Foundations

We went up to the building site yesterday for the first time in two weeks and, from the road, it didn’t seem as if there had been much progress. All we could see was that an electrical cable was now running from the main pylon on the road to the North West corner of our site. Next to the parking area, the temporary wooden steps were still in place, still waiting to be replaced by their future concrete counterparts. As we ascended the (more rickety than we remembered) wooden stairs, we were wondering to ourselves if anything had changed at all.

The top part of the plot told a very different story. The foundations are almost complete! It was quite a shock to see our entire house laid out in front of us like that – it was much easier to appreciate the size and shape than it was with just the string. First impressions were that the house is pretty big but the individual rooms and the garden look small. The latter is is probably partly due to the piles of earth and rubble that can be found near the edges of the plot and are eating into the garden space.

The concrete base for the foundations has been laid and there is some kind of plastic or polyethylene sheet covering it. If anyone knows what that is for, please let me know as I have no idea! Some kind of vapor barrier? Sticking out of the base layer are hundreds of vertical pieces of steel rebar, creating the cage into which the concrete will be poured. Using rebar helps to increase the tensile strength of the concrete, which is kind of important in a country where there are regular earthquakes. Apparently, bamboo can also be used but I’m more inclined to trust steel than something that can be taken down by a koala.

We’re pretty happy with how the house is situated on the site. There’s reasonable space on all sides, although traversing the space between the north wall and the parking space is a bit scary since currently there’s no roof over the car park and it wouldn’t be too difficult to fall off it into a crumple of bones below.

It’s also not only the house for which we can see the foundations but also the wood deck which will wrap around the master bedroom and the study on the ground floor. It also has a number of “mini-foundations” with a spray-painted line on the earth indicating where this will be. The deck is quite a lot bigger than we had envisaged, especially the part which extends out from the study. In hindsight, it might have been nice to have a bit more study and bit less deck but I still don’t think we would have changed anything – building deck is a lot cheaper than building house!

We’re still not sure what to do about the slope, although a friend who is staying with us for a few days and came to see the land with us came up with an interesting suggestion of planting bamboo there. This would need to be managed carefully, since it grows powerfully and quickly but it might be an interesting option and would certainly provide some additional strength to the land. Something to speak to the builders about I guess. Maybe we can get a pet koala after all.

I’ll try and get over to site later on this week so expect another update in a week or so. We’re booked in to visit the bathroom showroom at the start of June so expect to start seeing some more posts about interior stuff and more cosmetic things from then. Thanks to the new blog followers and for those sharing this thing around and talking about it with us. It’s great to have so many people experiencing this with us. Until next time!

Our house!

The narrow walkway separating the house and certain death in the car parking space.

The rebar frame. I think they were making the concrete riser blocks onsite - they look like those plastic Dominos pizza box tables.

East side of the house. Nice access for meters, air con boxes etc.

The walkway along the north side again. It's not that narrow really. Will be much safer with a roof on the right hand side.

You can just see the plastic sheeting in this picture. If you know what it's for, please tell me!

Double kids bedroom which can be split into two. Looks quite small. Sorry in advance, hypothetical children.

The mini-foundations for the wood deck, complete with ominous looking spikes. Kept well clear of these.

Oops. The wall fell down!

We've been to the land a few times recently to check on progress and things are moving on at a pretty fast pace. Unfortunately, it's a bit tricky to get there with work schedules being what they are and the fact that it takes around an hour on public transport from our current apartment. We are looking at buying a car in the next couple of months, assuming we can find some local parking, as this will help us to go to site more often and to the various showrooms and furniture shops that invariably are situated in the middle of nowhere.

The most recent trip was at the request of the builders. We have a shared private Facebook group through which we can communicate, share documents and photos and keep a log of progress. It's a really effective (and surprisingly modern for Japan) approach to doing things and has been working really well. We received a message on the group to ask if we could come to site as there were a couple of things to discuss.

Invariably, this leads to a certain element of worry and uncertainty as past experience has shown us that "things to discuss" have a tendency to be "things which will cost more money" and so again we left for the meeting with some trepidation about what exactly we were in for. I'm sure the builders don't mean to make us worry and it's difficult to adequately explain what's happened on an internet forum but I do wish there was some way that we could alleviate the fear of not knowing a bit!

Anyway, we got to the meeting to discover that in removing the steps on the eastern edge of the plot, the wall separating our plot from next door had collapsed! It transpires that the ground in that area of the plot is somewhat less solid than had been predicted and this caused the wall to give way. Thankfully, our neighbours have been very understanding and the builders have done a very good job of smoothly over any potential tensions, quickly offering a solution which was deemed cosmetically and practically acceptable.

The downside is that we will need to install six or seven additional steel pilings and, if I understood correctly, a kind of metal retaining barrier to shore up the ground before installing the new steps and the concrete walls for the parking space. Obviously this is likely to be a reasonably hefty expense and, since it's not a mistake but rather a discovered feature of our quirky plot of land, it's on us to foot the bill. Marvelous.

