L Kawamura

Beautiful design!

I see you are in 5a, do you see much heavy snow? I am wondering if you have some kind of system planned to keep snow from dumping off the upper roof onto the greenhouse in the event of a blizzard. My house is a similar shape and I would love an attached greenhouse but I can't figure out how to protect the glass.

Hello fellow Toyama person!!!

I got a good lead on pallets recently from the chef at Blue Koala Kitchen, who is a champion upcycler: he says he gets his from a kawara dealer.

Be careful with the horse manure. A lot of fodder is grown with the use of broad-leaf herbicide that persists through digestion and composting. It's a handy amendment for rice growing but it'll stunt anything that's not a grass. Good to test with some beans to see if they germinate and come up normally.

My favorite free garden material is the sugi bark waste produced by sawmills. Nobody is willing to deliver it, but if you arrange a visit with a dump truck (Yoshikawa/YDEC tool rental, the real MVP of all my big terraforming projects) they'll usually have a front end loader or something to load you up.

There's gotta be some local specialty food they make that generates chemical-free 55 gallon drums and IBC totes as waste... maybe the freshwater fish farmers use IBCs? I know I've seen food-grade stainless steel drums around miso factories down in Aichi.

It took me three years from blueprint purchase to starting construction in a country without a strong DIY culture. Well, at least there's no building codes or inspections here, lol.

It's impossible to find suitable ceramic fiberboard in Japan if you're buying as an individual. Everything is wholesale and to the trades, and it's VERY expensive. Equivalent of two days wages at minimum wage for a single 24"x36"x1" sheet but they're sold by the pack so I hope you want multiples of 10! That's way too much for a consumable component in my opinion, especially since you have to pay again when it's time to throw it out. Trying to track down salvage or deadstock would be an asbestos crapshoot because it was only banned here in 2006. I had to switch my plans for the firebox core to Isolite bricks and I'm still fiddling around with an insulation solution for under the top.

Chimney installation. I needed a professional to do it for me (NOT about to retrofit anything through an 18g stainless steel roof 40 feet off the ground!) but it was hard to find a contractor and I was on a wait-list for a year. I might have been willing to try DIYing it on a lower roof with less difficult materials in a less snowy climate. Single most expensive thing in the whole house.

Exertional compartment syndrome/arm pump + carpal tunnel. I can only do about one row of bricks a day and then I have to take a whole day off to recover.

40kg of old agrochemicals over the mountain to the hazmat disposal event, they came with my house and I didn't want to stink up the car.

I'm dependant on fallen leaves as my main carboniferous soil amendment, so I gather those via bike, 3 IKEA bags per trip. They tend to wash into big piles by the roadside where it's too narrow to safely pull a car over. The bicycle has basically replaced my wheelbarrow for this kind of task because the brakes are so useful in a hilly environment.

I got a super bargain on insulated firebrick for my masonry heater core!

I am lucky enough to live within comfortable driving distance of a (sadly dwindling) ceramics production town, so I thought to call a salvage yard in the area to see if they had any kiln bricks sitting around. They had six boxes of deadstock Isolite LBK-30s sitting around, about $2.50 a brick vs $17 ordered from the manufacturer. They're rated for up to 2800°F