You can see Yatsugatake from the window

I hadn't realised this until one winters morning with a clear sky. This is exciting because Yatsugatake used to be the tallest mountain in Japan.

The story goes that Asama-sama and Gongen-sama were having an argument about which mountain was taller, Mount Fuji or Yatsugatake. Everybody knew that they were both really tall. Asama sama thought it was Yatsugatake, but Gongen sama thought it was Fuji. Gongen sama also thought that Fuji was much more beautiful.

To find out, they put a channel from the top of Yatsugatake to the top of Fuji, then put some water into it to see which way it flowed. Whichever mountain it flowed towards was surely the smaller one, and they'd be able to find out which was bigger. When they put the water in, it flowed towards Fuji, showing that Yatsugatake was taller.

This greatly upset Gongen sama. After all Fuji was so much more beautiful than Yatsugatake. So Gongen sama, in anger, caused Yatsugatake to break up into several pieces, and it wasn't taller any more. Yatsugatake's sister, Mount Tateshina, wept at his broken figure and her tears created Lake Suwa.

(Note, much of this was made up, or half-remembered, but there is definitely some kind of myth out there upon which it is based. It may have been Konohana sakuya hime...)

It's a nice story, overlooking a couple of issues with it. First of all, the logistics of building such a long channel would be significant. Not only would it curve significantly under it's own weight, but the curvature of the earth would mean that it was not straight.

Second, and more significantly, the name "Yatsugatake" means eight peaks, so called because of the rugged structure of the mountain after it was broken into pieces. So it wouldn't have had eight peaks in this story, and wouldn't have been called Yatsugatake.

Anyway, mythology aside, the story is plausible from a seismic perspective. There was very likely a volcanic eruption at Yatsugatake causing the massive mountain, which is much older than Fuji, to become smaller.

Don't even have to dream of one.

Christmas Day, 2011. 

It seems like every Christmas I've spent in Matsumoto has been white.

I'm dreaming of a working internet connection though. Also I keep thinking that we haven't really moved into a warm house and that I'm going to wake up sometime.

So what does it look like?

A lot of people have been asking, for the past year or two, what the house is going to look like. And they're talking about the colour and finish of the exterior walls.

Now we're in the lucky position of being able to tell them. To be honest, it hasn't been my highest concern, and I've usually just said "white", then added "ish".

Structurally speaking, the outside of the wall is made up of strips of wood, covered with a layer of tar sheet, then chicken mesh, then some kind of cement, then another piece of state-of-the-art mesh that will inhibit cracks, and then plaster on top. Sorry for all the technical terms and trade names.

The choice with the top layer was between painters and plasterers. The painters use spray guns and are cheaper, while the plasters do it by hand and cost a little more. We were all set to get the painters with their spray guns, but in the end they were all very busy, so we were lucky enough to get plasterers. 

This is a good thing, by all accounts, as plaster is more resistant to cracks and lasts longer. And we seem to have got the best plasters in the area.

As well as the state-of-the-art mesh just under the top layer of plaster, this was the first time they had worked on top of plastic brackets. There is 100 mm of insulation outside the structural frame of the house, and the insulator wanted to use plastic brackets to keep the insulation in place and mount the wooden frame for the external wall. Being a lot smaller than any kind of wooden structure, the plastic brackets improve the thermal performance. Hopefully they were all put on correctly and will be strong enough so it all holds in place! 

The other choice to all this is ready-made sidings, which I can't help feeling would have been cheaper and quicker. If we had used highly insulating sidings, it may have contributed to the thermal performance of the house, and possibly saved some headaches or costs somewhere else. Also sidings would presumably be relatively easy to replace after they have absorbed a few years of weather.

Also, I'm sure there is some way of having double wall layers, with an air gap in the middle fitted into the ventilation circuit in some way. The idea is a little vague though.

Anyway, now you can see what the house looks like from the outside, and it's white. ish.

