Unveiled!

The scaffolding is down!

Four words I sometimes thought we would never hear. Yuko and I went over to the house yesterday morning to discover the good news. For the first time in about 9 months, we could walk around our house again without having to duck under heavy metal poles or trip over bits of sheeting.

I know we are pretty biased given it's us making all the decisions here but we think the house looks absolutely brilliant. The mortar has lightened to a shade that we really like, one that blends nicely with the shine grey windows and sits really well next to to orange cedar cladding. We love the black windows on the front aspect and the way they tie in with the darkness of the roof above. They are an integral part of the overall palette of colours and shades that make up the outside impression of the house and we couldn't be happier.   

The guttering is mostly, if not all, up and it's quite a modern-looking grey colour. I can't actually remember choosing it but it's understated and looks smart, which I think is all guttering should ever really have to manage to be honest.

Getting to this point has been a mix of decisions. Small decisions, big decisions, long decisions, short decisions, easy decisions and tough decisions. The interesting thing is perhaps that there is surprisingly little correlation between the size and difficulty of a decision and its impact. Things like the orange cladding were decided in seconds, believe it or not. Other stuff that we spent hours and hours thinking about, we hardly notice.

Inside, lots of progress to report too. Downstairs, the walk in closet is taking more shape and yet more walls are being boarded up ready for wallpaper. It really won't be long before the wood flooring starts going in, as evidenced by the huge piles of boxes of it throughout the house. Unfortunately, we couldn't find an open one and couldn't bring ourselves to break one open. I guess we'll have to wait to see it!

Work has also finally started on the staircase, in the form of the initial steps outline being attached to the wall, a bit of banister frame and a few horizontal wooden bars. Aside from provoking the imagination a bit, the main effect of these changes was to make getting up the, now wobbly again, ladder pretty bloody difficult. Wearing a big, puffy winter coat, I had to simultaneously lie flat against the ladder, slowly scale it and duck under a wooden bar, whilst avoiding falling to a splintery death in the process. Yuko, who falls into a distinctly separate size and weight category, managed the ascent with fewer problems.

Upstairs, the framing of the ducting is now complete with the area over the kitchen and bar area boarded up on the underside. I like the way this has defined the room and given some texture and shape, but it's clear that we will be losing some of the feeling of space that we had before (although that 'space' never really belonged to us in the first place).

Elsewhere, small changes were the order of the day. Various holes with protruding wires have appeared for lighting, including the foot-level stair lights that we copied from another of the builder's houses. A hatch has been installed in the roof of the pantry to access some of the technical elements of the house. I hope we never have to use it! Walls are moving forward towards completion and there are other little changes that we notice here and there. All very exciting stuff.

We will likely head over again at the weekend for another look so I will update again next week. Speak soon!

The house unveiled!

Colour contrasting shows up really well here I think (ignore the yellow!)

The East wall of the house. Much easier to walk around now

The west wall, looking to what will be the deck

South wall. Laundry area

More colour contrasting. Upright still to be stained dark

Ceiling boarded up in kids room

The first step in making stairs. Note the holes and cabling

The central frame separating the stairs from the cupboard

View from the second floor of the staircase. Wobbly ladder on RHS

Ducting frame built in above the kitchen (LHS 230cm height) and bar area (RHS 195cm height)

Ducting frame around the top of the living room

Ducting frame looking north. You can see how it protrudes into the room about 60cm. All well above head height though

Living room from the NE corner. Still a decent size!

A final photo of the view over the balcony. Mortar looks good!

Changing Colour

As promised, here's the second installation this week, focusing on changes to the house itself. Thanks to all those so far who have commented on Facebook and messaged us about the garden. So many great ideas! Hopefully we can address some of them and show the changes were are thinking about incorporating in the next update.

Having said goodbye to the man from the landscaping company, we were then free to explore the house. On the outside, about half the grey mortar had been covered over with the outside, coloured layer. Finally we could see what colour our house is going to be!

