More home made breakfast!

I officially announce here: July is the month of "PEACH!"


Taiwan has its local grown high mountain peach but you can find all kinds of imported peaches from USA and Japan in higher end supermarkets. They are not cheap but the taste is sensational!
We love peaches and last month, we discovered one kind of strange yellow peach from Japan which we never had it before! The morning was nice and kitchen was super bright in the morning cause our living room facing East [you know---Feng-Shui, hahaa]. We had simple and delicious breakfast together in our lovely kitchen again.

bright and shine

Aoki Jam--yummy!

Left side dish is the new Japanese peach we found!

Le chef preparing the dessert for dinner after the breakfast

Red wine "APPLE"---a twist from red wine pear..cause our apple was going to go bad...

Breakfast in our new kitchen

New Kitchen is not completely done but it is usable. Our favorite thing to do is cooking a big big breakfast together.

Zombie in the kitchen

Have a nice day!!

sofa!!

Sofa pix are coming soon~~

Here you can sneak a peek of THE sofa!!

 

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.

The fundation, A 30-year-old Apartment

After weeks and weeks of searching, we finally landed our eyes on an old apartment located in the East side of Central Taipei City.

Why this one? OK, first of all, we were smart enough to actually writing done a wish list of what we want to have in the apartment and about where we want to live. I have to admit, although I grow up in Taipei city, there are not too many nice residential areas in the city which we want to live in. We wanted to find an area is chic, convenient, greener than most of business areas in town, a small view of blue sky and right by a subway station. Second, after all the bad bath room and storage problems we had in our previous temporary homes, we also wanted an apartment is bit large for two--more than 100 square meters and better comes in 2 floors.

We did not have much choice and we could not afford the new apartments in the areas we wanted. So when this old but charming 2 floors apartment showed up, I graped it right away! B had his doubt but he soon realized this was a good option after he searched around town. We carefully examined the structure with some professions and history of the apartment, then, we went for it!! In one sentence-- We saw the potential!!

The remodeling process started 3 weeks ago, and we went inside the apartment to take some BEFORE pictures after our wedding. It is quit amazing that we are going to make this oldie a cutie!

The sky is typical a Taipei Grey Blue and I am sure you can tell this is an absolute 30-years oldie~~

Living Room


A bar is in command.

Sad 1 floor bed room used to be for a disable oldie we guessed

That person's bathroom?

A very weird kitchen


Sad 2 floor bathroom

2floor small bed room

2 floor master bedroom facing a school full of annoying kids..........

The other view of the master room

old old walk in closet......I guess it was kinda luxury for 30 years ago in TW..

Roof top

Yes, we believe it has its potential.........haha