Construction start?! Grass cutting and roping off

(Japanese article is here.)

１．Grass cutting

 

We eventually had the grass cut by a professional.

We - Bo & Su - were supposed to cut the grass ourselves, but instead of buying a weed-whacker we tried to cut the whole plot with only a scythe. This took us so long that our contractor, fearing to be kept waiting, offered to help out. This was both kind and wise suggestion, I guess...

 

Picture below: Bo cutting grass. Second picture below: Su cutting grass. If you're not used to a scythe, you can end up with bad ache in your lower back.

Japanese scythe is too small! Su finds room for tool improvement. .

 

Why don't you buy a weed-whacker, some people asked. It's simple, we don't want to buy another tool that we need only once but would have to store forever. The hens, whey they come, will neatly eat all the grass and weed-whacker will be super redundant.

 

So the temptation to buy a weed-whacker was bravely resisted because Bo & Su are now in the process of danshari  断捨離, a Japanese concept of decluttering.

 

Danshari is an attempt to keep only things you really need and get rid of everything else, so making your life lighter. Just as birds can fly because they are light, people too can live more freely when they are not chained to tons of stuff.

Of course, we can still move the weed-whacker from the current "unnecessary" category to the "necessary" one and go and buy it - but only if we  realize that life is terribly desperately unbelievably inconvenient without it.

 

On this picture is our contractor's man cutting the grass with weed-whacker:

 

 

2. Roping off

Roping off - or demarcation? - in Japanese nawahari 縄張り -  is the very first step of construction process. Roping off means stretching rope on the ground to demarcate the layout of the building according to the design. In our case this means to determine the position of pillars (pipes) that will support solar panels. Part of the layout didn't fit into the plot as planned, so the design will probably need minor revision.

 

Once the final design is fixed, solar panels and everything else will be ordered.

This is the view after cutting the grass and roping off was finished (you can see ropes stretched on the ground if you look closely):

For comparison, this is how the plot looked like in May: