Lighting Around the House

Recently we were contacted by Sweet Home magazine, a magazine that features homes in Singapore, Malaysia and other Southeast Asia locations. They wanted to interview R and I as foreigners living in Malaysia and also do a photoshoot of the house for the magazine. We said yes, but the house wasn't ready for a photoshoot!!!! We had under a week to get as much done as possible before they came. One of the things most noticeable (well besides the totally empty 'family room' on the second floor) was the light fixture wiring all over the house. For the past year we have been looking for the perfect fixtures, and when we would find one, we would buy it. But, now we needed to finish so I went searching all over Seremban for lighting.

I found this simple spotlight that looked nice. Bought two for 'family room' one for the ceiling and one for the wall.

Installed on the ceiling it has a rainbow effect on the wall, which I guess works ok with our color scheme for the 'family room' or what we are calling the library.

Also decided to add one of these white spots to the dining room so it is complete. Once I get the art, I may change the lighting, but it won't be for awhile.

Painting Complete

The painting and clean up of the upstairs 'Family Room' (as they call it around here), Stairs and Entry way is finally complete! I think it looks great and is ready for some furniture, now if we could only find the right items. The Ikea mattress cushions that I saw with the grey covering turned out to not be a good idea. The grey part was not a permanent fabric but kind of a temporary cheap fabric cover that would get ruined pretty quick. So for now we have to find other cushions that will work or resort to sofas/chairs. The search is on....

More Painting

For the past couple days the painters were here sanding and priming the walls in the Family Room, Stairway area, and Entryway to make the walls smoother. What a mess, but we put up plastic in the living room doorway and the kitchen doorway to cut down on the dust which was really bad last time they sanded the living room and dining room. The walls in these areas were painted a light 'gardenia' green. Almost white but with a light green tint. It was ok, but the walls were a bit uneven in places so we decided to paint the rooms Nippon 145 White in Spotless. We had used a cheaper non-washable paint Nippon paint in the living room and dining room and it just isn't performing as well as our Home office or Kitchen which are Spotless White. So we decided to use the better paint especially for the stairs walls which gets dirty faster. Here in Malaysia the Geckos create a dropping that gets on the walls and it needs to be washed off. No matter how hard you try to make your place gecko-free, they manage to get in anyway and there is always some of the brown hard droppings around the windows and floors. This sounds gross and it is, but after being here for awhile, it is just part of living in Malaysia that you have to deal with. Well, having washable paint on the walls does help cleaning it.

The photo above is while the painters are painting the sealer on the walls before the coats of paint.

Image of the completed ceiling in the stairs area.

Entryway with sealer coat.

Malaysia Common Kingfisher Bird

I was walking past the big windows in the second floor family room today and I saw a blue bird flying away from our property over to the treed area outside the neighborhood. I saw blue wings and body. It was a lovely bird I wish I would have been able to see the front of it to better classify it. Looking on Malaysia Bird websites like this I think that the bird I saw might have been a Common Kingfisher. I'll have to look out for the bird again. I'd really like to get a bird feeder to put up over by the large mango tree and the bamboo bush, because the birds like to hang out in this area, but I haven't seen a bird feeder for sale here or any seed!!!!!

Image from wiki commons of a Kingfisher Bird, wish I could have photographed the bird I saw

Upstairs Family Room

It is time to start thinking about what to do with the living space on the second floor of our house. Malaysian's call this room the "Family Room". The room gets really hot because of the many windows, especially the long windows in the front of the house. These windows slide open, but during the day that usually makes the room hotter because the sun shines right in. Keeping them closed is better because the windows have a light sunblocker material on them. So, even though we have put a York air conditioner and Panasonic ceiling fan in the room, we don't plan to sit in there much during the day.

The room and ceiling hasn't been painted yet and is currently a very pale green tint, we will most likely go with bright white by Nippon. Maybe an accent grey color on the large window wall (not too dark) only.

