Straw Roof Finished, Floor uncovered & Window front OK

Just some photos of the house.

Kobayashi has finished the roof and done a marvelous job. Last time I saw it it was all rough, but he went in with a hedge cutter, and now its really nicely trimmed, and looks sharp!



He also replaced the metal structure on the top and painted it a more pleasant brown, as opposed to the striking red we had before.



On this view you can still see the light blue on the metal roofs. I need another sunny day to finish painting it.



The Kabeya-san, finished plastering after Kunihara-san put the windows in their frame - it looks fantastic!





Having basically completed his work, Kunihara-san uncovered the wooden flooring and put all shoji's and doors in (I took a photo of Shojis too late in the day and it was too dark).

Blue Paint Scrub

Besides making bricks, our second focus today was get started on the cleanup of the metal roof covering entrance, kitchen, toilet and bathroom.

Peter Amor and I got up on the roof and first started scraping off old paint, and going over the roof with metal brushes.



The remnants of the old paint was difficult to get off, so we only tried to clean up around the rusty spots, but even only that was a lot of work.



A great sunny day - but it was very hot on the roof!



The Kunihara's were working inside, and whenever they came out they had to laugh about our effort. We had tea together near the open window, an excellent way to enjoy such a pleasant day.



Back to work, we started putting on paint. The instructions say that you should start with the edges and seams, and then to the space between. As we were two people, Peter used a large sponge for the flat bits, after I painted every seam.



For the Moment we kept the blue colour, so that we can avoid painting the entire roof, and just to quickly finish sealing the roof before the rainy season starts. Maybe next time we will try a darker brown colour on some patches to see how it looks. Because the paint is not so expensive, we could always use a nice day to change the colour later.



We could not complete the entire roof, because there is still some scaffolding for the straw roof in place. In any case we ran out of time, as we still had to drive back to Tokyo. Perhaps next time we can tackle the lower roof, and finish the remaining bit on top.

I don't know how they did it, but for some reason Peter and Victor managed to get themselves covered with blue paint all over the place. This is particularly baffling in Victor's case, as he only spent about 30 seconds with the paint can. And for some reason his hands stayed blue even after the Hot-spring!