Valen’s Vanity Square

We’re really frustrated with our cabinet contractor!

First, we should have had our bedroom wardrobe installed 2 weeks ago, but it didn’t take place due to their internal coordination problem. Then they promised to have everything done for us today and tomorrow, including the kitchen cabinets. However, when we called them up just now, they said they could only start work tomorrow and Sunday! What a bummer!

I was so excited, thinking that I could show a photo of my NEW and NICE kitchen today.

Well, the kitchen is definitely new. To me, it will be nice, since it is my first kitchen with a built-in oven! There will also be a double-sink, but with just an, hmm, ordinary faucet. We saw some kitchen faucets with really cool designs when we visited the contractor’s show unit, but hey, kitchen faucets are not cheap stuffs! The one that we ordered, though simple, already costs 100 bucks!

So you can imagine that, up till this stage, our kitchen is the most expensive part of our house.

Anyway, when the wardrobe and cabinets are in, I will post some photos of my new house here, hehe…

One of the items in our new house that we might consider changing few months down the road is – our TV!

We surveyed plasma and LCD TVs the other day, and were told that Samsung LCD is the top seller recently. I think replacing our conventional TV with an LCD TV is a good idea, hehe. It’s less bulky, and won’t collect as much dust, haha! (LCD TV looks more fragile though.)

After that, perhaps the next thing we want to do is to couple the LCD TV with a nice TV console. Or, even better, one of the tv lifts I saw on the internet. It looks like this:

Where’s the TV? Just press a button from the control piece, a cover on top of the cabinet will open up, and the LCD TV will be raised up. Cool huh?

I think this is a great invention. Not only it helps to keep the TV clean at all times, but because the TV is not out in the open, one actually tends to watch TV less. That’s good, isn’t it?

Finally, we are back in KL. Our stuffs arrived this morning. We are glad that the professional mover company that we hired sent a team of efficient workers. It just took them around 4 hours to pack all our things yesterday. It would have been 4 months if we were to do it ourselves.

Back in our new house, we are also quite satisfied with the plaster ceiling, down lights and grills taken care by one single contractor. They really rushed to complete the work so that it is ready when we had our things moved in this morning. They must have used some super powerful air tools to finish the work in less than 2 weeks.

Well, things are not quite done yet. The part I dread the most has just started – cleaning the house. I can foresee myself to lose weight very soon, haha!

Furthermore, there are like 101 boxes to unpack! The worse is - we are not able to unpack any of them yet (except for dirty laundry and dry foods) because we still don’t have a wardrobe to keep our clothes or kitchen cabinets to store our kitchen utensils and dry foods! No bed in the room, no furniture in the living room and dining hall.

That also means, lots of shopping to do in the coming few weeks. I hope we can get something that will create the style and feel of this dining room that I saw on the internet. Nice, huh?

Hubby called up the house developer two days ago and was informed that the keys to our new house will be ready for collection end of this month! (But we won’t be in KL end of this month, duh!)

Anyway, it means that we will start seeing a big stream of money flowing out of our bank account very soon.

We first need to install grills on all doors and windows, then put in an alarm system, plaster the ceiling and install ceiling lights, may be repaint some of the walls with our colors of choice, have air-conditioner units placed in the living room and master bedroom, re-do the fencing between our house and the neighbors’, furniture, kitchen cabinets…arghhh, a very long list. *Starting to sweat*

Find shutters at Larson Shutter Company

As much as I would love to have wooden exterior shutters for the windows to give the house a hint of Victorian flavor, guess we have no space for it in the budget now. In view of the recent rise in cost of living, I foresee that it would take months, or even one whole year, for us to get the house done in the way we want. So short of cash right now!

With the electricity rates going up very soon, we all have to tighten our belts even further!

I can no longer afford to have the laptop powered on for 12 hours a day. This means that I have to get really efficient and have work done with the laptop during the daytime, and thus, no more dilly-dallying between the internet and serious work, hehe.

As much as I like the living room to be well lit at night even if it’s just watching TV, I think I have to ‘comply’ with some save-electricity movement and only have the wall lights on. Well, may be we should just use candles at night, haha! Besides saving electricity, we could create a romantic ambiance within the house.

Imagine how these candles placed at different corners of the house would set a romantic mood for two?

The candles shown above are from www.quickcandles.com.

Our TV rack was bought from IKEA and has been with us for 4 years now. (Jeez, I’m saying this like it’s our pet dog. :P)

It looks modern and contemporary, but it also collects dust as it is an open rack. Dust on the CDs and the DVD player, too. So, too bad for it, this TV rack will not be sitting in our living room of our new house. We will try to find a corner for it though.

We shall get a TV rack with doors to keep dust away and things neatly organized. Something simple will do.

[Wanted to show a photo of the TV rack I like here, but the Wordpress add-image function just ain't working!]

Fortunately we won’t need audio racks because we don’t have any of those super high-tech home audio systems that only the rich can afford. That means one item less to spend money on (and the cash can be used to buy my dream oven, hehe).