Trying to turn this (above), after de-moulding, water-proofing and re-insulation, into this (below), isn't easy. Nor all that fun, 80% of the time. You know the difference though, between wood and life being rotten? When wood is rotten, it's Fixable. Right now, the only thing to love about it, is that both are a work in progress.
In fact, the only time I feel in control, is picking out tiles and surface colours for the new place. (A mix of the ones below) And even then, I must admit, after the initial underlying decisiveness, I changed my mind about twice every week and had many jaw-breaking moments of, maybe I should just ditch the beige, light, contemporary colour scheme and go for the fabulous grey floors with the streaked black and white marble counter-tops. Dark, dim house be damned.
Hello, my name is Weylin and I have an addiction. To stone counters. This is why I can never stop renovating. I'm like a Singaporean foodie, I plan my next project while I'm still picking tiles for this one. Must. Use. Black. Sandalwood. Marble.
Let's move on.
Staircase, meet your new balustrades. Do you see potential? To be fair, I don't either, at this point. But this, this is what potential looks like. These balustrades came from the Standard Chartered building in Singapore. To be more accurate, the new Standard Chartered Building, today known as 6 Battery Road, was built on the site of the old Chartered Bank Building. This building sat on and facing the coming and goings of the Singapore River, near Empress Place and pre-dated the MRT (it was said that when the Raffles Place MRT, which is partially an underwater crossing, was being built, the chandeliers in the basement of the Standard Chartered building would shake out spiders with the piling).
In any case, the point of my story is that the new Standard Chartered building was built in late 1983, at the same time my parents were renovating our old home to move in with their young family. Both the commercial building and our home were very cheap, as the property market in Singapore crashed with the crisis in 1984-1985, the year my brother was born, in our new home.
I actually remember being very young and living in our new home while it was still being constructed and my chief thrill would be which chunk of moulding had fallen off the ceiling that day. (The contractor had gone bust midway through the crisis and both the delivery and the workmanship of the renovations were similarly constrained). My dad went hunting around the Chartered Bank debris for cast-offs and these balcony balustrades had been tossed out with the old building debris.
It wasn't that they were part of Singaporean architectural history, since the Chartered Bank building fixtures probably date back to the 1930's, oh no, cast-offs and my frugal father, you see, are like a match made in heaven. And lest you think that this was because he was poor and young (though that is definitely true), let me tell you that when we re-built our house 30 years later, one of the long-standing arguments was, what will we do with my balustrades?
Oh no, I told him, there is no 'we' in balustrades. Week after week, he hatched a new plan. There had to be a way to salvage them and use them on the staircase. To spray them white. To put them on a balcony. How about around the (glass) walls of the gym? And week after week, I shot these down. They were old, heavy, chunky, completely out of sync with a modern staircase and glass and stone house.
It was as if, having rescued them once from a dump, he couldn't bear the thought of them being thrown away again. He had them packed up and stored away, such that when he moved, the balustrades, now wrapped in old newspapers, moved with him. Like a 70-kg trophy to his stubbornness and my horror.
I remember playing around them when I was a child, pressing my face to peer down at visitors and devising a game where I clambered from railing to railing, descending the stairs without triggering the burglar alarm. The truth is, I don't Really think they are ugly. In fact, they are very beautiful and historical. Classic, even. In this particular house, because the staircase opens into one side of the living room, I'm thrilled that the balustrades will be a very striking, in-your-face, visual display. But most of all, I knew it would make my dad happy. Hell, when my mum saw the house mood board, she exclaimed, you made dad so happy that you're using the balustrades!
Which brings us to this heavy rainy day, whereupon I spent a couple of humid hours retrieving, hefting and positioning 16 balustrades (there are more stairs than balustrades) and explaining to the contractor that no, it is not a better idea to paint the whole stairs black and no, we can't get more of these, unless you know where to fabricate them. (Short answer, no he did not, yes you can have them made in Penang or Malacca but for a fortune since they have to make a mould to cast them individually).
And because our contractor knew better than to argue with an insane woman, he helped make it work out, even if they are bloody expensive to install. The irony isn't lost on me that my dad was probably a similar age when he struggled to build a house and a home. In fact, I can imagine him doing the exact same thing as I did, actually, because there were also more steps at our old home than there were balustrades. And after that day, I've come to the conclusion that we do these things because even though we don't have children now, this work is a transfer of love, future and history, because sometimes building it out hurts less than trying to contain or understand such a powerful, debilitating feeling.
Before we took down this wall, this used to be the squarish kitchen, separated by a wall to the the squarish dining room, which was adjoined to the large living room. Part of the problem in this house is that the lower floor is somewhat dim. While the upper floor has a very high >3m ceiling, the ceiling on the lower floor is 2.8m and feels even lower because of the heavy structure and pushed-out bay windows. The previous owner also glazed their windows brown, then added pleated pink curtains for an all-around what-were-you-thinking heavy feel.
It was a toss-up between breaking through the wall, to create a sliding door glass kitchen that would allow the light and ventilation to be improved through the house and utilising the still-good and cosy kitchen to save costs. In the end, this was one of the two structural changes that we wound up making. Hopefully it's the right decision, though it feels like it, because it makes the house a lot simpler, cleaner and ironically, smaller.
We chose a mosiac tile floor for the kitchen to continue the heritage theme and provide a drastic change of surface from the dining and living room, which will go from dark green serpentine marble, to a very neutral matt off-white tile. This are some of the mock-ups of how the kitchen will look, you can see that it was heavily influenced by most modern kitchens, including Aun Koh's.
The other parts of the house are nice, but unremarkable. The parts that I obsess over are, in order, the kitchen, the masterbathroom and the doors. Yeah, no kidding, I'm big on doors. The masterbathroom has a darkish grey floor, volakas wall tile and a volakas marble counter. The regular bathrooms have a lighter grey floor, off-white wall tiles and a beige travertine stone counter.
We were fairly lucky with the bathrooms and light wood cabinets- a friend of mine is a regular customer at a boutique hotel here and told me that they were going into a haulage sale as the hotel was being demolished for a rebuild. We managed to get in and buy their beautiful new bathtubs, sinks, shower racks and pretty much everything we could strip from the rooms above.
The whole house will go from a beige and brick-roof exterior, surrounded by messy red lakka palms, to pure white with a dark brick roof and straight, dark green large-leafed trees. Wish us luck and we'll see you when we're more beautiful!
