The color

Our schedule is tide and somehow I think we are on time.
Yesterday, we started to paint the studio. No need to explain, you can tell what we are up to!

Bathroom---I love you

As my opinion, Kitchen and bathroom are the most important space at home.

I always know I want 2 bathrooms, it is scary enough to live with a guy but share the toilet ? No wayyyyyy. Besides, I really enjoy spending my time in my bathroom, I read, surfing on line, listen to music, have long bath, steam myself and have my full mask section. I can easily stay in my bathroom heaven for 1-2hours. I don't want to see B has to pee into the kitchen sink or our mini garden.

Especially a day like today, hard construction work kills my arms and lower back, nothing is better than soaking myself into my eggshell tub [from TOTO]with the book I read about hundred times [ so I don't need to pay too much attention to it.]

Today's recipe is: Harnn / Oriental Herb Bath salt+ Himalaya Magnolia Skin Pampering bubble bath.
I discovered Harnn during our last trip to Phi Phi island and I love their Oriental Herb collection. When I use their Oriental shampoo, my hair has the natural glow the next morning! The smell calms me down and drags me to very sleepy and peaceful place.

OK, enough talking, I am about to slip into my lovely tub, good night.

Update---Ikea, how can we survive without you~

Yes, We swore that we would say goodbye to IKEA for good.

But when you work under a tide budget, IKEA looks much more attractive than usual.
I have to say I used to Hateeeeeeeee IKEA lighting department, but ever since they started the PS series I noticed that they improved a lot in that section!

The lamps look fun and refreshing and we decided to finally say YES to them. Thanks for the free return policy, we took couple possible candidates to the studio for a tryout.

Notice some differences of the wood and cement work?
Our studio is going to be done in 1.5weeks!

See how we gave up IKEA

New project

This comes out from no where, at least, we didn't think this day would come this soon.

We have a new project to work on---we are opening our new studio!

The beginning of this year B and I both discontinued our job contracts with the big corporations. We thought we were going to take some time off and to finish the  leftover projects in our hands. Maybe couple months later we would find jobs in China or Europe.....

Some nice friends heard we were taking a break from regular jobs, they past on some projects and we got busier and busier. Now, the little office place we share with other designers is not enough to us anymore, our shit slowly taking over other people's space. It is about time to get a serious working space for ourselves.

We are in a rush, we can not spend too much time on searching for the perfect spot. Fortunately we soon find a place has good location and reasonable rent. The only drawback is this place is completely empty...{ well...the rent is cheaper than others in the hood for a reason]

We get one month to fix this empty shell into a functional office.

Here is the place looks like now, we see what kind of magic we can play...

we want the first floor, and yes, it is actually a garage

Suppose be the main working area [ in the near future]

This will be our material lab and "get our hands dirty work room"

meeting room~~we love the old rusty window

Little kitchen and rest area for both us and the visitors

Since our home burned a hole in our pockets, we determined to spend as little as we can on this project. Nothing is cheaper than" do it yourself" when it comes to simple wood work. Tonight, we are going to visit B&Q, get some table saw, band saw, air staple!

No worry, we took model construction 1,2,3,4, we will try not to cut our fingers off or staple into our hands. The expensive tuition got to pay off some time some where.

Customization---easier say than done

Back in Los Angeles, during the school time, we had a complete IKEA home. We swore so many times that we won't  do it any more once we graduated.
Easier say then done.....sign....We still shopped in Ikea when we lived in Stockholm and Taiwan. Please don't get me wrong, there were many good design pieces in Ikea but it was like you picked up some Lego pieces from the same toy box and trying to arrange them in a slightly different way than other people did. 

Customization was the key to us in this project in order to create something new but what we got from the workers is big"NO !!"  They told us either " it's too expensive!" " too much trouble" " you will regret" or simply " WE DON'T DO THINGS THAT WAY !"

The rules we set for this remodeling projects are:
1. Use as many local materials as possible.
2. Design as many parts as we can

So, Here is the first part we made under these 2 rules.
I liked the old American hexagon shaped tiles but it was too small and impossible to find in Taiwan:

I also was thinking about using marble as tiles because the entire East-North coast mountain in Taiwan is marble. Green material! Oh yeah~~
2009 when B's parents visited us we went hiking there ---Taroko, Taiwan. It was beautiful~

So I combined two things I like and made 5cmx5cm Hexagon shaped marble tiles and they looked great.
We used them in the kitchen and master bathroom

Moved in!!

We moved in right before Chinese New year!! Feb. 13, 2010, the day before Valentines day.

My blog is very slow comparing to the real schedule...I know I know, as soon as the apartment is done, as soon as I have everything set up I will upload more pictures. As soon as......

There were some Chinese traditional preparation we had to fellow when we spent the night in our new apartment. We didn't really complete the whole ceremony but we did greet our house trolls the first morning we slept overnight in the new apartment.

Chinese house trolls are a couple, they handles mainly the kitchen activities. We had to get couple things they really like to eat and presented this feast to them for our future happy life in this apartment with them. Because they were short[ all trolls around the world seems short..] we used a little box as table so they could reach the food.

The little box was facing the stove [where they usually stay around in the house] with rice bowls, rice wine, chicken leg, one fish, and some small side dishes.

[It was cold and early, you can tell by the look on my face...]

Everyone told me that the chicken leg was essential, our trolls would be very unhappy if we forgot to include that in this meal. We lit up some incense candles during the time they should be enjoying their meal and we went downstairs to burn some paper money so they also could buy things in their world..... Then, in a traditional sense, I guessed we officially moved in our new apartment.

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.

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

Designer disease

Since B and I are both designers [the worst part is we both are not interior designers but trying to design our apartment...] , this project is bound to be a big nightmare to my interior design friend who gonna help us to make the thinking into reality..... We have our own thoughts about how we want it, what type of method we want to use, why should we design this way....etc. We basically have opinions about almost EVERYTHING!

In the design book rule No. one: Set up a tone which meets up what the users want!

Luckily we don't need to do lots target research because we are the users!

But it really takes a lot of effort to narrow done what we want at this point.

I started cruising on line and buying interior design magazines to get myself inspired. After a long study and million questions we asked ourselves, here comes the conclusion of what our new apartment should be:

A library+a chic restaurant+ a SPA =our ideal home.

Here are some references I put together. 

 

Most of the images are from a great website desiretoinspire.

The War zone part 0.5

I found those pictures last night.
We were just back to Taiwan from Sweden and could not help but want to check how the "project" going on? So we woke up super early and went to check the apartment before work [ YES, we started working right after our wedding ceremony, you know, Asian style].

Here it was, a War zone, right before the pictures I showed in last post so I called these the war zone 0.5. Everything were half bagged and some pipes were half falling down...very happening.

The hard workers were up there eating their breakfast already and we were amazed how much garbages were installed in this oldie! It also felt like a fresh start, our hearts were starting beating fast and got all excited about our coming up home .AAB No. 1.

Big step one-- Knock everything down, I mean, yes, Everything.

After the painful Process of payments, taxes, and all the private information exchanges, we finally were the legal owners of this place! Which also meant that we were allowed to do anything to this place besides blow it up although what we did was not too far away of it........haha.

Anyways, while we were celebrating our marriage in Sweden this July, a group of hardworking men were knocking walls down, pulling all the ugly decorations off in our newly purchase home at the same time!

Here are the amazing results after one week work~~






The apartment was naked and full of hope~~

PS.
1. The stair way was there because we needed to get on 2nd floor and it is gone now!!
2.The guy with hat is my old interior designer friend who is helping us on this remodeling process.