The renovation

Many had asked me how's the progress of our house renovation. "ok.... fine.... progressing ...." was my answer for the past one month. Now here comes the truth.

After the whole excitement wore off (during the first two weeks itself), it slowly become a drag and a pain in the ass. The renovation had been delayed for nearly a month now. The contractor is slow in his job and was poor in his communication skill. His standard answer to all our queries was "ok, ok, can, can, no problem.." but never bother to explain what he meant by saying "can", what is the cost implication. Plus there is issues with old piping etc. which was out of our expectation.

Peter and I have alot of friction due to the disagreement in the renovation work. He was the bridge of the communication between the contractor and myself as most of the time i am not able to monitor the progress of the renovation due to my long working hours. Being the miss fussy pants, i have alot of requirements whereby poor Peter have to become the postman to convey my words to the contractor and vice versa. When things didnt work out, he had to listen to my whines and complains, and at the same time he was frustrated with the contractor's 'chinaman' working style.

That's why i wrote the post "A house is not a home" quite some times back as a reminder to myself that never lose sight of the most important thing, which is US and not the house. I appreciated that Dorcas promptly dropped a concern email to me once she saw the post. It was really sweet for her to do so but i am super bad when it comes to reply email (hehe.. sorry mate!).

I have to say the entire process was thorny and painful, but i am thankful that we have achieved most of our objective for the course of past two months. And i really hope that by this week, the first phase of the renovation will be completed and i can move in on Merdeka day (what a coincidence!). So far, the renovation list includes:

1. New plaster ceiling
2. New bathrooms (I love the master bathroom the most!)
3. Tearing down the wall between the kitchen and living room
4. Re-routing and replacing old pipes
5. Replacing all the old doors
6. Varnishing and painting
7. Polishing marbles, new marble skirting
8. New tiles for the balcony
9. New curtain railings
10. New down lights and sockets
11. Laminated floor for bedrooms (PENDING!!!)

One good thing was throughout the process, after many disagreement, frustration, silent treatment and reconciliation (hugs and kisses, hahaha...), Peter and i had learned to deal with unexpected issues with open mind and even have the guts to laugh about it. For instance, Peter and I went for a check on the new paints last night, to our horror, the lime green color which we have chosen for the main corridor and wardrobe appears to be too GREEN whereby i can even see the reflection of the green color on Peter's face when he stood beside the wall. You can imagine how my heart dropped when i saw the green wardrobe as it looks like some sort of kindergarten room/prayer room (if you know what i'm saying).

To prevent Peter from turning into the incredible hulk everytime he enters the room, we decided to re paint the room, OURSELVES. The funny thing was on our way back, Peter suddenly turned to me and said " Luckily we change our mind about the theme of our house from white-red to white-green theme, imagine how the room looks like in red". And thats when we started to laugh hysterically.... oh my, not to mentioned that yesterday was the day of celebration for hungry ghost festival. No pun intended.

All in all, it was indeed a journey, i will definitely share some picture of the place once its being cleaned up. So till then, i will leave it to your imagination. ;)