Heating Pipes and Staircases

Winter greetings everyone - just a week to go until Christmas! Things are certainly winding down here in Japan so this will be one of the final updates for 2019. Yuko and I have another 3 trips over to site in the next two weeks but I can't promise we will be able to get any blogs up. Mum is coming over from the UK for 9 days and we will be out and about touring Japan (she has no idea where we are going yet!).

This week our house was tested for air-tightness using a kind of big mechanical fan and a computer in order to generate the readings. Our builders take air-tightness pretty seriously with insulation and correct sealing a priority at all stages of construction. Their aim in our case was to create a house that 'leaks' less than 1.0cm2 per m2. Our reading came out at 0.6cm2, which some Googling and consultation with other house builders we know tells us is excellent. 

To put that in perspective, another family we know with a Passivhaus-type house in the North part of Japan (much, much colder and snowier than Osaka) had a reading of 0.4cm2. Burning 6 logs on their wood burning stove in the evening keeps their house warm until the evening the next day. If we can get anywhere close to that, we'll be very happy.

Last Sunday we headed over to the house just after lunchtime to discover that the mortar has lightened a little bit since the last visit. The slightly brighter colour looks great, especially when it catches the sunlight. Other than that, the house is pretty much identical on the outside, although the side walls of the penthouse on the roof now match it in colour (this may have happened a while ago but the only place to see the penthouse is by looking back from the second floor balcony, which we kept forgetting to do).

Inside, there are some relatively big changes. Firstly, we now have a staircase from the ground floor to the living room floor. The woodwork looks excellent (although most of it is under protective covering) and the gradient is perfect. Holes for foot lights and switches for turning them on are all where they are supposed to be and the wires are labeled correctly. The cupboard under the stairs looks like it will be spacious and practical. 

The only problem currently is getting up and down the staircase. Since they are still preparing to build the stairs from the upstairs up to the roof, the second floor has temporary boarding in place over the new stairs with a small hole through which to emerge. This means that the second part of the climb from downstairs involves crawling up like a tortoise. Going down is not much easier.

Upstairs, the ducting is now pretty much all in place and mostly boarded over. We were probably lucky to catch it this week as before long it will be completely covered up and we will no long be able to see how it works. I'll use the photos below to explain it as best as I can:

The black thing is the fan that draws warm air from the living room upstairs through the long silver pipes hidden within the ducting around the top of the room. This fan will eventually connect up with a downward pipe on the LHS of the picture above which will transport the warm air downstairs. It is then released through vents in the downstairs floor, heating the downstairs areas of the house. The hot air then rises and is blown back down again, creating a cycle.

Here you can see how the pipe runs inside the ducting. A few more days and this will all be covered up.

Here you can see how the ducting runs along the top of the room. It has encroached a little bit on the highest point of the ceiling and the room does feel a bit different now it is filled in, although it actually frames the space quite well I think.

At the top is the little window through which the hot air will pass into the pipe.I guess it is going to have some kind of vent or grate across it rather than just a hole. Interesting that such a simple looking hole in the wall hides a relatively complex system behind it.

Pretty clever eh?

I guess that's where I should wrap up for this entry. I'll put the remaining photos we took below with a comment under each as per usual. I'm hopeful that I will get another entry up before the end of the year but you never know. Time always seems to get away from me in December. If for any reason I don't manage it, have a very happy Christmas and a great start to 2020.

Machinery for measuring air-tightness

The cupboard under the stairs!

Looking down from loft space above the tatami room at the upper stairs construction

Loft space above tatami room

What will be the top of the stairs. The penthouse entrance!

Corridor leading towards the kids room

Looking back down the same corridor

Kids room. Can be split in two at a later date around where the brush is 

Roof terrace walls

Mortar colour. It's a bit lighter than before

Colour combination

Final gratuitous photo of the house

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)

Landscaping

Good morning! I hope everyone had a good weekend. This is hopefully Post 1 of 2 this week since there is too much to cover in a single update. A good problem to have I think!

Yuko and I went for a house meeting on Saturday morning at the building company's office. Outside a group of workers were busy replacing the old iron roof of the main company building. It was pretty mesmerizing watching the roofers bouncing around the scaffolding removing pieces. I'm amazed how quickly they worked, and without ropes either! 

This was also the first time this winter that the builders were using the wood burning stoves so inside the office was very warm and cosy. The smell from the burning logs was a further reminder that we are nearing the finish line and it won't be too long before we can be enjoying winter fires of our own. 