I think in these situations, it's always healthy to try and mitigate with a bit of positivity as far as one possibly can. In this instance, one such comfort is that we did get the land for a steal on account of it being rather difficult, and thus we do have a contingency for dealing with such problems (and indeed we expected a few). The other is that we at least know now that the land will be safe and stable and will have documentation to that effect. Aside from giving peace of mind, it's likely to be appealing to a buyer should we ever decide to sell and move on in the future.

The work is likely to delay progress by a couple of weeks which is unfortunate but not the end of the world. There was also some promising news this week that the government has extended the eco-subsidy that we have applied for from February to August and so there is a chance that, if the builders work quickly, we'll have a chance of having our application accepted. It's worth 800,000 yen so we're really hopeful of a positive outcome!

Here's some pictures of current progress:

Looking south. On the LHS, you can see where the wall fell down!

A view across the car parking space to the south west

The new slope where the old stepped wall was situated. Slope will be the part under the tarp. Gradient will be a little shallower than this and will feature flowers and trees (probably)

Looking down from the top of the plots at the parking space. The pole on the tarp is actually about where the north wall of the house will be.

View across the plot to the north west. As you can see, a lot more digging has been done in the last two weeks!

Large mound of earth under a tarp on top of the plot. Not sure what will happen to it.

Solutions, not problems

As you may be aware, in Osaka there was a pretty big earthquake recently, reaching a magnitude of 6.1 on the JMA scale. We were at home at the time in our apartment, a newish block which is presumably fairly well protected against such things. Since we’re on the 5^th floor, there was quite a lot of swaying and the earthquake itself was very violent. We both dived under the small table in the living room, me banging my head in the process.

The earthquake on June 18th

Luckily we both escaped from the quake unscathed but the 4 dead and 400+ injured were not so lucky. One of the fatalities was a 6-year old schoolgirl who was killed by a wall which crumbled outside her elementary school. Tragic.

As often happens following these events, building codes and policies are reviewed and renewed and we discovered that this would also affect our house. As you may have seen from the pictures and plans in previous posts, we had planned to partially remove the East end of the stepped retaining wall and to build a parking area in its place. This would have allowed us to keep the large stone steps to the West end of the wall, which we really liked. Furthermore, since groundwork in Japan is very expensive, we had been advised to make as few changes as possible to the wall.

Alas, the city office decided to reverse their acceptance of the original proposal and we had a lengthy message from the builders which said, in essence. “There’s a problem with the wall. You don’t have a lot of options. We’ll probably have to remove the whole thing. We need to talk”. It sounded rather ominous indeed.

The large, imposing two-stage retaining stone wall (二段擁壁) was always something we liked but we knew it was likely to cause us some building difficulties and we had somewhat accounted for this. In the second plans which radically reformed the parking area, we had more than used up this contingency. Further changes were far from ideal.

We began Googling to get a rough idea on how much this was likely to cost us which was absolutely terrifying. The first page we looked at said “don’t buy land with a two-stage retaining wall”. Oops. The next quoted between $20,000 and $100,000(!) depending on the nature of the problem. Our wall is big too. More-than-oops. What had we let ourselves in for?

We spent the few days before the meeting going through various scenarios and solutions, some more ridiculous than others (pickaxes at midnight etc.) and resigned ourselves to the fact that we would just have to wait for the meeting. We felt stupid for not having done enough research (can you ever do enough?) and were both really nervous for several days. It was extremely unpleasant.

Finally, the day of the meeting came around and we met with the builders in a coffee shop in central Osaka. We sat down at the table and prepared for the worst. Now at this point, I should mention that we considered anything less than $25,000 a “positive” outcome, up to $50,000 was terrible but wouldn’t necessarily kill the project. More than $50,000 was probably game over. Sell the land at a loss and start again or, more than likely, give up.

The building company were great. They didn’t present us with a problem, they presented us with a solution. (In fact, 2 solutions, the other more elaborate and vastly more expensive which they advised against.) In the time between discovering the problem and meeting us, they had consulted the city office, fought our case, consulted an expert, engineered and priced a solution and then produced a plan of it all.

There was a quick explanation of the problem and then immediately the revised paper plan was brought out. Everything had already been accounted for. Remove the second and third steps of the wall and replace with a slope on which we can plant flowers, grass etc. How much? Less than $10,000.

In your face, scary Google! It’s weird being happy about such a huge unexpected expense but everything we had read suggested this was going to be so much worse. There is such an investment of time and emotion and energy and resources into these projects that to have to confront the fear of potentially giving up is really harrowing. It reminded us that there’s so much we don’t know and we just have to hope that, through a mix of luck and, hopefully, the experience of our builder, we will get there in the end. Until next time. 

Our new slope