Chimney Cleaning

The company where we purchased our wood stove from came and delivered us the brushes and extensions to clean our chimney with.

It was very useful to learn how to dismantle the stove pipe and clean out the built up creosote.

SNOW

Christmas Trees

Our real tree is mostly decorated. We are looking forward to more lights and vintage ornaments which will arrive from America when my family visits around Christmas.

Yoko put the cardboard tree -which we made last year- in the second floor window where it is visible from the street.

Wood stove

We are really enjoying our wood stove. It's keeping our home warm and cozy.

Hopefully we will have enough wood to make it through the winter. Right now about half of the pile is gone and we still have several more cold months to get through....

Christmas Tree

Yay! We have a real Christmas tree...

We're getting all of our decorations and ornaments out and looking for the right kind of lights.

Thanksgiving

We enjoyed a fantastic Thanksgiving meal in our new home.

Thanksgiving Pictures

Baby Bed

I built a bed for the new baby.

I designed it to fit under Motoki's loft bed. It will be used as a bed and have storage space for toys and clothes.

Here it is in raw plywood. I decided to paint it to look more integrated.

Masked off and trimmed.

 Access was a bit tight.

 

Finished.

Headboard Sticker

We bought a Blik Headboard Sticker a while ago, and it finally arrived in Japan.
These wall transfers are always a bit tricky to install, but it went well as long as we took our time and worked together.

Here is the intended location. Before.

And after.

We think it almost looks like the real thing.

Garage Doors

I finally finished painting the deck, so I moved onto the next project which was to paint and install hardware for the garage doors.

We searched the internet for appropriate garage door handles, but couldn't find anything suitable that wasn't really expensive. We decided to show the iron-workers who built the deck railing a picture of what we wanted and they were able to duplicate the handles. It only cost $50 for the pair.

Here are the handles.

 

They needed to be painted black along with the hasp lock.

After masking off the hinges I began painting the doors.

I finished painting with a roller the following day.

I then installed the lock and handles.

Job done!

Here is a shot of the whole house the doors blend well into the concrete.

I had enough paint left to use on the surface of the worktable.

Planter Boxes

We wanted to have a garden in planter boxes to control the weeds and make it easier and neater to grow vegetables and herbs.

Since the construction for the deck required some large vehicles and digging, we had to wait until the deck was built before we could make the planters.

The construction of the planters was simple, but the weather was so hot that working outside was pretty uncomfortable.

Here I am putting the boxes together.

We had a pile of dirt from the foundation for the deck. I used this to partially fill the boxes. This soil was really rocky so I made a screen to filter out the larger rocks.

 

I then added some topsoil and manure to each box. We have two compost bins which are still at our old house, hopefully they have some nice organic soil which I can put into the boxes.

Here are the finished planters.

We're looking forward to starting our garden. Unfortunately the weather is still super hot and dry right now. So we will have to wait until it cools down and then we will plant autumn crops.