Sweet Home Vol. 31

The issue of Sweet Home Magazine featuring our home is available now!

As I mentioned previously, they came to the house to shoot our home and interview R and I about living in Malaysia.

They shot some of the antiques we had out which are mainly Persian items. It's fun to see these items in a magazine!

Pick up a copy if you can. It's in Mandarin, if you can read it. Otherwise, the rest of the magazine is great just to look at the pictures as it features a number of contemporary homes in Malaysia/Southeast Asia.

Bathroom Mirrors

The Bathroom mirror is up in the Office Bathroom! We didn't have B make a wood framed one as we didn't want to add another element in there. After looking at all the mirror places we could find in Seremban, where they make mirrors and also windows and window frames, we found one place that would put up a mirror without the standard gold or silver tacky poster frame that all the companies suggested. The compromise is that it has 4 silver round top screws on the outside of the mirror. No one is doing this anymore for large mirror, but well, in Seremban it's all we could find and it looks ok. I'm just concerned the screws will rust over time as everything here does.

We also had the company install a round bevel mirror we bought at Ikea in what is now our Master Bathroom. You can see that there are two doors in the bathroom. One connects to our Master Bedroom and the other to what used to be a slightly smaller bedroom that we are now using as a big walk-in closet (will eventually have B make custom wood closet shelves around the whole room...). Anyway, the bathroom wall tiles are ok in beige. The special tiles are greyish green tint and have a bit of elegant design (or try to be) of course we would have gone plainer, but here we are. The floor tiles are a green color. So what I thought we would do would be try to go a bit more elegant here. You can see that the counter is pretty big for only one sink. I would have put two, but then again when both doors are open (they open into the bathroom), the one sink in the center looks good. The ikea mirror is kind of elegant and I found a small pendant light with little crystal chandelier pieces dangling in it, somehow glamorous but still minimal and modern that we will have put up when we get a few more light fixtures for around the house. That and add an orchid plant on the side of the countertop and some nice spa towels and we should be done.

Not sure we want to add glass around the shower, but might do someday. For now, I was thinking about buying some of that teakwood flooring (something like this) and put it in there with some asian pebbles around the outer parts of it all inside the existing edged parts of the tile floor. Just some thoughts, but not sure yet.

Malaysia Sunset

Often the sunset makes the entire sky pink, but this photo doesn't capture just how pink and beautiful it really is.

Light Fixture in Office Bathroom

I'm getting ready for B to make the mirror over the sink/vanity in the Office Bathroom as the Ikea mirror selection didn't have a mirror that would work here. In my recent post here, I shared the photo above which shows the weird yellow fixture over the sink/vanity that doesn't go with the bathoom or the other light fixture over the jacuzzi.

Close up of the yellow light fixture

So I looked around for some cream colored acrylic paint to try and paint the back part of the fixure, I didn't find the cream color I wanted, but found some pearl off-white paint with a bit of metallic in it. So I thought I would give it a try. Using my finger to rub the paint over the fixture, I didn't want it to look to solid. I wanted the paint to be slightly translucent, so that the color underneath was still present. Just wanted to downplay the brightness of the yellow color.

Here is a shot of the fixture after painting. It looks better and blends into the wall much better. But it's still an ugly fixture. For now, we use this and when we spot a nice fixture for over the sink/vanity and a vertical fixture to compliment it for near the jacuzzi, we can change them.

Home Office Bathroom

Now that the mirror in the mainfloor bathroom is up, I have to start looking for a mirror for the Home Office Bathroom. At first, I wanted a large plain mirror to cover the area, but I am having a hard time finding a company to get it from. I saw a mirror at Ikea in natural wood frame that might work. For now, I keep looking.

This is the light fixture that is above the bathroom vanity. It is pretty ugly and doesn't match the other fixture near the jacuzzi. I should look for another one that would look better, or figure out how to change the yellow color of the glass to beige. I dont really want to have to install another fixture because it means more holes in the wall, and we just don't know where the pipes run in the walls.

Bat Outside

I snapped a photo of a small Bat hanging outside of the home office in the big leaf mango tree.

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).

Fruit Ripening

From the second floor of our house, where we spend most of our time.... away from the construction on the first floor in the Kitchen or the Roof repair, I noticed some fruit ripening when looking out the windows.

First I spotted from the Home Office window, two Mangos in the large Mango tree in the front yard. This is the first time I have seen any fruit on the tree.

Second the Rambutan tree in our neighbor's backyard and dangling above our brick wall has some fruit ripening; I hope some of these delicious fruits fall into our yard!

Malaysian Oriole

We were up in our second floor Home Office eating lunch when we heard a loud bird making a pretty song outside our window. We peaked outside and saw an Oriole (from the Oriolidae family) in the tree. Quite a large yellow bird. We went to the Malaysia Birds website and found an image of the yellow bird. The photo here is from Wikipedia.

I didn’t know that for Orioles there are ‘Old World’ and ‘New World’ families. They have the new world type in the US and the old world type in Malaysia, so when I saw the large bird we saw today being called an Oriole, it didn’t look like an oriole I am used to seeing in the US.

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

Getha Mattress

After looking at a number of different mattresses like Simmons, Dunlopillo, King Koil and Goodnite we decided on a Malaysian made eco-friendly brand called Getha. We talked to a few people who love their Getha mattresses and the MY mattress forums say good things about the product. Getha is made from natural latex foam and does not have MC Methylene and is chloride free (many mattresses produced in Asia supposedly have these harmful chemicals). The high-end Getha models were over our budget, but the Spring Power mattress from the Transforme Series was soft and extremely comfortable (comes with both natural latex and spring coils and a soft padding on top) and somehow affordable. The Getha website states, “The company manufactures its product with the Dunlop technology process and its latest European automatic foaming machine and automated line. All products are proudly manufactured using 100% pure natural, high quality latex from only Malaysia which is renowned for its world class quality.” At nearly 3,000myr it was a splurge for us, but yet it doesn’t cost as much as many of the other brands, especially the imported mattresses. So we thought we would try this locally made product.

The only furniture that was already in the house when we bought it was a new bedroom set including a king bedframe/headboard, two side tables, a large closet wardrobe and a vanity with mirror. The set is ugly!!! See photo above when the set was still in the master bedroom.

Speaking of the Master Bedroom- the room is large at 21.5 feet x 17.7 feet not including the bay window space. The house has 5 bedrooms (if you count the maid's room as one).The upstairs has 3 bedrooms: the big master bedroom (with large bathroom including jacuzzi), a medium size bedroom and a slightly smaller one. The two smaller rooms are jointed by a shared bathroom. Since it is just the two of us, we decided to we will use the master bedroom for our home office where I can do my art and R can have his computers. And we will use the other two bedrooms and bathroom as our “master suite” since they are all near each other on the other side of the house. Using the larger of the two bedrooms for our sleeping room and the smaller one for a big walk around closet (someday we will get custom closet cabinets to fill the whole space). Using a smaller bedroom means we will run a smaller size air conditioner at night as well. So we moved the ugly bedframe and two side tables into our new bedroom until we find a bedroom set we like and will move the wardrobe and mirrored vanity in our “closet” until we make that custom closet.

Bed in our new smaller bedroom

The Getha mattress arrived in its own plastic/cotton bag sealed with a green Getha lock and a CD of music for helping you fall asleep (we’ll have to try that later when we get a cd player). The mattress seems great and quite thick. We can’t wait to start sleeping on it!