Hampton Mosiac

It is surprisingly hard to find these white bevelled ceramic tiles in Singapore (in the US, these are known as hampton mosiac). For those who may be looking, the only place to get them is Jausa City Ceramic, at 530 Balestier Road.

Jausa sells both varieties of bevelled and flat tile, Hafary and Lian Heng Seng Tiles sell only the latter in bright green and grey.

Week 1, the homework edition

Finding an enthusiastic contractor is a bit like the Holy Grail, our Contractor T. is really on the ball, about as on the ball as I've ever come across. Even so, sometimes I feel like a 'cher, checking that weekly homework has been done. This week, the workers are meant to rebuild new walls, re-lay the piping and electricals, do the waterproofing and lay tiles for living, kitchen and bathroom areas. We'll see when Friday rolls around.

We've settled on the selection of tiles- there are a few late additions that I didn't manage to put in here but generally this is the colour scheme for the apartment. It's very white, dove grey, natural grain wood and matt stone. Lord, I think I'm going through a colourless phase of life. The living room floor, which had to be confirmed first, is one of the white tiles on the right and the right wall (the only full wall)of the living room is a white, textured hollow brick wall.

We sifted through a huge number of variations-of-white tiles and I got overthrown because the textured white tile that I liked becuase of a sprinkling of sparkly bits-it sounds disco but from eye-height the colouring is even and makes the white really pop, wasn't homogenous all the way through the depth of the tile. Contractor T. jumped up and down, insisting it was sparkly when under spotlight (yes but not in natural light!) and it would be a different colour when chipped (fine, fine, fine).

One of the walls, along the powder room and kitchen space, next to the main entrance, will be left in an unfinished textured grey to match the unfinished white one in the living room. This is what an unfinished hollow block wall looks like (not our place, this is a friend's bar in construction phase). We've asked Contractor T. to increase the texture by juxtaposing the position of the blocks against the sandwiched groting.


In the living/dining area, the only real thing that breaks the white is a large pannelled wood cupboard (a bit like the one pictured below except closes completely with wider doors), surface mounted wood panelled light boxes on the ceiling (I'm going to have to laminate these myself, believe it or not) and a wide timber strip inserted in the step riser between the living and dining room. These all match the re-engineered wood used for the stairs and bedrooms. We decided to go with a lighter wood, like the colour of the wood tile on the left. I'm done with Asian darkwood.


The selection of rough grey tiles were the choice set for the regular bathrooms. We chose the rough grey granite, center, top row for the shower wall and floors as it was the most practical and the grey-taupe homogenous tile, second row, for the bathroom floors. Both attached bathrooms are identical, except one has a very masculine vanity wall of 5cm square matt black mosiac and the other a vanity wall of the softer wood grain tile. The beige tiles in marble and sandstone are for the master bathroom.

Weekly progress- Week 1

It's been just a few days and props to our contractor for hacking and hauling in 2 days. I'm going to start posting weekly updates so you can follow the process as we slowly (very slowly) make our way to a new look. As you can see, it's a very expensive demolition ground right now and there is rubble everywhere, it's dusty and the floor and bathrooms have been completely removed, really kind of a sorry and slight scary sight.

The first picture is of the living room, the windows and the recessed area is going to be a full height wood pannelled cupboard. The slanted surface (in the second pic)are the stairs, to the right of that is what will become the kitchen space and the rest of it is dining and on the lower level in front, living.

Weekly progress- Week 0

These are some god-awful uninspiring photos taken by the agent of the original apartment. We really should have taken some better-lit ones to show what it was like but this is actually fairly representative. The area around the stairs is very dark because of the trapped-in second flooring landing and the partition box storage constructed around the stairs. What it has going for it is that the space is large but the entire place has a lack of lighting, the waterproofing was poorly done, the kitchen and bathrooms are unusable and the ceiling was lowered because of air-con ducting (the central air-con now doesn't work so the false ceiling beams can be removed), which should raise the ceiing.

Bathroom Inspiration Needed

How depressing, I just saw an ad for a beautifully appointed and renovated home in Echo Park- ok so I don't actualy know where that is but it's somewhere between Silver Lake and Echo Park in California (and with names like that...)- all 888sqm for USD$615k. Yes, 888 sqm, versus a mid-size Singaporean apartment of let's see, 115sqm. And all the comments were about how this was severely overpriced.

