Tomobe House – Week 2

Trying to catch up with updates here on the house work in Tomobe, and I’m about a week behind at the moment. I’m probably not going to keep up weekly updates indefinitely but these first few weeks at the house have been full of interesting work and discoveries, which I though might be interesting to share.

I previously mentioned that the north side of the house has some bad foundation damage due to water issues and a fully closed section of wall. The water issues have been improved with some gutter maintenance and repair to the underground gutter drainage pipe, which I shared last time, but the foundation and related wood work still need attention.

So first order of business was to just dive in and do some demo to get a better look at the situation on the north side. Here’s what things looked like prior to demo.

I started by removing the black siding to expose the clay wall and posts. I also removed an aluminum box which housed a bunch of shutters for the sliding glass doors to the left. I’m guessing the aluminum shutter box was a replacement for an original wood box in the same location. The back side of the shutter boxes on this house are all open on the interior, and in this case when they installed the aluminum box they put an old door over the opeining on the interior side of the house and further closed things off with 2x material and thin plywood which is removed in the photo below.

Underneath the shutter box area was some nasty damage done by termites.

Moving over to the clay wall… with the siding removed I could start to get a better look at the foundation and posts. Years and years of moisture, rot, and most likely termites have been taking their toll on the old sill. It was once probably 3 times as thick, but not much is left of it now.

Here’s the same corner from the other side. The sill is mostly gone and the post is definitely in need of repair.

Nonetheless I like the look of the house in this state. The contrast of the raw earth wall with the finished white plaster above is really nice.

The next phase of demo involved removing the lower section of the earth wall to expose more of the posts and foundation. Ultimately my goal will be to leave this area of the house open so that air can freely flow, hopefully reducing water and moisture build up down the road.

Working with natural material like this earthen wall is truly awesome. I’ve been doing other demo here on the house removing old sheetrock, ceiling tiles, and fake wood laminate, all of which can’t be recycled or reused and will ultimately end up in a landfill. The earth from this wall on the other hand can all be saved and reapplied (which is what I plan to do), or it could simply be thrown back in the yard. I love that.

Anyways, removing the straw and clay was pretty simple. It largely comes off in sheets and chunks that are loosely held together by the straw. I worked first removed the earth from the outside, then cut the bamboo lattice, and proceeded to remove the earth from the inner side.

Here’s the wall with the lower section removed. The horizontal board is a nuki (horizontal brace) that helps lock the posts together.

And looking up close at the newly exposed foundation… things are not so pretty. But also not unexpected. Crazy how little is left of this wood.

It’s also interesting to see what remains of the joinery that used to hold the sill beam together, like the kanawa-tsugi joint below.

And another here.

And here is what remained of a dovetailed connection between two sections of old sill.

This corner is by far the worst.

But on the postive side of things, air can now freely flow below the house, hopefully helping to keep things dry. Termites also don’t like light spaces, so allowing light to shine in will also hopefully add a level of termite prevention.

With the wall open I could also more clearly see a section of sill that was previously hidden. This clearly shows the level of rot that has been taking it’s toll on the sill over time. Rot combined with the weight from this post has compressed the sill to nearly half it’s original height!

So there’s plenty of foundation repair work ahead. Despite how bad things look, I feel relieved to have things open and exposed. The problem areas are becoming more clear now and we’re making progress in the right direction.

Lots more happened as well including more demo on the interior of the house as well as some jacking up of a few posts, but I’ll save that for another time. Some exciting progress on the shop buildout as well, including a few machine orders… I’ll definitely have a post on that soon enough.

Thanks for reading.