On that note, we have a notional handover date of the last day in January. We are pragmatic enough to know that these things don't always work out as planned but we do at least have a date in the diary. I have an overseas conference to attend a week later followed by a trip back to the UK so we're doubly hopeful that we can stick to that date. If we can't, we will deal with it. As I've said countless times already, we are used to waiting.

At the meeting, we mainly discussed the kitchen and the position of taps and handles. We added a towel rail to be placed just below the sink from the same ironmonger who is supplying the cabinet handles. We also decided to change one of the plug sockets on the island from a Japanese 2-pin to an American 3-pin (which has an additional round earth pin). We have a couple of American kitchen appliances that we figured it would be nice to use without an adaptor. 

(The voltage in Japan is 100w which is compatible, although appliances may be slightly underpowered since America is 120w. We are lucky that Osaka has the same frequency (60hz) as America, whereas in East Japan it is 50hz and things like timers and clocks may not work properly.)

The main focus of the meeting, however, was to discuss the landscaping and so we talked about this with our builders before meeting the landscaping company themselves on site. It was quite nice to be able to do this first since our builders are a 'neutral' third party and don't handle the landscaping themselves. They have referred us to a landscaper who has worked with their previous clients but there has been no hard sell or anything like that - we are free to use this landscaper or not. Discussing the proposals before meeting the landscaper gave us a chance to think and ask some questions, especially valuable since neither of us know anything about landscaping!

When we first saw the drawings provided by the landscaper, we were both pretty taken aback. It looked like something out of a magazine! As you know, our plot is currently blessed with a rather ugly, overgrown slope of unusable land that we have always considered to be restricted to "damage limitation" in terms of what we can do with it. This proposal somehow seems to have taken the difficulties of that sloped area and turned it into a feature in itself. At the same time, practical improvements to provide access and utility have been added. As you will see below, it would be quite the transformation!

After looking at the proposals, it was time to head to site to meet the landscaping company. The representative was a nice guy who listened to our questions and gave sensible advice. I imagine he would be pretty easy to work with. He also seemed to be well in tune with the idea of prioritizing certain things in order to fit a budget. This is not a given at all in Japan where conversations frequently involve questions like "do you like it?" without considering the cost. I might like a tree if it costs 8000 yen but I like it a lot less at 80,000 yen! He seemed to appreciate this.

Anyway, onto the pictures! Just to remind you, this is what the slope currently looks like:

The current slope

And here are the proposals:

The landscape plan

View from the road

Proposed materials, plants, trees and samples of previous work on sloped gardens

Here you can see the basic idea. The left hand side could feature a small tree with ground coverage behind and a few strategically placed stones. We talked about whether or not we even need to have a tree there, especially given that the house next door has 3 trees already not far from that area. I think on balance we would like one but it may not survive the trimming of the budget.

On the right hand side, you can see how they propose to use the slope. The main feature is a kind of zig-zag stone pathway built into the side of the slope, culminating in a horizontal path at the bottom, also in stone. In front of the path at the bottom is a 1 metre high fence which gives some privacy as well as a line of demarcation between the end of the garden and the road. I think we could potentially lower this by 20cm.

Ground cover (I believe kind of like wild grass with flowers and other things) is again in abundance with a number of strategically-placed trees to break things up. We talked with the landscaper about changing some of these to fruit-bearing trees to give us nice things to eat as well as visual stimulation. No problem at all, apparently.

One thing that is unlikely to survive the budget trimming and that we are not even sure we want anyway is the line of trees extending into the garden at the top. Whilst they would provide some privacy protection from the house in front, there is currently no one living there and we may wish to use that area for additional flower beds or lawn. In the hot summer, small trees there would provide a bit of shade but only for the first floor and all of our living spaces are upstairs anyway. We could always add some more trees later if we wanted to.

The quote we had requested didn't include the laying of lawn for the rest of the garden as this is something we were planning to do ourselves. We did however ask for the landscaper to quote for doing this too, since neither of us has any expertise and we don't have any tools. If it's reasonable, we may just ask the landscaper to do it for us. 

All in all, the landscaping would take about 2-3 weeks if we opted to go with this company and it seems that they could probably carry out the work whilst the house is being built (although it might be easier to wait until afterwards). We will wait to see what happens to the quote after removing and re-specifying a few things but we are pretty impressed with what they have come up with overall. Interested as always to hear what you guys think!

I'll hopefully be uploading another post later in the week with developments on the house itself so look out for that. In the meantime, have a great week and speak soon!