boxes to pack

Sunday morning... on the couch with my coffee, laptop and dogs, staring at:

Removalists come on Friday, so that means I've got about 5 days to pack everything. Must. Get. Started. Must also go and spend who knows how long at Ikea today sorting out refund, return, exhange, delivery, assembly etc! Aaaagh!

shower screen, pelmet & wardrobe

The Ikea fairies came yesterday and dropped off several presents at our apartment! We received our bedroom wardrobe, Expedit bookshelf, a mirror, laundry sink, bike shelving, an up-light and some other things. Not as many presents as they should have brought though, because we had to cancel our Pax broom cupboard and a Pax wardrobe for the computer/bike room because neither fitted in the space they should have! A couple of oversights there - oops!

Left: Our bedroom wardrobe under wraps. Right: me in the shower

Our shower screen was installed yesterday. The shower is quite roomy, and I really look forward to not showering in a bath tub with a shower curtain anymore!

The construction of the pelmet for the two bathroom doors is also underway. I want the two sliding doors to be a feature, so I'm thinking of wallpapering them. I'm not sure if I should (just take the plunge and) order some wallpaper now and get the workers to put it up now, or if I should make it a little project of mine over the summer holidays and do it myself? I think wallpapering might be really hard though! Is it just like putting contact on school books?

Left: pelmet being built. Sliding doors will meet in the middle. Right: a funky Marimekko wallpaper. Kind of looks 3D! Might go well with our somewhat black & white apartment?

cupboard crisis

Last night when we were at the apartment, Justin and I realised that one of the Pax cupboards we ordered from Ikea to use as a broom cupboard next to the toilet will not fit! The space is fine, however, the light switch on the wall would be covered over by the side of the cupboard. Too late now to change the light switch to the opposite side of the doorway. The wardrobes, shelves etc are all getting delivered today from Ikea, so what to do? I called Ikea late last night (lucky they are open til 10pm every night!) and the lady said I can just tell the delivery guys not to open it and assemble it, and then I can organise a refund. Of course, Justin and I are both at work during the day, so we cannot talk to the delivery guys directly. So at 10:30pm last night, we rode our bikes back to the apartment and left a sign instructing the Ikea guys on what items to cancel. I even Googled "cancel" in Chinese and wrote that on the sign, just incase! (I hope it's the right characters!).

This morning I was able to talk to our contractor and also one of the Ikea guys on the phone and explain, so I'm fairly sure that situation is under control, although of course now we have to figure out the alternative! We could get our contractor to build in a broom cupboard, or I could by an alterative, slimmer cupboard from Ikea.

The saga now continues... I just received a call from our contractor to say that the wardrobe for our computer/bike room does not fit! What?! There is a support beam running along one wall in the room, which means the 236cm high wardrobe is too tall for this one corner of the room. Damn! So looks like that wardrobe will have to be returned, and hopefully the 201cm version fits there instead, but this also means another delivery from Ikea and a delay in the whole process.

This is what renovating is about, right?

lights, camera, action!

Wow, so much more happened today! This is what Justin and I have been looking forward to for weeks - we're out of the demolition stage and into the furnishing stage. No more walls are being knocked down or floors ripped up. No more plumbing and wiring going in. No more holes in the walls. Now we're in the thick of the kitchen being installed, doors in their frames, handles on doors, paint on the walls, and as of today - lights shining brightly!

Pendant light over the dining area


Our Dulux "Kingfisher Blue" toilet/laundry room!
















Left: Dogs patiently waiting for us to finish inspecting everything. Right: It's mandatory, right?

more kitchen!!!

All of the base and wall cabinets are in now, but not complete yet.

Exciting to see the kitchen forming, but a couple of problems though! The pantry doors open the wrong way! And it took us a while to realise, but the appliance garage is built too far out. i.e., it is not set back at the depth of the wall cabinets as it should be, but it is the same depth as the base cabinets (which it shouldn't be, otherwise we can't use the appliances inside properly!) Check out the video to see it all explained!

kitchen!!!

Excitement! The kitchen started going in yesterday! Check out the video!

Also, a couple more door frames are in, and the LED lights in the bathrooms are in! AND the final smooth layer of plaster has been put on some of the walls, so the place was looking smoother and whiter last night!

doors & frames

On Friday 21st May, our doors and frames got delivered. Here they are all wrapped up...

















We didn't manage to get to the apartment on Saturday (Justin was working and I was swallowed by Ikea the whole day, but that's another story), but when we checked on Sunday, a couple of the frames were in (see video).

not long now!

Wow, so much is happening! So much still to be done! Due date for completion is May 31st (that will be a nice birthday present!). We move 4-6th June, so we have an extra week up our sleeve for everything to be done (and clean, thanks!).

The floor looks white in the video, but it is just a protective plastic covering. All the floor tiles have been laid.

false ceiling and more

We jumped on our bikes last night after dinner and rode over to our new apartment. It's a daily ritual - either walking the dogs over there or riding our bikes - to check on what's happened that day.

