Silver Case

Met up with contractor today to see revised set of plans on the house. The Physical Engineer approved converting the dead-space attic into a proper room. Now the project chief, Frank, wants to get us decided on wiring and plumbing so that he can proceed with the ripping-up works.

Deciding on outlets and power service is a big deal, particularly in the kitchen. It’s forcing me to decide soon on what appliances I’ll be using.

To that end, I met with two different kitchen guys today to talk appliances. One is the distributor for an Italian commercial-quality line. The other is a a specialist in used commercial equipment. He’s the guy who I bought my Nuova Simonelli Mac 2000v espresso machine from three or four years ago.

The Italian line guy will send me a quote. I’m expecting it to be very expensive.

Ling and I talked with the used equipment guy for a long hour or two tonight. His advice was basically that I could buy everything used except the refrigerator. He didn’t recommend buying used refrigerators because you cannot judge the compressor or health of the machinery. But for the other equipment, he told us that instead of paying $12,000 for a new Lainox combi-oven, we could get a used one for $3,000, for instance.   The brands I would buy here all have long-term reliable support, not fly-by-night agents.  On Saturday we’re going to a couple dealers to look at equipment first hand and further refine what we want.

It’s also forcing me to decide on how the layouts of my rooms (the workshop, the attic, and the office) will be. This is also not trivial, as I need to decide how to break up all my equipment and projects. I don’t want to be lazy about the design and just default to the desinger, for, as I told Ling, it’s very infrequent we get chances to design rooms nearly from scratch.

meter dimensions of the three rooms

Anway, that is current status as I do more strategizing about room layouts.   Somehow I woke up at 6am today, and now I realize it is closing in on 2am, so I had best get to bed.

Would own my house today, except I wrote 2008 instead of 2007 on a $3,140.00 check, so that has pushed things back a day or so.

At any rate, we met up with the guy we’re going to have do the renovations at our house.  He had pretty good design for modifying the kitchen and downstairs. I would prefer a bigger workshop down there, but the guest room and kitchen trumps that to some degree.  He nicely designed a new master bathroom/bedroom.  We’re finalizing the wall lines first, then will bother with the finer details.

The price is about what I expected.  The timing is longer than I’d hoped:  1-2 months to get government planning approval and then 4-6 months after that to have all the renovations completed.  That puts us right at Apr08 for completion.  Thankfully our lease runs till April, so we should be ok.  Had been hoping to move more like December or January, but it seems infeasible.

I’ll try to get the plans scanned and uploaded here, but they’re on strange-size paper which will require scanning and stitching, and I don’t have the time for that right now.

Looks like I’ll get the “keys” (the place is unlocked and empty) to my house a day before we go back to the US for the better part of a month.  Tuesday I sign the loan documents and on the eighth I’ll sign the final papers.

A builder/contractor/designer is already working on some drafts for the renovations.  I had to spend an hour last week poring over three separate spools of microfiche (ugh) to find all the architectural and structural plans to my house.   I printed these and gave them to the builder.

Finding the plans was a chore.  My house is a part of a large project.  For any house their are two sets of plans, structural and architectural.  I had to find a master map of the project, realize my house was a “Type B” home, and then read through the whole project’s plans, pulling out anything that was general or for Type B homes.  It appears that the diagrams for a type B home are for the left-hand side homes, and mine is a right, so all my blueprints have to be reversed when you read them.  A further nuisance is that errata are filed against the original plans.  In my case, my project had three tiers of errata for both the architectural and structural plans.

Hopefully I pulled out 98% of what I should have. I am sure I missed a piece here or there. If so, tough, my contractor can go retrieve whatever is missing or wrong.

This is the n’th weekend in a row where at three, four pm, the house is just insufferably hot. Total dog-day.  It sucks the life out of me to do anything. I’m amazed that I managed to convince myself to play with my Print Gocco, in fact.

Anyway, I had the epiphany this afternoon that “fuck it, my new house is going to have smartly-setup airconditioned that is actually efficient enough to use regularly. At least that’ll make me more productive.”

Currently, although we have air conditioning in all the rooms, we only really use it in Luke’s room and my bedroom.  The house is leaky, so it’s not especially efficient, and the living room isn’t easily chilled.  It’s a really nauseating feeling walking out of my 73-degree office into a wall of 89-degree living room, so I tend to just leave it all off and pant at the fan.

What the new place needs is:

1) a way to easily partition segments of the house off so that the entire zone can be chilled down.

2) units that are new and efficient and aren’t going to cost an exhorbinant amount to run regularly.-

Walking Tour

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Looks like I’ve almost got final approval from the Land Authority to buy this freehold house (freehold, landed properties are restricted from foreigners. As a Permanent Resident I have to seek special approval).

As well, my mortgage is almost finished with Citibank. For better or worse, the only mortgages offered over here are floating-rate. Currently rate is 3.7%/annum, but it could go to whatever it wanted. I asked a loan officer why there were no true fixed rate mortgages and he uttered some incoherent about “people not being able to guess where mortgage rates would be in 30 years.” Whatever. It doesn’t matter, it’s not available.

Anyway, I started uploaded and crudely organizing and commenting on a collection of photos I’ve taken of the place. There is quite a lot of stuff we want to do to the place, and we are not going to move in until it is all done. (I have very cheap rent here that lasts till April, so I have time)