Plants

23 Nov 2014 Sun
We are not a plant person, but because this was recommended by our fengshui master, we went ahead and buy plants for the house. Oh man, he recommended that we put 4 plants outside our main door, 8 plants in the living room (8! but 3 are essential) and plants in our bathroom.

So, we really bought 4 plants to be placed outside our main door. Cos our unit is directly facing another unit at the other end of the corridor, he recommended putting plants to block off the disadvantages of directly facing your neighbour's unit. As you can see, we have a beam of light at our main door, he recommended for this light and the one at the other side of the main door to be turned on for 24 hours a day. We bought a 3W LED energy saving bulb to do this 24 hours. Actually not bad leh, we like the brightness of our house.

Instead of 8 plants in the living room, we bought 4. 2 standing ones at each corner of the living room and 2 hanging ones at the window.

And also plants in the bathrooms.

We bought all these at the nursery near my place at jalan bahar. And plants are expensive! We spent $400 on all these green leafs! Didnt know that plants are so expensive. But well, we can choose to see that they add on to be a decorative item in the house. Just that extra effort would have to be put in to maintain them. Water them, feed them with fertiliser. Oh well, this sounds like a husband job.

Handover at 26th week

16 Nov 2014 Sun
OK, our reno is finally complete. They have fixed the holes at the skirting for us. Though I can still see some holes, heck, I dont care anymore. This has taken too long. He has apologised for the delay and looked sincere for the delay. But the thing is, even though the circumstances were hard to be predicted, a delay is still a delay. We waited 6 months for everything to be settled, as if we are building a bungalow right from scratch. Maybe the next time we move house, we will use tiles instead of vinyl flooring.

We have started moving our things in and periodically cleaning the house. The fengshui has given us an auspicious date to move in: 4 Dec 2014 (Thu). It would be very rush, cos we would be at BKK for a short vacation from 29 Nov - 2 Dec. We will pack on 3 Dec and voila, 4 Dec is move in date! I think it's doable. We dont have a lot of things to move anyway.

For reference on how much it cost to build up a home:

Reno, inclusive of the downlights that you have to buy yourself: $45,000
Furnishing and other miscellaneous stuff: $25,000
Wedding expenses: $15,000
Honeymoon: $15,000
Total: Whopping $100,000

Reno at 25th week

Uh huh. Latest count is week 25.

It is not that the reno took so long, but we waited for 8 weeks before shipment of our vinyl flooring came. Our ID helped to replace all the vinyl flooring last week. I would say that the replacement was quite flawless, you cant see the joints between the old and new flooring. It is as good as new. It is nothing disturbing other than we had to wait and wait.

We were supposed to pay him the final installment of $7,888 and close off this contract today. But guess what. As I was mopping the floor, i noticed that there were lots of holes on the skirting. Hello, holes, seriously?

They are all over the house. I pasted masking tape on all the skirtings which had holes. I made 86 markings. This is slipshod work really.

He said that the workers did not do touch up work. Meaning that they have nailed the skirting, but they forgot to touch up the holes where the nails were. Isn't this like some sort of an SOP, where you MUST touch up after you nailed the skirtings?

Many people told me that I shouldnt be paying them the final $7,888 that are due to them. What would you do if it was you? He wanted to do a video interviewing with us on our house. But dragging the reno to 25 weeks, i would definitely close off this option. No interviews, let alone a testimonial. My integrity doesnt allow me to do it.