Well, not exactly. Unfortunately, the coloured mortar was not yet dry which means that what we were seeing was a shade darker than the final colour. We actually liked the darker shade quite a lot! I guess it's lucky in a way that we didn't have the option to "pause" there and take the darker colour - whether to do so or to stick with our original choice and go lighter and brighter would have been a difficult choice. Thankfully, that's all hypothetical due to the laws of chemistry and physics so we will have to cross our fingers and hope we like the light mortar as much (I'm sure we will!)

Inside, there were quite a few changes, the major ones I will describe briefly below before the usual photodump at the bottom.

So here is the colour of the mortar as it was on Saturday afternoon. As mentioned above, it is going to get a fair bit lighter than this as it dries. This area was getting a reasonable amount of light though, so any shaded aspects of the house are likely to have a similar hue. I think it works quite well with the shine grey window frames.

Here, one of the workmen is putting up the kind of "false wall skirting" which will go around the top of the room. This will be used for cabling and ventilation as well as the ducting which will cycle heat from the upstairs back downstairs using a fan system. This allows the house to re-use warm air in a cycle. 

The skirting extends about 60cm out from the wall, partly at about 195cm height (in the far RH corner) but mainly at about 230cm. It will just look like wall when it's finished. It's a shame to lose some of the sense of space in the upstairs area but, then again, we wouldn't have even thought about this if we weren't building the house from scratch. These major details just dissolve into a completed house. I guess we are lucky that we get to experience both the before and the after and it will be interesting to see how this changes the feel of the room.

Finally the other side of the doorway is framed up for the pantry. The doorway is not as narrow as feared and just the simple addition of this framed part makes it feel more like an enclosed space.

The walk in closet that separates the study and the master bedroom is finally being built. This will house the sliding door on the study side. It will be very different once these three spaces are finally separated. The study and master bedroom can be swapped around at a later stage if we want to (since the Walk In Closet has two entry points). In hindsight, this was actually a very clever idea! Well done us!

At last! A completed ceiling. This is what the study looks like. The sloped roof is very noticeable and may take some getting used to. I wonder if it will be as obvious when the room is full of stuff and fully functional. That said, I am currently sitting in a room I sit in every day and can't imagine what the ceiling looks like without looking up so maybe we won't notice it as much as we think.

Here's the new access they have built to the upstairs toilet. Previously the bit on the left was missing so it looked like all one big toilet space without the "corridor". I quite liked the "big toilet" but Yuko said it was weird to have a toilet door right at the top of the stairs, even a sliding one. The toilet corridor is growing on me. We can put a nice picture on the wall at the end.

Right, that's the major bits taken care of. Below are a few more captioned photos. We'll be at the house again this weekend so will take some more photos. Speak soon!

Inside the new, smaller upstairs toilet

Walk in closet space (far end), large storage cupboard (near end)

Corridor alongside kids bedroom (RHS)

As above but from study (soon to be closed off)

Other corridor towards back door

Laundry room

Bathroom prep area (脱衣所)

Mortar and Cladding 2.0

Hi everyone. I hope you all had a good weekend. It's been 4 days since the last update and here we are with another one! Never underestimate the power of an imminent Japanese test to inspire you to do literally anything other than study. The kanji can wait - let's write a blog instead!

Yuko and I went to the house yesterday. We tend to visit on Sundays since this is the workers' day off and we have the whole place to ourselves. Whilst it's nice not to feel like we are getting in other people's way and to have unlimited time to explore, we do miss out on the chance to chat with the workers onsite. Other blogs we have read have mentioned the value of talking with their construction workers and using it as an opportunity to learn and ask questions outside of any regular meetings.

Unfortunately, due to our work schedules it just hasn't been possible to get to site as often as we would have liked during the week and so we have missed out on the opportunity to get to know our contractors better. That said, we do have a private Facebook group shared with our builders and various others involved in the construction process that allows us to have discussions, share links and documents, ask questions and organize schedules. Perhaps not as good as talking face to face but nevertheless a convenient alternative.

This week, there has been a huge amount of progress on the outside of the house. Where last week there were hundreds of horizontal wooden planks on the wall, now almost the entire outside has been mortared in a dark grey base layer. This has fundamentally changed the look of the house. We have gone from a Swiss chalet to, at least from certain vantage-points, a Cold War era Soviet administration facility. The nice, colorful mortar we have chosen should be going on soon though!

