Monday, December 13, 2010

Crazy Hats

It was a very busy month. Since the housing project was already settled: house chosen, deals closed, interior and exterior plans making on progress {read: internet search and items on sale hunting}, and down payment source almost settled, we are now on the roll for the work related activities. 

And yes, no Christmas shopping was ever done yet and it is still on the least of my priorities. We might hit the malls few days before Christmas, and I think like last year, there will be midnight shopping on some major malls where we usually shops.

My {former} classmates on masters had a get-together party and it was themed Crazy Hat! Will be posting photos on weekend. 

Together with my colleague, I conducted talks for universities and will be flying to Cebu tomorrow for another talk and will be back on Thursday morning! These things happening amid migraines that I am suffering from lately. 

Here are some photos from the net that I found on my files:

small space kitchen

photos from www.myhomeideas.com


Have a great week, people. I will try to post photos from Cebu once I get the chance.


Saturday, December 11, 2010

Link it up

Here are for the homeowners who are leaning towards green living:

I wanted a home with minimum risk of sickness due to toxic materials. Glasses will be used instead of plastic containers (for the kitchen) and we will probably plant our own vegetables and fruits. {we are already doing that here}.

lady palm
Plants inside the home will be another thing we are planning to include and you can find the list of plants here together with the compounds that they absorb for you. Just to give you an idea, inks and detergents release Benzene. Benzene causes skin and eye irritation {and much more} and carcinogenic. Chinese evergreen is excellent on absorbing both benzene and toluene. And aloe vera {we happen to have a plant that needs replanting because it is already too big for its current pot} will soon have a new place indoors because it absorbs formaldehyde from wax papers and facial tissues.


chinese evergreen


photo credits: indoor tropics

We are not computing our carbon footprints yet, but if you know me well, expect that we will be doing that soon.

Busy Bees

We are far from moving to our new house. One reason is financial. Second is building materials. So far, the homeownership thing is still an alien topic to me. I am still guided by my instinct and the internet. One big hurdle though is that there is very limited information about buying a house here in the Philippines. But since I am not buying from home developers like Avida and we have lived in the area for a long time, we trust our agents.

We converted our 660k lot purchase to a 1.7M house and lot. We have few losses here:

1. the 18k plan will probably collect dust on our paper piles.
2. Time spent on building permit and some documentations

But we are happy to see an actual house and getting away from the heartaches and headaches from building the house. Although I am an engineer and good in math including physics and mechanics, civil engineering seems to be a different language to me.

The house that we chose will cost us around 500k for equity to move in. We are negotiating now for a 12months payment without interest  to cut off additional expenses for borrowing rates. It means, we will be paying around 100k (we already paid 130k for the lot) and will pay off the rest next year. I am coming up with a proposal to pay the equity until October 2011, so it is technically not 12months but 10 months. If this doesn't work out,we can actually delay signing papers to give us at least another  2 months of lag time{that,being bad and low of me, but things like that worked here}.

As i surf and study our steps towards this financial dilemma ( i do not want to wipe out our savings), i also keep tabs of what i should know about the house before turnover such as electrical load and the plumbing. Although not that equipped with knowledge, I can read drafts and understand computations since i had a subject on electrical engineering back in college.

I will be updating this blog every now and then so that if there will be others who have the same issues, they can get some ideas that might help them.

****

It is really a big investment for us. I already conducted search on malls and hardwares for the things that we need for the house so that i can slowly buy things next year, on sale, while paying equity. I have to document it yet but have already some excels to work out with.

I had few forums to attend to and scheduled to fly to Cebu next week. I am not that happy to be moving around at this time of the year but sometimes we do not have that much choice. I hope to get positive news on the job prospect although I am giving it some disappointment space. :D

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Daydreaming

I was staring at the photos of our "new home" this weekend. I am so inlove with it that I created a new account on my SIMS 3 game using the house model. 
With the SIMS 3, the hubby was able to get a visual on how the place will look like and it is very wonderful to see the big difference after the curtains are hanged. It gave the place the coziness that we want. 
(the SIMS 3 model of the house was a perfect duplicate except for the roof on the front porch. I can not find the same model that have an arch on the entryway. I used same color, same shelves, and floor plan)

The floorplan is great, the materials are not substandard however there is an issue on the kitchen. 
The kitchen sink and counters are located at the far right corner of the room, near the door. The adjacent room is the masters bedroom. Since the counters were installed near the door in L-shape, the only space for the refrigerator and oven is the wall (adjacent room is masters bedroom). We were thinking about renovating the area, demolished the counter near the door and install there the oven but assuming that we have to pay for the down payment, there will be no budget on that for the mean time. Sigh. That's my dilemma. 

To come up with other ideas i went surfing! Mostly on Young House Love and Apartment Therapy. I realized that the house is 66 sq.m. only but it is big enough for us since we are not planning to have lots of kids. the three bedrooms are big enough for us because privacy and immediate moving is our number one concern. We hope to start paying for the mortgage because we want to finish it early on (we did our math).

Inspirations From Young House Love:

perfect for halfbath


I have seen this pantry at Katie's blog and have been obsessing about this for a long time. It appeared again on one of Young House's House crashing :


another half bath:


and the lawn, i think we can have one like this:



I also found some great ideas from Apartment Therapy and BHG wasn't able to bookmark them. So here is all I have for now. Have a happy Monday.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Project Prospects

I had a crazy week. The workload is heavy but somehow it still made me feel like I have never done them before. Two months away from the job (commitment-wise, if you catch my drift) makes same job exhausting once you go full time again. I can not blog that much so I am posting prospects for projects at home.

On the good news, we were able to get the house and lot. We are now on the process of looking for funds to add for the initial down payment (we do not want to wipe out our savings and our loan will not cover the down payment). I will be posting photos of the house this weekend.

Here are the new links:

1. easy to do tutorials (for beginners):

{via Mr&Mrs.Phillips}



2. More on for little kid (boys) craft and nesting

{via CookCleanCraft}

3. Inspiration and tutorials

{via MadeByJenn}

4. MadebyJenn made a camera strap that I want to do and she got the tutorial from {PriddyCreations}

{photo via PriddyCreations}

There you have it. Hope you will enjoy your weekend. Have a great Friday.

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