5 room is better than EM

working in the army, i am also the housekeeper by default at home.

every week, i will do some area cleaning after running on saturdays - the chores are part of my extended workout. i do not do much, just simple sweeping and mopping of the floor and other miscellaneous items.

but even then, those two things alone can already add up to be quite a bitch. only after you have mopped the floor using just a cloth and your bare hands, can you appreciate the largeness of your apartment.

these are times when i appreciate my relative poverty at not being able to afford a EM. imagine mopping the stairs! well done with level 1 - now go on to level 2; how do you even clean the ceiling?

 sometimes, less is better than more. =)

le Pothaus

IT IS DONE!!! =D

when september ends II

as usual, i just feel like singing that green day song, "wake me up, when september ends.." because somehow, september has never been a good month for me.

have been so swarmed at work recently!!! guess i got more than what i bargained for.. *dang* (>_<)"

anyhow, it seems like the pothaus should be done by mid-sep, so i guess we should be moving in by october!!! *hooray* remember to wake me up when september ends!!! =)

reno woes

sorry for the lack of updates, but we have been busy for the past few weeks navigating the home renovation and décor landscape in singapore - everything just seems so nice yet so expensive at the same time!

indeed, projet pothaus has been a project like no other project that i have handled before. whereas my other projects involve of sums running into the millions, projet pothaus is the first project that i have done involving my own hard-earned money. and therein lies the fundamental conflict of wanting everything in the fastest time at the lowest cost.

performance, schedule, cost. as they say, you can only choose 2 out of 3.

if it is good and fast, it will not be cheap.
if it is good and cheap, then production will take some time.
if it is fast and cheap, quality will definitely be dubious.

can't wait for all of this to be over. don't get me wrong; the process is somewhat enjoyable seeing your concepts or designs being turned into reality, but renovation is really stressful, especially if you have a full time job yet want to be as hands-on as possible during the renovation process like me. of course, seeing your slowly depleting bank account is not exactly most encouraging either.

oh wells, at least we'll be done soon!!! after about 4 months of hacking, painting, drilling, puttying, cabling, fixing and screwing (not me), its about time, isn't it? =)

PR, PR, where art thou?

excluding the 2 weeks break, renovation has been proceeding along pretty smoothly so far.

in terms of what has been the minor stumbles, i guess its been the case of the unknown unknowns. basically me and the girl are total noobs are home makeover: we do not even know what we do not know, and having an ID who is more than happy to accommodate my sometimes over-imposing requests, means that we frequently run into cost overruns, which obviously is a serious problem, and we find ourselves having to also frequently temper our wants and look more into our needs.

case in point, we were out shopping for sanitary wares last week and we had to go shopping twice, just because we didn't know that there were toiletbowl+sink packages in the first place! needless to say, we went for individual items that caught our eyes (and butt feel), and that translated to a rather hefty bill the first time. luckily, sense prevailed, and we went for the cheaper but packaged route after we were briefed on the economics of homeware shopping.

luckily too, that i am quite familiar with the project management process (occupational hazard), and i was able to manage my ID quite well thus far. by the way, if you want to know, projet pothaus is already CO-ed now. however, i have yet to get my LSMP nor PMP endorsed. luckily there's no need for a Logs Annex cos projet pothaus is less than S$15M in cost. =P

anyway, what i realised so far is that there are very little singaporeans in the entire ID/ renovation industry. let see my experience thus far:

ID: malaysian
ID husband: malaysian
construction workers: bangladeshi/ chinese
electrician: malaysian
electrical workers: chinese/ malay (not sure singaporean or malaysian malay)
laminate flooring salesperson: singaporean
cement screeder: chinese
window contractor: malaysian
sanitary wares salesperson: malaysian
blinds contractor: malaysian

not sure if this is representative of the entire industry, but what happened to our FT/FW to citizen/PR quotas? point to ponder: in our zeal to rapidly modernise and grow our labour force, have we applied the same stringent standards to the outsiders as we have to our own people?

