Exterior of House

The painting of the House Exterior and Roof Tiles is finally complete! The Roof Tiles are painted with Dulux Roofshield in Idaman Grey 10524. The Exterior House walls are Nippon Cement 9507. The Timber under the roof is painted with Nippon Timbershade (Low Sheen Finish) in Silhouette Grey 4223D and the Exterior Property walls are Nippon S 8500-N (accent base).

We still have to order the exterior lights. I think we are going with black. And now it is time to move on to the landscaping!!!

at the back of the house the covered wet kitchen

Fence Removal and Kitchen Update

Yesterday we had our neighbor’s decrepit Fence removed from above our wall (after photos soon). Now I have a clearer picture of how it will look when the wall is painted and need to start thinking about what kind of plants/flowers to add to the planters running along the 77 foot wall.

Today is day 7 of the Staining and I asked the stainers this morning how much longer it will be... they said through tomorrow (Wednesday). We do hope they finish because yesterday I drove the Bareno Undermount Sink to Kuala Lumpur and dropped it off at the Corian Countertop Distributer so that they can start to fabricate the countertops. I begged them to work quickly as they said it will take 10-14 working days, let’s hope they can do it faster. The company seemed pretty professional, so I am hopeful we made the right choice. Plus the cabinets seem to be getting darker and darker much to R’s delight. The dark wood will look better with the Corian Glacier White countertop.

Yesterday the Roof people were also here power washing the tiles (which produced some more leaks on our plaster ceiling on the second floor (arrghhh). I wonder if we will ever be leak free, it seems in Malaysia with all the rain, wetness is a regular thing. I have to adjust my oversensitivity to it. Today they arrived at 8AM to start to paint the Roof Tiles. We chose Dulux Roofshield in Idaman Grey 10524. We had to go with Dulux because the tile paint only comes as pre-mixed colors and Nippon did not have a dark grey color close to the existing tile colors. I don’t know if I wrote why we are painting the roof... we hadn’t planned on it, but after the 2^nd roof contractor painted spots of dark grey all over our roof when we were away from the house for a few hours to “touch up the holes” we thought it looked extremely junky especially from the second floor. The contractor said that the dark spots would disappear in a couple years, thank you very much.

More Bad Color From Dulux

We have been told to go with ICI Dulux Weathershield for the exterior paint on the house, which lasts 5 years. When asked why it is better than Nippon or Jotun no one can give us an answer, just that everybody in Malaysia uses Dulux Weathershield.

So to keep the price down, we decided to pick one of the pre-mixed colors from the chart on the two images below. I chose Zambezi Rocks. But when we paint a sample on the house, it looks more like a color used on a 60s Pataya restaurant. So after wasting some money and getting flustered with Dulux, we decided to try Nippon.

Metal Staircase

Gold Staircase after sanding it down (was brighter gold!)

A few days ago we started painting the Metal Staircase because it was black with a gold sponge paint-type pattern applied on top. We were told the designer creating the ‘look’ of the house did it before the house went on the market for sale. Was he responsible for the other hideous colors in some of the rooms like the teal sea-breeze green in the master bedroom (now the home office and now painted bright white)?

We chose Dulux’s Gloss Finish oil based paint in Obsidian Glass (Dulux OONN 13/000). The painting has taken much longer than expected as it is really hard to apply the paint and it doesn’t dry fast. We have finished two coats and a going to add a third on to the top railing later today. Tomorrow we can take the newpaper away and clean up. We like the color, but once again Dulux’s color at home differs from the sample swatch at the hardware store. We were looking for a darker color, but this is OK. Check the color online here. Maybe the Dark Side would have been better.

Using a grey on the metal was reconfirmed when I opened today’s post on CONTEMPORIST showing a house in Evergreen, Colorado built by Entasis Group, a Colorado-based design/build firm. See photo below, have been seeing other staircase railings in dark metal lately too.

Dulux Sealer Problems

After spending a huge amount of time spackling the imperfect (by our standards) plaster walls and sanding the Master Bedroom walls down, we attempted to apply a coat of Dulux ICI Wall Sealer on the wall in preparation for adding the Dulux brown paint. It was a DISASTER; even after we added water as the product and hardware store suggested it was still too thick and caked on the wall in a chunky mess before we could even re-roll over a stripe. We finished after adding more water, left the house and can only hope when we return tomorrow morning it will have miraculously flattened out to what we were expecting from the expensive product. We haven’t been at all convinced about the Dulux products so far. Our experience with Nippon in the Laundry Room and Kitchen was pretty good.

Move in Date Set

We recently decided that we wouldn’t extend another month at the rental condo and gave our landlord notice. We now have to move out by the end of the month, so the plan is that we will be living in the house starting on JUNE 30th!!! It doesn’t give us much time to get it habitable and we already know that the Kitchen won’t be finished when we move in, but we think it is best to get into the house because trips back and forth from the rental to the house are becoming tedious and we can better monitor the work at the house when we are on site.

Today there was a rush of activity mainly because of yesterday's heavy rain when no roof work could be done and the wood kitchen cabinets could not be transported to the house.

This morning R and I were at blind/curtain stores picking the blinds for our Master Bedroom as we need to try and have them installed before we move in. I’m not sure they will be ready in time. A few days ago we decided that we wanted to paint our bedroom (and the walk in closet if possible) before we move in. So we spent some time picking the color for both rooms. R wanted a dark color so together we finally picked Artisan Brown RM 71YR 08/119 from Dulux (ICI). We painted a test sample of the color in Dulux Supreme in the bedroom because it is so dark to try and get an idea if it would be too dark for both rooms. We like the dark color, but the paint on the wall does not match the paint sample swatch from the hardware store... the color on the wall is not as rich as the swatch and more of a run of the mill 'chocolate brown', the hardware store had Dulux come out to the house yesterday to check it. The color specialist said that hardware store was not using the most current base and that we should do another test with a new sample mix. So late this morning R and I were working on getting the bedroom prepared for painting while the roof repair was underway and B brought the cabinets on site. The blind company came out to measure the windows late in the day. And now we are resting for the night. Tomorrow will be another big day on site.