Kitchen

A Malaysia resident wrote and asked me for some current photos of the kitchen because he and his wife are embarking on a kitchen remodel at their home in Penang. So here are some photos.

A search of 'kitchen' on the right sidebar will provide you with links of all the posts of when ours was being designed and installed. We do love cooking in it and working together to prepare meals, there's enough space for us to move around and it's designed functionally. Our favorite part is perhaps the wood shelves where we put dishes out. I like to pull various dishes right from the ledge while cooking.

We are also very happy about the real Corian we spent the extra money on. It was a much better choice then marble because we didn't have to deal with seams.

The one thing we aren't thrilled about is the Stainless Steel table. While it looks fantastic and fills the space, it gets rusty if you don't wipe off the water. Actually all the stainless steel items (except the refrigerator which isn't really stainless steel but some kind of stainless looking material) get rusty if you don't keep them up. I never had this problem with my stainless steel appliances in New York.

Panasonic MX-900M Blender

So I have been putting off buying a Blender since we moved to Malaysia. Every time I'd see them in the stores I couldn't decide what to get. I was looking for stainless steel to go with the kitchen or black to go with the coffeemaker. But many of the SS models are imported models and just way too expensive. You see I bought a blender back when I lived in New York . It wasn't that expensive maybe $75 USD (but you can get much better quality appliances in the US for less cost than Malaysia). I bought it to mainly make frozen drinks like margaritas, etc. And when I used it, the thing barely could crush the ice to make the drinks, in fact, I don't think the ice ever got that small it was more like shaved ice. This was disappointing. I figured I had to spend a lot more to get something that would do the job but never go around to it.

So being in Malaysia, I immediately thought... oh there are good fruits here, we can make all sorts of frozen drinks!!! Every time I was in a store, I would think about my bad blender in New York and not be sold on any of the Malaysian blender options.

Well, my parents from Virginia were just here to visit R and I for the first time and they thought I really needed a blender so they said they were going to buy me one as an early Christmas present! We went around the shops looking and I was still being fussy. One day we happened in my favorite appliance store in Seremban called Syarikat Hoong Bee (Jalan Tuanku Antah Jalan Rahang) where R and I bought all of our Panasonic products for the house. We have been pretty happy with the Panasonic refrigerator, washing machine, fans etc. we have bought from the guy Jimmy there.

Jimmy said that the best blender is the Panasonic MX-900M Blender (now R said Jimmy just says that because he sales mainly Panasonic, which is probably true), nevertheless, he said it is the model that all the commercial businesses use.

I wasn't crazy about the idea of buying a white blender, but I was trying to be flexible because my parents were buying. But I did like that the model had a plastic container instead of glass because many of the real glass models just seemed way to heavy. He said the blender was made in Malaysia which didn't excite me (although strangely the plug is not a Malaysian plug and needs an adapter?). So I said OK to this blender to put a rest to the whole situation! I bargained him down to 140RM (about $46 USD).

Right after buying the blender we stopped by a fruit stand and picked up some fruit. All the fruit above cost 2oRM (under $7 USD). One Papaya, two mangoes, bananas and some strange small fruits on a stem. Does anyone know what they are called? They have a white fruit and taste pretty nice. I mainly bought them to try with my parents as they were trying all the local fruits (they liked Durian!!!).

So we decided to make some Papaya drinks in the blender using the whole papaya, some ice, sugar and rum. We put all the ingredients in and turned the blender on it blended it in like 2 seconds! It was amazing, there must have been something wrong with that New York blender. I can't wait to blend tons of things like pesto with my Thai basil ...

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