It's been snowing

As I mentioned before there was a fair bit of discussion about what paint we were going to use, and how it was going to be applied. I think the most likely choices were Clay Paint and Chaff Wall. Both are eco products, whatever exactly that means. Clay Paint is imported from Europe, and made from natural ingredients, whatever exactly that means.

Chaff Wall is made in Japan, from scallop shells. I've always loved scallops, although I don't think that was too major a factor in our decision. In the end they used a spray gun rather than rollers, which ends up using more paint, although takes less time, so I think made no difference to the price. I can steel feel the smell of the paint in my nostrils, and a lot of the windows in the house were covered in condensation from it, but it was a bit like walking around just after it has snowed, when everything is pristine and beautiful. The electrician can start putting the fittings in now, and hot and cold water pipes can all be connected, and we should be in at the end of next week.

And now, in colour

We're going through the magical experience of seeing the plans really turning into a house. The black and white two-dimensional drawings had appeared in three dimensions, and now the drab colours of raw wood and plasterboard are being transformed by paint and wallpaper.

The choices have been involved and traumatic, but the results so far look great. We have now chosen every wall and every door, except the ones for the cupboards in the bedroom. We need to give a final answer on those tomorrow. 

Most of the walls are going to use a material called "Chaff Wall" which is made from scallop shells. Another option was a product from Europe called "Clay Paint". Both are Eco products which contain natural products, allow the wall to breathe, and absorb rather than emit harmful and unpleasant odours. Chaff wall also absorbs and releases moisture, helping to stabilise humidity within the house, and apparently works as an insulator, although this may be negligible compared to the 230 millimetres of insulation beyond it. 

The most important considerations are probably to allow any formaldehyde in the wood or other materials to escape, and to let moisture pass in or out of the wall, so that we don't get any condensation build up anywhere. 

Of course colour and texture are also important, and at first I was keen to get off-white, although none of the off-whites looked very nice, so we just went for White. Chaff wall looked nicer than Clay paint, and being a local product, it is used more widely so the painters will handle it. If we'd chosen Clay paint, the builders would have had to buy the paint, then get painters to use it, and they'd be lumbered with any left over.

Another choice we had to make was whether the paint should be applied by roller or spray gun. At first we were told that spray guns use about 50,000 yen more paint, so will cost us more. We began trying to choose from tiny samples, on which the spray finish looked much better than the rougher roller finish.  Once we ordered a colour, the painters made bigger samples for us, around 50 cm square, and the roller-finished one looked really good. We then spoke to the painter, who was also impressed by how good the samples looked and how difficult it would be to make the wall look like that as the roller needs to leave the wall at some point, where there will be some kind of a line. Small bits of wall would probably be no problem, although the ceiling, 10 metres across, may be more of a challenge, and he seemed to much prefer the idea of a spray gun. He was encouraged to tell his boss this, so that we won't have to pay too much extra for the paint, in view of the fact that we're making the job easier.

So when it comes to cupboards in the bedroom, which cover the bottom part of the west wall and the north wall, beyond which is the closet, I'm inclined to go for something dark, as there will be several metres of white wall above them, and on the whole of the east side of the room. We'll have to wait for tomorrow to see what the decision is.

Picasa ate my albums - Blogger beware

I've been using Picasa to store my thousands of photos of the house and put them into scores of albums, and it did something rather annoying the other day.

I moved my computer from its summer residence in the cool north room of the house, to it's winter residence at the desk in the dining room, which is much more pleasant and cheaper to heat as the north room plummets through chilly to frigid. This was a move I had hoped not to have to make, but I digress.

I keep my photos on a terabyte external hard drive connected by USB to my antique laptop. The USB connection was a little bit loose, and I think for this reason, and because I was running Picasa while it was connecting and disconnecting, it removed a whole load of photos from a whole load of albums. I assume it was connected to the disconnection, although it may have been due to some other Picasan quirk. The original photos are kept in a series of folders on the hard drive. I start to make a new folder after about three or four thousand photos, because it just gets too unwieldy for my antique computer to handle. Of course the photos should all be in one folder, and I should be using tags with them, but that's another story. In fact that's what I really got Picasa to do, because it can add tags to the photos, such as captions and locations, and it can put them in any number of albums, easily including the same photo in several albums, which the old file and directory system can't do so well, without either cluttering up the disk with duplicate photos, or causing the trouble of having to add links.

