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

Bungalow Exterior Paint and Property Walls Color

The first coat of Nippon Cement 9507 has been painted on the exterior of the house. They still have to paint one more coat, but the house is looking a bit lighter than we thought it would.

So in trying to determine the exterior property walls color, we have opted for a very dark grey, nearly black Nippon color S 8500-N (accent base). We think that the dark wall on the side and front of the property will give the house some color and character. With the bright flowers and greenery we will add to the flower pots on the exterior side wall and up on the second floor flower planter, we should get more color around the house.

S 8502-Y on the left (the lighter color) and S 8500-N on the right

Other Progress- the Roof painters are now painting the tiles on the lower roof and 'after lunch' (this is a very vague time in Malaysia since lunches can run up to two hours!) the Corian Countertop should be arriving as well a B to oversee the installation and install the Ikea Stainless Steel handles and Hava handles. If we are lucky maybe the Bareno kitchen sink and Tuscani standalone cooker can be hooked up today, tomorrow or Saturday and we will be ready to cook!

Painting the House

On Saturday the Painters power-washed the house to prepare it for painting, they say it is important to power-wash all of the old paint off the house and any peeling paint before painting. It was a HUGE mess. Water seeped into the windows inside the house, peeling paint landed on the ground and surrounding bushes and trees and it still remains. Luckily, we haven’t done the landscaping yet. After the power-washing episode, the painters painted two coats of Nippon Vinilex Wall Sealer 5100 over the ceiling of the roof underhang and walls of the entire house. The sealer is very important in Malaysia, because without the sealer they say the cement walls will peel; it is true because the sample colors R and I painted on the front of the house had already started to peel (after less than a couple weeks! And when they power-washed the sample color sections on the wall, the paint peeled off in giant chunks because we didn’t use sealer under the paint when we did our test). Yesterday the painters painted the ceiling of the roof underhang and today they have finally begun to paint the Exterior Walls with Nippon Cement 9507.

House with two coats of Nippon Sealer

Seeing the house with the peach accent color gone and white from the the sealer confirmed our decision not to paint the house exterior bright white which we thought about doing during the color selection when we about gave up on mixed colors here in Malaysia. White looks way too stark for the house, think Cement will blend into the landscape better.

Work Continues....

After 8 full days of work the Stainers finally finished. Now B can come in and install the upper Kitchen Cabinet Doors (bottom should wait until after the Corian is installed). He will also work on the shelf lighting and installing the built in Rubine Microwave.

The Roof above the second floor has been painted and now the Exterior Wall Painter will come and do the underhang, timber and exterior house walls on the second level. Once he is complete the roof painters will come back and paint the lower roof and finally the exterior wall painter will do the ground level of the house and exterior walls on the property.

Exterior Wall after fence was removed

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.

Malaysia Tile Roofs

I mentioned we are on our second roof contractor... the first wasn’t really doing the work needed. While the house hasn’t been lived in, the tile roof has still been exposed the hot sun and heavy rain for a few years. To make matters worse, the houses in this development were built with too low of a slope which has caused leaks. In order to fix the problem the pitch of the roof at all the corners needs to be raised. So we have reluctantly hired the second group to rip open the roof and fix it so we shouldn’t have any problems in the future (I write this with only a small amount of hope because the weather conditions in Malaysia are harsh). We are doing it now to stop any leaks before we paint any more of the plaster ceilings (have already done the master bedroom, dressing room (walk in closet) and our home office).

The Beehive

While the first roof contractors (we are on our second now, more later) were working on the Roof at the side of the house behind one of the long wooden slats they found a live beehive (tile roofs in Malaysia are open at the bottom on the curve to let hot air out, so ‘things’ can go in there). We had to have some bee specialists come to remove the hive.

They told us they can only remove it at night when all the bees are there, so they came after dark and worked for about 45 minutes removing the bees which they told us were Honey Bees.

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.