In the areas not covered in submarine-grey mortar, there is more of the orange wood cladding that we began to see last week. We absolutely love it. Not only have they color-matched it with the front door very well, the contrast with the darker roof above and, dare I say it, the contentious black window frames on the northern aspect is brilliant.  What we had thought was a nice color and texture variation has become one of the most striking and beautiful elements of the house. We can't wait to see what it looks like when the colored mortar is applied alongside it.

Inside, there has been more general progress everywhere although it is again evident that the outside has been the focus this week. More and more cabling has been run through the ceilings. How they keep track of it I have no idea. There are also several patches of wall inside which have been boarded over with a kind of yellow-covered board. I'm not sure if the wallpaper (or wood in some rooms) will be directly applied to this but it is certainly a step forward from seeing insulation and moisture barrier everywhere.

We'll likely visit the house again this Sunday so I'll try and get an update written up here early next week. The week after that will be our next meeting with the builders and we will also meet their recommended landscaper for the first time, which should be fun. The builders are also trying to come up with a more concrete finishing date so that we can start to make plans to move out of our rental. More details to follow, I hope. Stay tuned!

Cladding around the wood deck. Love the contrast with the roof

Study doors to deck

Infamous black windows. Will match the front door handle on the same aspect

The almost completed wrap around the study. A few more panels to go

Grey mortar. Looks alright with the shine grey frames but a bit bleak overall

Mortar everywhere!

Walls being boarded over. This is the kitchen

North wall of the living room being boarded over

View over what will be the dining table into the living room.

View over what will be the kitchen island into the living room 

View back from living room into the kitchen

Ceiling construction with more and more wires going in

Cladding (Both temporary and permanent)

Yuko and I went over to the house on Sunday, still suffering the after-effects of England's terrible defeat to South Africa in the Rugby World Cup final. Despite the pain in my heart and my head, we soldiered on to check up on the week's progress.

First impressions were...wow! The entire house was covered in horizontal wooden boards on the outside, making the whole thing look like a kind of odd Swiss chalet. It took us a couple of moments to remember that we were not in fact building a mountain hut and that these outside walls will mostly be covered in mortar. Indeed, closer inspection of the wooden planks revealed the insulation and weather-proofing material still visible in between. The more we looked at it, the more we started to think that it was actually pretty neat and I wondered whether we should just keep it as it is, before thinking better of it. It's a shame it will soon be covered with mortar perhaps but I guess mortar is a lot more hard-wearing than planks of wood and visible insulation.

That is not to say that the entire house will be mortared though. Around the study and the master bedroom, we have a stained cypress wrap and this is repeated over the balcony on the upstairs floor in the area which houses the sliding doors. Though none of this was in place downstairs, some of it had been installed on the balcony and it looks great. It's very bright at the moment but will likely weather with age and become a bit more muted. Either way, it looks pretty awesome. Yuko said it was 'bold' and everyone knows that 'bold' is synonymous with 'brilliant'.

Inside, there weren't any radical changes (I imagine cladding the entire house took quite a while) although more construction has taken place in the ceilings and there are a whole host of new electrical wires and plug socket housings. We have a meeting at the house on Saturday to discuss various things so hopefully we will be able to see some more changes then.

It's pretty crazy to think that we are likely to be moving in less than 3 months. Although the house and preparing to move is now taking up pretty much all of our spare time, it's sad in a way that this process is soon going to come to an end. Although there has been a huge amount of stress at times, we have really enjoyed doing this and sharing it with you all. I'll try and keep the updates coming at least once a week as we get towards the final stages. 

Best wishes to all and speak soon!

Our cladding, ready to be transported to site

Cladding in place over the balcony

Wooden paneling by the door

Paneled walls - will be covered in mortar

Will also be covered in mortar

Study wall - will be clad in cypress. One piece is already in!

As above but from a different angle, showing the study doors

Wood deck - wall (currently white sheet) will be clad with cypress 

Electrical cables everywhere

Ceiling construction has begun

More ceiling construction

Plug socket housing

View up the stairway to the roof terrace area

View from about 2.5m up. You can see the loft space above the Japanese room on the RHS