I have been looking for sofa sets for this room but really can't find anything. I am liking the ads that I am seeing in international magazines that are showing cushions or low-type couches with lots of pillows. Someplace to just lounge around. So I brought up one of the living room cushions and a couple pillows to see if a low cushion formation might work. It seems to work fine and looks good as this room leads to our Home Office. I have taken measurements and am going to go back to Ikea because I saw some long grey cushions that were about the size of twin beds (not that I want more grey, but will take it if it is all they have and then use some kind of bright big pillows to accentuate). I think we will need 4 of these big couch cushions (which are actually longer than the couch cushion I brought from the living room) placing two along the wall under the air conditioner and two under the long window.

I also brought out a large piece of brown laminate that I had to mark the floor path to see if a coffee table in the middle of the room would work or if it would block the traffic pattern into the home office. No, it doesn't but it should be bigger and still it wouldn't be useful really because it is too far from the cushions to set your glass on or use it. Often times in home magazines especially contemporary homes I see these big spaces with two sofas and a coffee table in between them and there is so much space, it seems useless to me. So maybe two very long 8 foot by 18 inch very low coffee tables running in front both sofa cushions might look nice, be something different and actually useable to set books on, your drink, laptop, etc. They could be made out of wood/laminate or maybe glass. From what I can tell, there would still be enough walking space in the center of the room to get to the office. OK it all depends on finding the cushions.

Below are some examples of Mah Jong Sofas by Roche-Bobois which are low cushion seating configurations. Although these have a nice back rest and mine will only have big pillows...

Ceiling Fans

The House is extremely hot so we wanted to get the fans in as soon as possible and had them installed a few days ago. Metal hooks were already installed in the ceiling in 10 places throughout the house, but we chose not to put fans everywhere as we will be adding the ACs in a number of rooms this week. We determined we needed 5 fans. One in the Living Room, one in the outside covered Patio, in the upstairs Family Room, Home Office and one in our master suite Closet. Come to find out that the ceilings on the second floor of the house are only about 8.5 feet high which is low for adding a ceiling fan. So we had to start looking for low-ceiling fans- forums online and stores told us that the two most reliable fans in Malaysia are KDK and Panasonic. KDK is a Japan brand, but the fans sold here are made in Malaysia. We heard about the KDK Baby Fan which needs only 26.1 cm from the ceiling to the bottom of the fan. The model seemed good for our Closet and Family Room but looked to small for our Home Office. Later we found out that the Baby fan can not attach to the metal hooks on our ceiling and needs to be installed into cement ceilings while our upstairs ceiling appears to be heavy sheetrock. So we couldn’t go with the Baby Fan. The next best option and what we chose is the Panasonic Nami F-M14E8 which needs 30.6 cm from ceiling to bottom of the fan. While maybe silver might have been better, the Panasonic white model blends in with the ceiling making the ceilings look less low. So we went with this model in our Home Office, Closet and Family Room.

Panasonic Nami F-M14E8 in our Home Office

Panasonic Nami F-M14E8 in the Family Room

Unfortunately, the Family Room hook was bigger than the other hooks so when the fan was installed, it hangs lower and there is a gap between the ceiling and the fan top. This causes the fan to make more noise and movement. Not great, for using above where our family room couch will be. But for now, we will leave it and maybe try to have the hook or fan adjusted later when before the room is filled with furniture.

Since we went with Panasonic for the upstairs and since we heard that KDK is actually manufactured by the Panasonic people here in Malaysia (now makes sense why certain models were similar) and since the price of Panasonic was less than KDK, we opted for Panasonic for the main floor fans as well. We went with a five blade white model Panasonic F-M149 WT for the Living Room (with a 46.8 cm drop from the ceiling because the main floor ceilings are higher) and the Panasonic Bayu F-M148C8 WT fan for the outside Patio.

Panasonic Bayu F-M148C8 WT in the Covered Patio

Panasonic F-M149 WT in the Living Room