It's fun walking in each day and seeing what new has been done, kind of like opening presents! Yesterday, we found:

• a new channel drilled in the kitchen wall for the gas pipe

• the three air con windows (where the old air cons used to sit) have been boarded up (we will plaster over them as our new air cons are a split system that sit on the wall)

• the false ceilings in the two bathrooms have been put in! I would love to keep the original height of the ceilings, but because we need fan/extraction/ventilation systems put in, then we need a false ceiling

• the bedroom walls have had a coating of plaster

False ceiling in shower and thermo-ventilator. Old air con window boarded up.













Channel drilled for gas pipe. Plaster powder, goop and tools.

things i won't miss

We are 3 weeks away from moving, and our current apartment seems to be getting messier by the day. We have our new washing machine in the living room, our new and old dining table and chairs both in the living room, our old microwave in the living room, an old desk in the entryway... and on top of that, I think we've lost the will to put things away properly because we know that EVERYTHING needs to be sorted, edited, culled, organised and packed before we move!

As much as we have loved living at our rented apartment for the past 3+ years, I am looking forward to so many things at our new apartment! We will miss the super-convenient location we're in now, but here are some things I WON'T miss when we move...












I won't miss having a toilet right in the middle of the shower and vanity area, leaving us with barely enough space for a bathmat. I won't miss all our deodorants, sprays and magic potions on display on the vanity. I won't miss having to step up and into a bath to shower. I won't miss the shower curtain (yuck, I hate shower curtains), and I won't miss the broken showerhead.














I won't miss having only ONE drawer in the kitchen with everything piled inside (except the cutlery which has to sit on the bench)! I won't miss having bikes stacked at the end of the bed which I need to jump over to get out of bed each morning.












I won't miss having to pile food and appliances on and around the fridge and microwave.


And I won't miss having piles of dirty cutlery in the sink, because we will have nice new little compact dishwasher to help us out! :-)

PS: this is not a whinge post, but instead I will remind myself of these things I will not miss and thus be grateful for what I will have in the new apartment!

floor tiles almost done

Floor tiling is basically all done, except for the base of the shower.














Above is the flooring in the bike/computer room (I need to think of a better name for this room. It was the 2nd and 3rd bedroom, but now they're combined, and I don't want to call it the 2nd bedroom because it's not a bedroom at all! It will be for the bikes, computer and a wardrobe. Multipurpose room? Sounds like a hall at school. Spare room? Not really, because if it was spare that seems to imply it's not really used for anything. Hmmm, will have to keep thinking. Suggestions, anyone?)















The bottom of our front door has been chopped off, to allow for the thick tiles. We of course are getting a new front door, in case you were concerned. I love that Kiera was poking her head under the door when I took the photo! And here's another of Kiera licking some wires in the hall! She is currently laying next to me on the couch making me scratch her belly as I type!

colour scheme

It's been very hard for me to decide on a colour scheme for the apartment. I knew for sure that I wanted fresh, white walls (not creamy), and we decided on the charcoal grey floor tiles many weeks ago now, so whites and greys are forming the base of our apartment. But as for the decorative colours, I've been a little unsure. I've seen some nice teal and peacock type blues around on interior blogs and in magazines, and even though I'm generally not a blue person (I don't usually buy blue clothes), I've decided on teal and dark blue as the colour scheme for the apartment! Something like these colours below, but more of a bright teal.

And so to commit myself to this colour scheme before umming and ahhing further, I bought two
pillowcases from FrancFranc! (I LOVE FrancFranc!)

Tiling!

OK, so I think I am finally up-to-date with the blog! Tiling happened this week! Firstly, wall tiles in one of our bathrooms were put up, and secondly, floor tiles have been laid the past 2 days! Let's go straight to a video!

air cons

As I write this, I am sitting in the living room of our current rental apartment, listening to the noise of our dehumidifier rumbling and the air con in the spare bedroom whirring. It's currently 25*C and 89% humidity. We've had a couple of days this week of absolutely sauna-like conditions! Air so thick it felt like you were breathing under a wet blanket! And so what does our main air con in the living room do? Die, of course. And because we move out of this place in a month, and our landlord is selling it, they are not going to replace the air con. Hence why the air cons in the bedrooms have been running most of the day, to try and push some cool air down this way into the living area.

So I am very much looking forward to our 3 new air cons in our new apartment! They are reverse cycle, split systems. This means:

• no ugly, old, dusty air cons sitting in the window like we've had the past few years (see picture on left)

• quiet operation! The only good thing about the one in our rental apartment dying this week is that it sounded like a 747 taking off every time we switched it on! It sat directly over our dining table, which meant summer dinners were spent either yelling at each other over the noise, or sweating into our salads.

• reverse cycle means we can have some heat in winter! I know Hong Kong winters are neither harsh nor long by world standards, but buildings are just not heated here, so once the building cools down in the first couple of weeks of winter, everyone struggles to keep warm with little electric heaters at their feet! Even the northern Europeans and Canadians complain, so I'm not being soft! I look forward to testing out our heating this winter!

• we can set timers on the new air cons, so we can come home to a nicely cooled apartment!

Left: one of the air con engines mounted outside our new apartment, up high so it can be accessed from the rooftop for maintenance

Right: our new bedroom air con

...and the glass!

