Tomobe House – Week 1

First things first, I want to say thanks to everyone for the well wishes and comments in the last post where I introduced our new home/project. It’s been a little over a week since we more or less moved into our new house in Tomobe, and a lot has happened. There’s no shortage of work to be done inside and out and we pretty much dove in as soon as we arrived.

I spent most of the first day just running a weed whacker through the yard knocking back the weeds. The yard really turned into a jungle with weeds as tall as myself, and it was hard to walk let alone drive a vehicle up the driveway. It was a good way to get to know the land though, and discover what sorts of trees and plants we have growing. A few discoveries were a fig tree which is fruiting out as we speak, a sudachi tree which produces small fruit similar to limes, and 6 chestnut trees. I’m really excited for the chestnuts. Right now the nuts are still green and covered by their spikey protective shell, but once they turn brown and fall off the tree they should be good to go.

Other cool sightings over the week working outside were tons and tons of preying mantises. I’ve now seen green, brown, and even a white variety of mantis. Really strange creatures.

As for house work, this is the area that I’ve been most concerned about. This is the north side of the house, and one of the few (original) places where a wall comes down all the way to the foundation stones. We have the slightest slope flowing into this part of the house, and while I’m grateful it’s really a light slope and not a major hill, water still likes to pool up back here when it rains. The saturated soil combined with the wall coming down to basically ground level, has made for good conditions for rot and termites.

Looking closer you can see how the building is sagging and even the siding has started to buckle as a result.

Adjacent to that space is this area where you can see the posts coming down to the old wood sill.

The sill is basically worthless at this point. At one point the sill must have been close to 150 x 200 mm or 6×8″ in cross section, but now in this current location it’s nearly completely gone. So I ‘ve started cutting out the sill, with the goal being to jack up the posts and support them on blocking.

Here’s another post coming down to what remains of the old sill. Not much there anymore, and as a result of the sill rotting out this part of the building has sagged a good amount.

As I removed the sill from different areas I started to block up the posts using some very temporary blocking. At some point I’ll be back in here finishing things properly, but for now I just wanted to dig in and get an idea for what the sitution is like.

One of the issues related to the water pooling up in the yard was our gutter system. The roof on the house is pretty massive, and thankfully the previous own installed a good gutter system complete with underground piping to drain the water away from the house. After the first big rain we had it was clear that the gutters were plugged up, so I got up with a ladder and clearler out years of mud and moss. With a quick cleaning all looked pretty good, with the gutters catching all the roof water and everything flowing nicely down into the underground piping. But on the northside of the house, the underground piping was backing up and water was overflowing out of the in-ground cleanout boxes. So one thing led to the another and we ended up digging out a section of the underground piping which was composed of old clay drain tile. We came across several breaks in the tile which over the years filled with mud making the system useless.

Here’s the full length of the section we dug out. The drain pipe was about 2 feet below the surface.

And a quick trip to the home center to get some new pvc drain pipe and we were on our way.

We managed to find a good pipe fitting and connection point to join a clean section of the old clay tile with the pvc.

And success! Amazingly this whole thing went pretty smooth and only took a few hours. And I’m glad to say our gutters are now truly draining properly and all the of the roof runoff is being nicely directed away from the house.

There are still some more water issues to address, especially on the north side of the house, but it feels good to be making some progress. Definitely hoping that the repairs and changes we make will keep the north side of the house more dry… there’s more to come with that work in the future.

Back on the inside of the house aside from general cleaning one bit of work that I dove into was tearing out the old tile ceiling in the kitchen. Eventually the kitchen is going to undergo a much more extensive remodel but for now I couldn’t help but tear down the ceiling to expose what I was hoping would be some really interesting roof structure.

And here’s a sneak peak with the ceiling down and some of the roof exposed. Nice hewn beams, cool joinery, and a much more open and expansive space!

That’s all for now.

Thanks for reading.