Saturday looms. More bathroom pictures, still little inspiration. Should we go modern, or a little more vintage, as you can see from these photos, today I was leaning toward smaller rectangular wall ceramic tiles and mosiac but somedays I think we should just go with large pieces of sandstone and slate. Send me pictures of your favourite bathroom, please?

The New Cake Lady in Town

For all you brides-to-be and party girls in general, I have a really good announcement. My dear friend, PL, is setting up shop in the wedding and celebrations cake business.


You might remember her as the one behind the pale pink and green cake from a few posts back.


Check out her new creations at http://crummb.wordpress.com/, I'm sure you'll get sucked in by the gorgeousness. If you have a real special occasion and if you are looking for something dreamy, something whimsical or something just plain knock-your-socks-off-wowsome, do drop her a line. As you can see, she has amazing taste and what she's doing is out the realm of Singapore sophistication.

The most important rooms in the house

Bathrooms. Ho Hum. You wouldn't think there is so much to them but there is. And so much even before you get to the fun stage of, what tiles do I have on the walls. Digressing slightly on that, look at far left of the picture below- I discovered this gorgeous italian brand of textured tiles called Cris, in particular this truly awesome yet discreet White Feel tile that they've designed, which, when you look at it, face-on, simply looks like a white wall but from the side, looks like, surprise an inspiration from the hallowed logo of which overrated brand?


Anyway, at $30 a tile, I think this will have to wait till I'm a great deal more well off.


I was going to say though, that bathrooms are really, all about the water-proofing. And that's the part that scares the heck out of me. Having had the good fortune (please note only slightly sarcastic tone) to buy a place from someone who ducted his air-conditioning unit into his *cough* bathtub, I can hardly hope that good plumbing is a hallmark. Instead, it'd be more like a watermark that we are going to have to get rid of. Although I suppose it doesn't really matter since all the bathroom walls will be gone, gone, gone, please pray very hard that our contractor is indeed a miracle worker.

Soon, we will have to drag ourselves in a merry, motley crew down Balestier and Z. will complain all the way along. This I already know. I suppose it's not everyone's idea of fun to spend hours sifting through many shades of white tile. Still, he should be glad that I already did some of the pre-shopping for us. Thanks to some blessed relatives, we got a contact of a bathroom showroom where I managed to pick up some neat deals by wrangling the best GSS bargain out of the busy, impatient uncle-on-duty. I think he just got tired of answering "and how much is This one" and finally pointed me in the direction of a few steals of sinks on clearence for $40 each.

Searching around online, I found The Trend Group HK, where a lot of the sinks are made. Their website says, the Trend Group has been specializing in the researching, designing and manufacturing of sanitary wares and porcelain art wares since 1999. The Group has a staff of about 1, 200 employees including 120 researchers and technicians scale. At present, the Group has land of 140,000 sqm and a workshop of 80,000 sqm, we have 3 shuttle kilns and 1 tunnel kiln in the factory, the equipment is from Germany. Our production capacity is about 10, 000 toilets and 100, 000 basins per month, with a yearly output at about 1, 000 40ft containers.

Wow. 100,000 basins a month, how awesome is China, no wonder they are populating the world's bathrooms. Who knew, they can stencil any brand or even your brand onto their vitreous white china sanitary ware (I like the idea of vitreous, it sounds like my toilet is virtueos but actually, it means a glossy, lustreous sheen, this is the same product and finish used for most bathroom fitting brands like Kohler). In theory, I could have my own WC and sink, with my name signed in where it usually says Gerberit or American Standard or TOTO. Their location, for those interested, is B-11, 6/F, Tonic Industrial Centre, 19 Lam Hing Street, Kowloon Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Tel: 852-2795-9193

For this reason, their products or similar products, are often branded Trenz or Trends at retailers. I managed to find quite a few pieces that I saw and purchased in the showroom. These all come as plain basins, without the mixers and they can be installed as a extension as in some of these pictures or affixed in a semi-recessed manner, which I think is a lot nicer.


