Home Office Update

Our Home Office gets the afternoon sun and so we have been searching what is the best option for blinds in the room. Originally we planned to use Malaysia made Wooden Slat Blinds like the blinds we used in our Master Bedroom only using natural/light wood instead of the dark wood color. But after the Master Bedroom blinds were installed and we started using them, it became apparent that they are very touchy... they hardly close when we pull the slats at night and lifting the entire blind up to open the windows is a difficult task and seems like it might cause the blind to break.

Dark Wood Blinds in Master Bedroom (hard to photo as they are dark and walls are dark)

So I was thinking about how I plan to open and close the five windows in the Home Office throughout out the day. We need something that opens and closes easily and totally blocks out the sun when needed. We looked again at metal blinds, which seemed really cheaply made and we didn’t think traditional rod curtains would look good in an office. Then I saw some Roller Blinds with a cord on the side to pull them up and down. These are better than the old roller blinds I had in the US. So we were planning on getting a Seremban company to custom make some roller blinds (they are expensive and limited in colors to beige, white and grayish colors, still we thought they were our best option). Then when we were at Ikea buying the metal handles for the Kitchen Cabinets we saw the Tupplur Roller Shades in Black and figured out we could work with the sizes they came in by cutting the two small window blinds down in size to fit into the Bay window.

I am not a fan of Ikea, in fact, I didn’t like the products in the US at all, but in Malaysia there is such a limited selection of furnishings/houseware items that we find ourselves buying Ikea products (such as the art desk we also bought on our recent trip). The best part of the Tupplur Roller Shades is that they cost half the price of the Malaysian Roller Blinds and seem to be better quality. The drawback was that we would have to install the blinds ourselves (something I hate to do, but R seems pretty OK with). Cutting the two small blinds down and sawing off the metal tubes was like performing surgery and installing them in the odd sized space was very difficult and time consuming. But the blinds are up (except we have to screw the white ball cords to the wall which should be easy).

Office at 9am... the afternoon sun is much more blinding

So now our Home Office is finally looking better. Remember this used to be the Master Bedroom when we bought the house. Awhile back we painted the gross sea-breeze-green-ish color on the walls to Nippon 145 White in Spotless. The two desks are Ikea (Vika Moliden Stainless Steel legs and Birch Effect Amon Table Tops) as well as the Leather Verner Chairs. The chairs are a bit ugly, but they were the only affordable AND comfortable chairs we could find. Some people told us not to buy leather because it is so hot in Malaysia that your back sweats if you are using a leather chair. So we bought a mesh back chair to use when we were living at the Condo and it was so uncomfortable and the mesh back started to rip... this chair is now placed in front of my art desk, but I don’t know if I will use it.

my new art desk

The new wooden Leksvik Ikea Desk which extends with leafs to a length of 230cm long, was listed on sale for 699myr for solid wood (regularly 995myr). We had been planning to have B our Kitchen contractor make me a custom desk out of some kind of low cost laminate, but we figured that his price would be around 700myr anyway and we thought that this table was better. B had told us he would have used panels of laminate all around the base of the desk for strength, which we thought wasn’t as nice as open legs like this Ikea desk.

The sconce Light fixture in the Office was here when we moved in. We added a dimmer to the light socket and for now we are keeping it, but we are thinking about getting a lamp that exends from the wall and hangs over our computer desks (will try and find the image on the TSEN Lighting website and post it here soon).