Sunday, January 17, 2010

Go green! It isn't cheap

It is strange to me that Eco is expensive in Taiwan. If you want to go green, you have to pay for them with no help from government what's ever! For example, all the hybrid cars are much more expensive than gasoline cars, no lower tax, no carpool.

Unfortunately, all the manufactures here seem have no clue about what real Eco friendly products are as well. You have to spend extra time and effort to dig out the materials are closer to the green ideas you have in mind.

Finding out the energy saving electronics was the easy part in this searching process. The problem was to find the ones were energy saving, smart to use and also looked good in our place.
We picked the basic ones really quickly:

Refrigerator--Hitachi 543L
                      













Washing Machine: SFB1200T
                           










TV: LED Samsung UA40B6000VM

                         





Food compost: Izumi ICM 300TW

                                














Air Conditioner:Daikin









We also picked up some LED spot lights [33 of them in fact] and a solar panal water heater which was the only one thing Taiwanese goverment promoted with 300usd rebate, then we were done with the easy part.

More Sketches in baby-step speed!!

First time to sketch for a space was not easy to me...
I found that I lack of the sense of the real space proportion in my apartment especially because we have low celling and meanwhile I was trying to think about the thickness, relation between objects and users, materials and finishing in a larger scale at the same time. The strange thing was although all the process sounded really like any other design tasks but interior design was somehow too different to me compared to design a car. I was like an adult got trapped in a baby's body and tried to run....

Here are some examples that I started to planned out the space and doodled out some ideas about living room and my walking closet.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

And---SKETCH!

After deciding the floor plan, I started to sketch up some ideas of how I want the space looked like. Sketch! Almost my favorite part of the designing [ OK, I actually love to see the final products the most.] I started with rough sketches to figure out how many items I want
to put in the space and how the aesthetic gonna be .

We both thought putting color themes into different spaces especially we won't have obvious walls in between the areas. As a cooking antreprenor, I sketched the open kitchen first. When I picked up the makers to shade the sketch, I thought about BLUE ---I imaged using a kind of wood dyed with deep and rich blue paired with stainless steel top!

Cooking station + Kitchen counter 

The floor plan...endless decision making step one

Of course we thought about how we wanted to layout the floor plan couple million times before we actually drew it out....

It was so difficult for first timers like us and we loved to do it a gazillion times anyways.... We definitely wanted a large living room and an open kitchen on the first floor and have a half open bedroom and master bathroom on the second floor.

Then the hard part kicked in, how did we want to layout the guest room, guest bathroom and dressing rooms? Later on I found out the most difficult part was to decide the moving path between toilet, shower, bath, changing area, dressing rooms and bedroom. It was especially important to me because I spent a lot of time in my bathroom [which women doesn't anyways?]. Then we had to fit in all the details: windows, doors, storage..etc. After one month of discussion [also some small arguments here there, heheh] here is the final outcome!

First floor

































Second floor