As in the case of this basin, for example. This is fairly large and will probably go in the master bathroom, semi-recessed into the solid surface counter. At 1.2mn pieces a year, my basin has a lot of brothers!
TR4015
Item: Wall hung basin
Size: 443 x 810 x 173mm
Material: Vitreous China
Color: White
Single tap hole: 35mm
Outer Drain hole: 64 +/- 3mm
Inner drain hole: 43 +/- 1mm
Over-flow: 25mm
Installation: Fixing to wall back
Volume: 0.071cbm
Certifications: CUPC & UPC


This rectangular basin was in short supply, we wanted more of them, hopefully when we go back to the showroom, more will have become available.


If I remember correctly, the 4038 and 4039 were both available but one doesn't have an attachment for the basin mixer which is kind of a pain. I also saw these online in Australia for $125, discounted to $69.

Stationery Show

Loving strong letterpress and geometric patterns...

Working with what you've got

Sometimes it's just taking the little pieces you have and making the most beautiful matches you can out of them. Today, work on our new place starts. Pictures updates when I have them and wish us luck!

Sobriety

Lest you get the idea that this blog is all twill and twee, I do have a rather sober post today. Or at least, I'm feeling in a sober mood.

I have a friend who told me that she only posts about positive topics and as such, her blog is always (I find this to be true as well), a delightful and relaxing read. But these couple weeks have been full of logistics, distractions and disappointments, none of which are fun to plough through. And yes, you can make lemonade but how do you wring out of yourself enough will to work harder?

I'm having one of those existential, is this all that there is, moments. Please God it will pass. This last week, or rather, some weeks ago but it took sometime to do anything about it, we started to discover discolouration on the study wall. This area is an internal balcony space, which I suspect, back in the colonial days, used to be an external balcony that got window-ed close. This showed up in rust brown patches on one wall and then along a low window-ed wall, there were light grey patches.

These walls were always uneven to begin with, as the building is old and many areas were less than finished and there had been a lot of rain of late that probably came through the big bay windows and seeped into the wall below. One day I decided to scrape away the paint and re-paint the whole area only to discover, lo, the thick paint (for there were at least three layers of previous colour from tenants who'd lived there before) simply peeled off the walls in large slabs and chunks. It ripped back in damp, sporish sheets and I watched the bald blistering patches grow with a rather helpless, sinking feeling.

This apparently, is what happens when water proofing is not well done and water seeps into walls, causing the wall (and paint with it) to expand and crack, or mould. In our case, the back of our mounted cork noticeboard had gleefully moulded all the way through and spread the mould to the rest of the wall. As for the other wall, well, who knows what really happened but it was, a mess. A huge mess. A flaky, dusty, unhealthy mess.

I don't know why that depressed me so much, after all, in a positive light, the new, fixed-up wall is so much better. I think it's because it was such a tired cause of inevitability and probably it also had something to do with the landlord's response. United Premas is the building manager for the government and although I respect that they are operating on minimal resources, they sent me a reply that in essence said it was not their responsibility and insinuated that they knew the units were prone to mould. Why then, I felt like asking, did you not think it was your responsiblity to fix the problem and not paint heavily over it and pass it on to the next tenant? There are young children who live in this building.

After a protracted exchange, they agreed that we could use their contractor to repaint, though we were responsible for any paint we wanted to use, should it be anti-mould paint. We also purchased and used our own anti-mould agents, which, for anyone curious, is essentially bleach and a lot of strong sunshine.

The question is, how does one make sunshine and lemonade out of such a scenario? There is no upside (really, no) and it doesn't remove my concerns about the remaining of the house nor the old state of other places we're trying to do up. These are all structural and quality issues that even in the renovation process, are not neccessarily apparent to the naked eye and yet these are the most important things about a building and an abode. It frustrates me that there is precious little the average home-owner can do about it, for who can be fully aware of these things or only afford to buy new? I never thought I'd say it but I'm sick of home-building, I really am.

In living spaces

Kinda in love with these and a white sofa and chaise. With a wooden coffee table and a modern arch lamp.

Terracoral

There should be a word invented just for this colour. The shades are somewhere in between pink and coral and orange and light green? It's not really me (skin colour doesn't agree with it!) but ain't it striking? I don't know many tone-on-tone combinations that work this well. My cousin mentioned coral for her wedding in September and now I'm really excited.