At last I’m back with an update. A lot has happened over the past few months. I’ve been working on our renovation project pretty much nonstop, aside from a few breaks for some small commissions and teaching. But the big project dominating my time this year has been renovating our kitchen, and I’ll share the initial phase of that project here.
Like a lot of old houses in Japan, ours originally had a kitchen on the ground level, also known as the doma (土間). The doma in old folk houses was traditionally a utility space with an earthen floor, and like our house also contained the primary kitchen. In a somewhat unique design, our house had an addition with a separate doma with a wood fired hearth for cooking. Comparing the beams and woodwork of the addition as well as the doma in the main house it’s clear that the “dirty” cooking was done in the addition, since the beams in that space are black and sooty from years of cooking, while the beams in the main house’s doma are clean. So it seems that the addition was added to the house very early on, if not right from the get go. However it’s structure suffered a lot more than the main house, and at some point had undergone a series of repairs on the walls, foundation and roof.
Below is the doma addition. On the right is essentially an open air storage space, and on the left is a fully closed space with the old kitchen and wood fired hearth.
Here’s the roof line of the main house joining the roof of the doma addition. More on that later.
The appearance of the addition from the front isn’t terrible, but around back the condition of the structure looked much worse. A poorly done foundation repair was crumbling, and overall the structure showed many signs of decay and neglect.
The corner post is crushing down onto the crumbling foundation and the building has a considerable tilt.
Inside the ceiling structure was pretty cool though, with some nice natural log beams, blackened from years of smoke from cooking.
The next photo shows another type of repair that this structure saw at some point during it’s lifetime. There’s a section of wall which was repaired using mortar in place of earthen plaster. The wall was only repaired to look finished from the outside, so from the interior you can clearly see the mortar poking through the bamboo lattice. I’ve found a lot of mortar wall repairs like this on our buildings. I don’t know when the work was done, but it’s clear that at some point the earth walls needed work and someone thought mortar would be a good option.
Below is the adjacent space where the wood fired hearth was (I had already torn it out when I took this photo). Again the main wall here, is all mortar. At first glance it looks like it could be an earth wall, and that’s exactly what I thought when we first moved in. There are a bunch of problems I have with mortar, but for now I’ll just say that it’s a pain to demolish and also expensive to throw away.
All in all the structure needed a lot of work. The poor foundation was a big problem, and since the previous repair involved cutting back the posts to set them on a short (now crumbling) stem wall, it was unclear how to best fix the situation. In addition the roof was also in need of work, and was going to be particularly expensive to fix. So, after dreaming up a bunch of different ways to fix the structure, ultimately we decided that the best option was simply to demolish it. It made more sense to just remove it from the equation, allowing us to focus on the main house.
So let the demolition begin! I started by tearing down the mortar walls. Below the mortar was a wood lathe structure that was tacked onto the old earth wall.
Here’s the outside wall after removing the mortar and some earth wall sections as well.
And now with the wood panelling removed.
As I removed the walls, different parts of the building became more visible, particularly the roof structure.
With the walls stripped bare I started in on demolishing the roof. The roof had already been repaired at some point, and the original clay tiles were replaced by cement tiles which were starting to fail. I couldn’t get a truck in close enough to the building to directly load up the tiles, so I had to resort to laying down a tarp and just started tossing them down.
The tiles themselves came off super easy. The bigger chore was having to haul them from the tarp to demolition bags. In this work it often feels like you are constantly moving heavy piles from one place to another.
Here’s a closer look at the roof during demo. The ridge tiles were bedded on layers of mud, while the main field were set on spacer strips overlaying cedar bark. The cedar bark is actually a pretty incredibly underlayment, and it’s the same thing that we have under the original roof tiles on the main house. The bark sheds water really well in the event of water getting past the tiles, and it lasts a really long time (the roof on the main house is 120 years old and still going strong!)
With the cement tiles off, I moved onto to ripping off the cedar bark.
The cedar bark rested on thin strips of wood, which were nailed down to the rafters. Initially I started pulling up those strips with a crow bar but eventually switched to just sawing out chunks with my circular saw.
And here’s the structure with the rafters down.
The roof members of this structure are really quite small. On many of the buildings that I’ve had the privledge of working on here in Japan, the roof members were much more massive. Why this building was built this way is another of the many puzzling questions that have come up during this renovation project. In any case the small size of the members was really beneficial for me working solo during this demolition, since I could pretty much handle all the material without too much stress.
Looking towards the main house you can see where the ridge and purlins are joined to the roof of the main house. In another somewhat puzzling, but incredibly beneficial bit of good luck, the main house’s rafters and roof structure were left completely intact. In other words it appeared that the main house was built to completion and then soon after the addition was added on. I have no idea of the actual timeline of that work, but I do think the addition was added very early on, and many other little clues have pointed to that possibilty.
With the roof members gone, all that remained were the perimeter walls.
Here’s one particularly cool joint that I documented during demolition. The two larger beams are spliced together, while also locking to the post in the middle.
From above that joint you can just make out the long tenon from the beam on the right side of the image below. It is being locked to the beam on the left with a pair of wedges (aka shachi-sen 車知栓).
To disassemble the joint you have to pull the shachi-sen out. I did that by driving in a couple screws straight down into the shachi-sen, and then used a pry bar to pull them out.
Here’s another look at the main house with most of the old doma removed. All that remained at this point on the roof was some flashing. But otherwise all the rafters and roof substructure were left intact, which meant I didn’t have to do any work to amend the main house. That was incredibly lucky, since it saved me a ton of work. You can clearly see the lines of the old doma’s roof where it was joined to the main house. The blackened rafters and walls are from smoke from cooking on the old woodfired hearth.
For all the demolition work up to this point I was working solo, but we did call in a tile expert to come patch up the main roof for us. And he did an incredible job. He warned us the new tiles would be a different color from the old original tiles, and may be conspicuous, but the end result was really pretty subtle. He even managed to get end tiles with the same pattern as the originals which was really cool.
And that’s it for the old doma demo. It took about a week or so to do the actual tear down of the building, so not too bad for working solo. A lot of that time simply involved moving piles of material as each portion of the bulding came down.
From this point I started tearing open the wall of the main house, visible in the image below, to repair the foundation in preparation for the next project which was our kitchen remodel. More on that next time. Thanks for reading.
