett who is bothered about Peak Oil

One barrel of oil is the equivalent of 25,000 man hours of labor. That's like you having 12 people that work exclusively for you for one year, and all it costs you is a little over a hundred dollars. That's the $50 for the barrel of oil and maybe $50 for refining it. And you get that kind of labor intensity. The energy intensity is just phenomenal. I have a little personal experience.

I too have a little personal experience. Digging out one block of a concrete, dragging it up and out of its hole and down the slope was a huge effort. Watching a small~medium sized digger just scraping up bucket-loads of concrete blocks effortlessly in minutes using the energy intensity of fossil fuels really brought home to me the significance of our energy use. It would have taken me three years of weekend work to clear what we managed in a day.


I really wanted to do all the work 'under me own steam', but it would simply not have been done, and all the benefits of homestead vegetable production (projected) would have been lost.


Today Selco Home was having an 'open house structural inspection' at our house to show everybody how good naked 2-by-6 looks, and how warm it is unfinished with just a couple of small stoves running. Nobody came. It's their loss. Selco had prepared some fascinating exhibits, including comparisons of 2*6 and 2*4 with glass wool, and 2*4 with cellulose insulation.


The stairs have also been put in. It's amazing how the addition of stairs makes the house seem much bigger. It's been a roller-coaster ride. When the foundations were done we grieved about how small it would be. When the first floor was done it looked big. Then the second floor made it look pokey and small. Now with the stairs in it looks just right. It's weird.

Looking exceedingly good upstairs.