April 28th - the windows now have their panes in place! We chose double glazed windows for a few reasons:

• to help block out some heat in summer and cut down on electricity bills

• sound insulation. Although the sound of the waves lapping the shore below our window is lovely, I don't want to be kept awake by it at night, or any other noise for that matter.

• typhoons! We're on the 17th floor (top floor) of our apartment block, which isn't that high in Hong Kong (we used to live on the 45th!), however we're also on a hill, and we're right on the shore line looking over quite a vast expanse of water. So we hope some extra strength windows will help keep us braced against Hong Kong's summer storms!

window frames

On the morning of April 22nd there were no windows in our apartment. By evening, there were frames! No glass yet, just pretty, new, white frames! Yes, every little detail is exciting for us!

floor tiles

As I twiddled my thumbs back in February and March waiting for the contract to be completed (i.e. waiting for the apartment to be officially ours!), I did a lot of thinking about flooring. Material? Colour?

Materials we considered were wood or wood laminate, tile, and I also did a bit of Googling about bamboo flooring. It pretty soon got narrowed down to tile, reasons being that wood is a bit of a liability in the high humidity here in Hong Kong, and tile is nice and cool for the long hot summers here.

Colour was not so easy to decide on, and even now, I am wondering if I am 100% happy with our choice. (Too late, because the tiles have been purchased and delivered already!) We picked up a few samples from tile shops of wood-look tiles (see picture below). When I first heard of these from a friend who used them, I thought they sounded like they might look tacky. But in fact, wood-look tiles look a lot like real wood flooring. You wouldn't necessarily realise such a flooring was not wood until you stood on it and felt the coolness of tile.

In the picture below you can see three wood-look tile samples, and the bottom left tile is a charcoal grey tile.


We went for the charcoal grey tile in the end! Something a little different, and Justin was quite keen on it. It is a matt finish, and the tiles are 60x60cm, so nice and big. I plan on white walls, and perhaps a feature painted wall or some wallpaper somewhere. Some of our current furniture is white, so I'll be looking to add some wood into the mix somewhere to warm up the place away from purely a black and white look.

Now I just need to figure out how to stop my two little dogs from shedding their WHITE fur all over our DARK floors!

no windows!

Aha! I finally found out how to post video on here! I have to use the old editor - go figure. Anyhow, here's a video from the 22nd April (I still have so many posts to catch up on!). We had visited the apartment the night before and found our windows missing! Just giant black holes and a 17 floor drop! Well, we do have bamboo scaffolding surrounding our apartment, so it wasn't exactly a 17 floor drop. Justin even decided it would be a good idea to just step out the window void and onto the scaffolding and give me a heart attack! I know it's safe, but still, who's to say the workers weren't needing to mend some part of the bamboo in the morning, dear husband?

Moving on... here's the video I took the next morning...

plumbing and wiring

While we were away on holiday in Yunnan, China at the beginning of April, work on wiring and plumbing was happening. This would not have been nice for the neighbours, as it involved drilling channels into the walls and floors to insert new wires, cables, pipes, etc. Sorry neighbours!

We've added extra powerpoints around the place to correspond to where we will put our appliances and electronic things, and also to avoid having to use too many ugly powerboards everywhere.

Left:
a channel cut in the wall for wires to create two powerpoints, either side of where our bed will be

Below left:
new pipes in the bathroom

Below right:
a workman out on the bamboo scaffolding working on installing new pipes

storage vs aesthetics

The original set up of our apartment had a false ceiling in the hallway with storage above it. While I love the idea of being able to hide away as much clutter as possible, I didn't like the look of the false ceiling (and when our 6 foot 5" friend walked through, he practically had to duck!). There was a lot of too-ing and fro-ing in my mind... I could throw our bags in the ceiling, store heaters during summer, store summer cloths during winter, etc etc countered with the nicer aesthetics of a high ceiling. Well... looks won out! The ceiling was removed! I'll just have to be really organised and practical with the rest of our storage!

                  False ceiling with storage above                                                                                                                                                Ceiling removed

In the picture on the right you can see that the two doorways of the 2nd and 3rd bedrooms have been removed to create one big open doorway (with no doors). The wall above the door area has also been removed up to the support beam, so the new higher hallway ceiling works well with this to really open up the area.

wonder wall

Last week of March - paint got scraped off the walls, I even helped out :-)

Cornices, doors and door frames also got removed.










We have a hole in the wall between both bathrooms. This is not to peep from the shower to the person on the toilet in the other room! It will be a niche shelf for shampoo and conditioner in the shower (and the hole in the other bathroom will not be a hole at the end of renos!)

 Justin looking from the shower in the other room to where the toilet will be!

This will be our shower and the space for the niche shelf

day 3 of renos

When Justin visited the apartment on Day 3 of renovations, the kitchen floor tiles had been removed, there were lots of sand and cement bags around, and the warm morning sunlight was streaming into the apartment.

 

                                          Kitchen                                                                                                                                                                  Dining room

        2nd/3rd bedroom (wall used to run between windows)