The other thing Picasa can do is to upload and sync the albums on your computer to your webalbums. This is really useful except for two things. First is that the sync only goes one way. If you change albums on your computer, the changes will be reflected online. However, if you change albums online, the next time you switch on your computer bound Picasa, it will revert all the changes to the version there. Because of this, if or when it starts eating the photos from your computer albums, it fairly soon starts to eat the same photos from your web albums. It did this until I realised and switched Picasa off line.

Curiously, Picasa didn't take all my photos out of the albums; it left photos from the most recent folder (August 2011 to present) and just ignored photos from the older albums (8th June to August 2011, and up to 8th June). The only rationale for choosing to ignore these albums could be that I had set it to always look for photos in the most recent album, but only look for photos once in the older albums. This seemed logical as the older albums were not going to change, and Picasa had no need to keep scanning them, but with hindsight, and if you use Picasa be warned, and if you develop Picasa, pull your finger out: Either set the album to scan always or never. Setting Picasa to scan a folder once is a foolish option, and may mark the path to misery.

If only we knew the results of our actions before we took them!

So with reference to the speedy and helpful Picasa help forum, www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa and one piece of sound advice that didn't work, and a piece of less sound advice that did work, the problem was kind of solved.

The first piece of advice led me to the folder where Picasa keeps its album info, in files called "PAL". No pal of mine though. There were several folders with dates from each backup, so it was straightforward enough to copy the full albums from an older backup into the latest folder, and hope that Picasa would use these, and put my photos back in my albums.

Picasa did not, though. Trying all the different combinations and reboots, and even changing the database id number in each file were to no avail. I took the more drastic advice of another writer on the help forum, and deleted the database, so Picasa had to build a new one. When I then resurrected the album data from an older folder, all the albums came back in their former glory. Everything was fine except, and I was worried this would happen, Picasa now ignored all the albums it had made online before, and proceeded to make another 86 webalbums, with identical names, and usually the same collection of photos. Of course the URLs for them are different, so now I have the old albums full of partial collections of photos that are pointed to by my blog, and the new albums to which I will be able to continue adding new photos of the house, containing forthcoming details such as paint, wallpaper and floors.

So instead of writing about it, I should really be going through the albums and blog posts, and fixing all the dead links, so that normal service may resume.

Pictures of windows - not recommended for any over-excitable readers - contains explicit pictures (of windows)

Just been going through the photos again and making many more albums and removing a tiny number of photos. Not sure if progress is going in the right direction.

I had just been throwing any pictures of windows into a "windows" folder--eat your heart out Bill Gates--but decided they should really be grouped with pictures of the same window. It was a bit tricky in a few places to work out which rectangular shape on a flat wall was being represented. I wish the computer would help, as it tries to do with pictures of people. They're getting better and better at face-recognition, but wall-recognition and even angle-of shot recognition in general have a lot of work to do. Perhaps it should be up to GPS and direction-sensors in the camera.

 

Anyway, among over 300 shots, there wasn't much fairness in the distribution between the 18 windows in the house. There were over 30 of the upstairs window on the west wall. I think my desk may end up under this, so I will probably continue to spend a lot of time looking at it. I've just noticed that in around the third shot the handle suddenly switched from the right side to the left side. This must have either been put in upside down, or switched for another window.

There were only two shots of this window in the washitsu, the Japanese room, at the north of the house. Here's one of them. I should probably start taking more pictures of this.

Actually the most pictures were taken of this window on the north, although most of them were taken, at around 10-second intervals, while it was being installed.  As usual, among most of the pictures several were identical, where I've been diligently charting progress on a daily basis of a process that is characterised by weeks of stagnation and then rapid change.

I think my favourite is this one in the kitchen though. Notice the sockets to the right creeping around with our prevarications.

