Linden
@kirindensetsu
Your wizard friend in the Japanese countryside. Gardening, antique restoration, long bike rides, and little animals. 🏳️⚧️ they/them
Appear to have hit the limits of my endurance, I slept in 4 hours past the usual time despite doing almost nothing done yesterday, and am ready to get back into bed. Got the edging strips done for the open shelves. Made from the back rails and stiles of the tansu that became the sink cabinet.
It becomes more kitchen-like! Painted and installed the shelf brackets + wired and bolted up the old factory lamp. Still futzing around with the hue on the shelf plywood. The shelf edges and the side of the pantry will be covered in leftover sink tansu wood, so that'll all match.
Fiddly and obnoxious work for Future Linden: deburring the antique cast iron shelf brackets. The raw castings have rough edges that would be difficult to wipe when cleaning the kitchen. They were made like this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_ca...
Looking down Hitokuidani to the plains. This is the old road down to town. Before it was built in the Meiji period, you had to either take the river, or summit and then follow the ridgeline trail to the end of the mountains. It has since been replaced by a tunnel.
That has a bullnose because it is, tbh, a fucked-up mixed media sculpture (also still waiting on finish plaster). But I like how soft and glowy the radiused corner looks next to the angles of the wood and the hewn faces of the beams, so all freestanding drywall edges are getting this treatment.
FINALLY done with this window after 2 years of waffling and ready to plaster the kitchen! It needed a curved frame, so we jigsawed the edges off at 45° and I sculpted in that bullnose with a rasp and Umaku Nureru's undercoating plaster.
WHO WOULD WIN: repetetive stress injury from working overhead OR the visceral disgust of the unfinished mud plaster walls sprinkling dust onto my food prep area
"La Parisienne" is really in just the right spot. The flowers are at eye level as you approach the door :) "Lady of Shalott" overshadowing "Distant Drums" and sending up shoots like it's fixing to hit 2m tall. I like the bright crocosmia against the dark hydrangeas. #bloomposting
I have achieved color matching between the 2-year-old and 100-year-old woodwork! I'm still layering on the polyurethane, goal is to get the whole wall and ceiling totally sealed in high gloss and then polish back to a satin-finish.
Had a harrowing drive back from Nagoya, I had to stop in Gifu and get a bag of ice for the bottom of each bird carrier because they were overheating :(
More from today's hike. I went up the mountain directly across the river from me, the one I can see when I look out the front door.
Hardest part of the kitchen project so far: this is a dedicated pull-out counter to give the rice cooker and electric kettle adequate clearance to avoid steaming the upper cabinets. I'm bad at drawer slides and I had to install *four*. The top will get mosaic tile, hopefully delivered tomorrow.
I picked Korochan up out of the gutter six years ago today. Happy gotcha anniversary to the world's luckiest bug!
I'm so glad the birds are with me instead of at the apartment, it's so much easier to be alive when I can look at them multiple times per hour.
Some of the little centers on hydrangea "Magical Chocolate" have opened and I like how they reduplicate the little white sparkles of dew on the leaves of the alchemilla. "Mizuiro no Koi" proving itself worth the ¥3600 I paid for it and making the others look washed out and underwhelming.
Wwe were all supposed to go back to Nagoya with Tatsu yesterday but due to interpersonal issues only Tatsu went back and birds are SOOOOO HAPPY not to have had to go for a late night car ride.
Tadaaaaa~ I cut down the door originally intended for the toilet room to cabinet size. The open bottom section will be basket drawers for onions etc. Shelves, face frames, and big screws into the wall studs tomorrow.
For my next trick: very tall pantry but the shelf fronts are ladder rungs to reach the high spots. I have gotten as far as laminating up some 8 ft long pieces of 3/4" plywood, because they don't sell it longer than 6ft and 12mm is about 1/3 the price of 25mm :|
WELP I fucked up and was half a cm too short to even fit the last row of tiles in but by scooting the top rows down .5mm each, sanding the kamoi, and taking a diamond file to the top row of tiles, I got them in there. Thankfully this is the last part where I'm tiling up to meet something.
Cutting these things sucks even more than cutting glass btw, you have to score the front and then gently tap the back with a hammer while you squeeze it in your hand until it snaps. They're too thin for the manual cutter and too thick for mosaic nippers.
I measured correctly, please clap!!! The lower half of this wall section gets covered by a steel heat deflector.
Making a 沓脱石 (check out the old kanji for kutsu there: it's 'shoe' but I only ever see it in architecture, like a pillar footing is a kutsu-ishi) out of fiberglass cement over foam, which will allow me to shove it out of the way of the snow shed in winter.
Tried to get a picture of them preening my hair but once the front-facing camera comes out all they want to do is video-call with Tatsu.
My tilting bulk bins are done and they work :D I got painty fingerprints on the insides of the bins while rushing to get them out of the rain, but I can sand them clean before the final polyurethane goes on. Still need knobs for the lids.