[disclaimer: this is just a point for ponder; the people whom i've dealt with so far are as good as they can be, to the point that i am afraid that singaporeans can no longer compete with them. but is that reason enough for us to stop developing our indigenous workforce, or is that just taking the easy way out?]

the day that time stood still

recently, i've been passing by silat estate a lot more frequently as it is a shortcut between my parents' place and the pothaus.

sila--wat? you may ask: its a quiet and quaint 4-storey kampong just opposite the old KTM station in tanjong pagar. i suspect just like its taller brothers just opposite kampong bahru road, it used to house the KTM railway workers.

i used to have a primary school friend who stayed here, and on occasion we would come to his house to play sega games. he was quite a rich kid (although i never found out why he stayed in such a relatively run-down estate), and i remember sitting on a swing chair in the flat's rather large balcony. in primary 6, this was the same place where we would spend afternoons listening to boyband songs, and later on go on to practice and win at our primary school's talentime competition (if you must know, we sang i can love you like that by all-4-one). eventually we lost contact after we went on to separate secondary schools.

so i've been walking by this shortcut for the past few month since renovations for the pothaus started. and i observed more and more rubbish being collected at the rubbish dump (the red-brick building in the photo). huge pieces of furniture, tvs, discarded clothing, what-have-you, were slowly but surely piling up. then i realised that the occupants of silat estate were being relocated - probably to the newer hdb flats that had TOPed recently at kim tian.

last saturday, i passed by silat estate again after a 2 week absence, and i could tell that most people had already vacated their premises. judging by the mountain of sofas stacked up by the refuse collection centre, i guess that the cleaners had also given up on maintaining the estate - just waiting for the dump trucks and construction vehicles to flatten and clean out the entire place.

then i saw it - one singular household that still had its clothing hung out to dry; just like any other day, as though it had not one care in the world.

of course, i am sure that in the next few weeks when i pass by again, the occupants would have moved out already, but i just can't help but feel that one part of my childhood is already gone.

a house is not a home

facebook has made it so easy to share thoughts and articles (and reach out to a wider audience at the same time) that i fear that the end might be coming soon for blogs.

over the past few weeks, i had shared quite a number of articles on facebook. those were mostly social commentaries about singaporean life, and how difficult life is getting in singapore. i must admit that i am already much better off than most of my peers or singaporeans, but i always get a sense of foreboding doom whenever i read the newspapers. yes, it might not happen to me now, but looking at things, it will not be long before my cohort belongs to the "past" of singapore.

i think that the thing about singapore is that the government tries too hard to be open to the world. in our quest to attract foreign investment, we have almost forgotten who we are, where we came from, and where are we heading to. in our haste, what happened to this place that we call home? what happened to the swiss-class standard of living that we were supposed to attain? if the government can always beat their chests and loudly proclaim that the singaporean brand is so strong, why are they so afraid that foreign companies will close shop and shift elsewhere if we increase the wages of our low wage workers? i opine that if we are really 真材实料, then investments will continue to pour in because people recognise our value, not that we are cheaper, better and faster than our neighbours. 

---

talking about transformation, projet pothaus is coming along nicely. less than a week, and the apartment is a shell of its former self. walls have been hacked, built-in wardrobes removed and existing wires ripped out. now it is a skeleton, waiting to be zhng-ed into a proper liveable habitat. doubt much can be done in the next two weeks when i'm away, but well sometimes fast is slow and slow is fast! =)

it has begun!

hulk no happy.. hulk smash!!!

handover

 can't really believe that i'm officially a property owner now in singapore.

may hdb resale prices continue to rise!!! *HUAT AH!!!*

reno blues

if you're wondering what i've been up to, well only ONE thing: renovation.

the magazines all make it look so easy: buy a house, engage an ID, decide on a decor, go to quirky shops to buy furniture, put it all together and ta-da: your dream home is created!

-_-"

perhaps the above only happens to the rich folks. for the more average peasants like me, it means operating within a fixed budget and that also means that weekends have to be burnt, wholesalers all over the island have to be visited, quotes have to be compared, and compromises have to be made, all in the name of getting the most bang out of my pretty limited buck.

so for the past weekends over the past two months, the girl and i have been going from north, south, east to west on the search and research for moderately affordable furnishings and appliances for our soon-to-be humble industrial scandinavian loft. we're already settled on our ID, have sort of an idea of where to get what and at how much, and hopefully in a few months, this:

can soon be transformed to this:

doesn't the reindeer decal look oh-so-lovely?! i love horns!!!

but first, there's more research, and shopping (oh-my-poor-wallet) to be done! stay tuned for the progress of projet pothaus!