Fred took some photos of the house the other day with his old Nikon and wide angle lens. It was a terribly rainy day, so the pictures are all inside. Apparently that's not a bad thing as the light is well dispersed. He was using a flash anyway.

These pictures are unusual as I'm in them. Also, there is an incredibly rare shot of me actually doing something useful in the house, rather than getting in the way, complaining and giving impossible demands.

I will always look at the bookshelf on the balcony with pride, as I had a part in its construction, even though it was only holding it up for about five seconds. I hope you like the way the carpenter and I wore matching T shirts too!

A complete photo album

The house is by no means finished, but we're not going to get any more shots from the far south west corner, as there's now a house in the way. I just went through the album on Picasa and thinned out the photos from over 70 to 36. Please enjoy the slide show! It starts off with the boiler being lifted in before they put the roof on.

Photos of the outside of the house are easy. You just have to stand far enough back, and that's what it will look like. Taking pictures inside is much more tricky if I want to give an idea of what it looks like.

36 views of Matsumoto Passive House

A couple of weeks ago I clocked the camera memory stick. I've been taking pictures of the site since they first laid out bits of string to mark the footprint of the house, back in December last year. I've been deleting old pictures from the camera each time to make space for the new ones, and just caught up with the first pictures of the plot.

At the beginning I took four pictures, one from each corner of the plot. I'm still taking the same four pictures, adding each one to a separate album.

Actually, there are many more than 36 views. There are now over 90 albums, most with a series of pictures taken each day from a fixed spot inside or outside the house. On a busy day I'll take over 100 photos.

The slideshow above is the biggest album, the view from the South East corner of the land, with 130 photos. To the right is the latest angle, looking at where the boiler as going. I wish I'd started taking this shot sooner. The back wall is already finished. 

You can see all the albums here on picasa.

I've wanted to change the name of an album a few times as the situation changes. Unfortunately, the name of the album is included in the link to the photo, so once I've used the link it's not a good idea to change the name. The names each made sense at the time.

Another thing that seems to happen is that I'll start taking a shot from an angle, then something will appear right in front of the camera, blocking the view.

This happened with two of the original angles, when a wire frame appeared in the shot from the North East corner, and a portaloo appeared in the view from the North West.  

More recently they moved the boiler, still in its box, right into the middle of the shot from the South East corner inside the house. 

I think this view of the four corners of the house is nice, and shows how the walls are developing.  

Publicity - Probably not for publication

A couple of banners have appeared on the North and East of the house, visible from the the road.

Before	After

It may be a coincidence, but the day before this, during a meeting, the architect casually announced that the insulation contractor was going to be showing some people around the site next Wednesday.

The boss of the builder didn't take too kindly to this, saying that he should have contacted me first, with it being my house. I suggested they should have contacted him first as it was his building site.

It'll look nicer when we get the wallpaper up...

... and the walls.



This is the upstairs.


Here's the view from the south-west corner.

All in a day's work

Yesterday there was blue tarp, filled with puddles, and today it looks like a house.

When I got there a little after 8am, most of the pillars for the first floor were in place. When they knocked off a little before six, they had reached the roof. Tomorrow they should get the rafters and the bottom of the roof on, and it will be ready for the solar panels, which arrive on Tuesday.

It's impressive what seven men with tabi on their feet and tools belts around their waists can do with a crane and seven truckloads of wood. 

The wood was all ready cut and in many places it looked like a giant puzzle that had been set for the carpenters by the architect, who was standing watching from the edge of the site for a lot of the time.

It's amazing how quickly this has turned from a stagnant pool of concrete into something that really resembles the house that we've been planning for the past two years. It's a bit like a sumo bout where they spend half an hour position themselves and eyeing each other up, then the action is over in about three seconds.

Yesterday I was looking at puddles in tarpaulin, and today I was walking around upstairs. A link has finally been made between the building in my head and a solid and substantial house we can live in!

Four corners

This works better than the stereo vision. Soon there'll be pillars sticking up from each of these corners.