the first week

of work.

Well, 'twas interesting. In a good way! Mostly. Except for the damn toilet. I thought it would get easier to use with practice -- and it sort of has -- my squatting muscles are definitely stronger. However, THERE ARE STILL THE OBVIOUS ISSUES.

I finished the paper tiles on the roof of the model of the Nagoya temple. . . well, sort of. I finished the tiles on the larger model. Unfortunately there was an error in communication between me and my boss on the larger site model with buildings at a smaller scale, so I have to do some more twiddly work to finish it. (Dammit.)

Andrew, the other guy who works in my office, looked at this model and said, "Wow, they're so neat!" Which was a first. . . I don't think anyone's ever accused me of making neat models before. Of course, this has to be balanced against the fact that this office still does a fare amount of hand drafting, which I suck at (though I'm relatively confident I can do it if they ask, so long as they don't mind it taking me a really. long. time.)

the good, the bad, and the ugly

First: The good! There's quite a bit of it.

Today was my first day of work at Design 1st, a (very) small firm (I think it's just the principal and maybe one or two other people) that mainly restores machiya, traditional Japanese townhouses, in Kyoto. The "office" -- actually a small machiya which is currently in the process of being renovated -- is maybe a mile and a half south of my apartment.

The house itself is pretty tiny. The practical person in me cocks a brow at the amount of work it will take to make it really habitable (in a non-camping and non-Mom-living-in-the-old-church kind of way -- flood reference for the win), but the historian and the architect are still going, "SQUEE SQUEE SQUEE SQUEE SQUEEEEEEEEEE!" It's such a neat little structure.

I think my boss said in an email that this house was 200 years old. It's at least a hundred years old, that's for sure. It's probably about twice as big as my studio apartment in total floorspace, and constructed of dark pine beams (stained or aged, I do not know), plaster, and wood paneling. I drew a little picture (see below) to help understand the layout, but basically it's two living rooms, one in front of the other, elevated about 1-2 feet off the ground on platforms. The front one has a screened-in bay that faces the street. There is a ground-level hallway running alongside the two rooms that is two stories tall. In the back of this hallway is where the kitchen area used to be; there's a skylight/smoke opening and the remains of a brick stove. This hallway is sort of the "mud room" area -- the floor is concrete-ish and dirty, you can wear shoes and there are storage cabinets there -- while the two living rooms are the nice areas, where you're supposed to take your shoes off. There's ladder in the hallway that leads to a little platform which opens onto a loft over the back living room (the roof slants down so that there wouldn't be room for a second story in the front room.) The hallway continues straight back to the tiny courtyard with one tree in it, where the plumbing services are -- toilet and what I think was probably a shower, each in its own cubicle. I didn't put this in my drawing, but I think the space between the two cubicles and the back living room (which looks out onto the courtyard through a glass sliding door) had a big dry sink (or wet sink, not sure) in it. (edited to add: drawings not to scale. sort of, but not really.)