Well it will take a while till we can hike through the green hills and mountains in Discovery Bay.

A hillside fire started near the construction site near Siena Two in Discover Bay, went around the hills all the way up to the Reservoir and almost reached the golfclub.
It started Friday morning and was still blazing most of Saturday. It was finally put out by the late Saturday afternoon, but by then it had wiped out a large part of the hills around town.

Firemen were busy keeping the hills nearest to the flats wet, and helicopters went back and forth between the sea and the fires. The whole Saturday black pieces of burnt trees, leaves, twigs etc. flew around the place and landed everywhere.

It was quite stunning to see how helpless we really are against a fire raging over a hillside. There’s just no stopping it, and the wind surely did its best to help it.

What is of course said is that all this has most likely started with a human cause. Someone throwing a sigarette or something. Well, he or she certainly wasted part of our pleasure of living in ‘the Greens’!

Check out the pictures below.

Marc

The electricity lines and new waterpipes are being done at the moment.

Meanwhile we’ve made some choices for Aircon, bathrooms, tiles, kitchen etc.

The aircons will be Fujitsu General split type units. One 3 HP, one 1.5 HP, and 2 times 1 HP units - if they’re all on stock at the supplier. Nadine’s in charge of the tiles as well as the paint colours.

Nadine and Danny checking out something…

Nadine trying to decide on the wall / ceiling colours (not the red please..)

Electricity in the kitchen. For the electric waterheater, dishwasher, and washer/dryer.

Here are some of the wardrobes after the second layer of paint. Not bad at all, we’re happy that we didn’t choose to have the whole thing replaced, coz a layer of paint does the trick!

Here’s our “loodgieter” messing with the water pipes:

And this is a picture of an electric conduit along the staircase. I’m installing a couple of small lightpoints near the stairs.

See you later and check out my MMSBLOG - see the link in yellow on top.

Marc

I’ve got an additional website set-up. This one is rather COOL because:

With my phone I can take pictures, which I can then immediately post to an online website.

The results is a Picture Blog, or a visual scrapbook online.

Hopefully this will also work when I’m abroad, but depends on GPRS roaming availability around the globe - hope to test that soon!

Check it out here:

www.marcdelange.com/mmsblog

Screenprint of this service:

Most of the breaking work is now finished and the debri disposed of. On the pictures below you can see how the utility room is being added to the kitchen.

This is the utility room viewed from the kitchen:

The open part on the right hand side of the utility room will be closed by an aluminium window unit. The floor will be raised to the same level as the kitchen so that it becomes an integral part of the kitchen.

This picture is taken from the utility, so you look back to the kitchen:

The gas heaters (all three of them) have also been taken out, leaving two gaping holes in the bathroom walls. Hong Kong houses generally do not have one central water heating unit, but instead there are small heaters for the kitchen and the bathrooms.
After the renovation we will have a small electric water heater in the kitchen (immediate hot water) and two gas heaters in the bathrooms.

They’ve made a start with painting the inside of the wardrobes. The inside had plain brown ply wood, which didn’t look very nice. Because the wood is so porous and would suck up all paint you put on it, they’ve put a layer of white plaster on it first.

For the first time ever I’ve purchased music online last weekend.

With the launch of the EU iTunes Music Store, one can purchase songs at 99 Euro cents each from a large database of music. The service is focused at EU, and there’s already an existing one in US. iTunes is not available yet in Asia Pacific, but if you have a credit card issued in one of the participating EU countries, you can sign up.

This is an interesting milestone in some respects:

- The music industry and record labels are finally starting to co-operate with online service providers to create an online distribution channel.
- Some of the large volume of songs that are downloaded free (mostly illegal) will start moving to the paid and legal form.
- While current users are early adopters, there will be a critical mass of users in a few years time. I expect next generations will get most of their music by downloading it electronically, rather than buying some kind of physical recording (like a CD).
- And consequence for retailers in this business: they better add a music download service to their portals to survive, or co-operate with the likes of Itunes.

See Apple’s Press Release here.

~m

That’s what our place looks like. The main wall between kitchen and living room has now also been removed as you can see:

Viewed from the living room, you can see a little better what the place will look like in a few weeks:

Today was a brilliant day, so took some more shots outside:

We got to pick one of these types of wood for our floor.

There’s American Walnut, Ipe wood from Brazil, Teak or Jatoba as choices.

The darker types are nicest, and we probably go for Walnut or Ipe.

I had no idea there were this many choices to make when you’re renovating a house. Tiles, floors, kitchens…

Four days into the renovations and we’re still breaking away the walls.

One this picture you can see part of the kitchen wall removed. The part to the left still needs to be taken out.

This picture is from inside the kitchen. You can see the electricity wiring to the left. The electricity box will be replaced for a new one.

There are lots and lots of tiles that need to be removed: the whole kitchen, and two bathrooms. I pity the neighbours coz they use jackhammers and they make hell of a noise. To top it, we are the third unit in the block to do renovations in the past 3 months…

Here’s one of the bathrooms, partly stripped:

And here’s the living room:

It’s been quiet on this page for a while, that’s coz life is busy as hell.

Here’s some news on renovation of our new place in Seabird Lane.
We’ve finished negotiations with contractors and made a choice. We started with quotations from 7 contractors, then had further negotiations with 3 of them. It’s really tough to negotiate with contractors and our final choice was based more or less on ’seems least likely to cheat us’ and ‘most likely to do a good job’.

Anyway, the work started last weekend. First week they will be breaking away walls, tearing out the old floor, removing some dodgy plaster, ripping out the old kitchen and all existing aircon units.

Down below I put some pictures I took last night.

Here’s the staircase with the floor ripped off - revealing bare concrete;

Our house is full of tools, hardware, equipment etc from the contractor. I’m not sure if it’s all necessary or if he is trying to look impressive so that I feel good about the money I spent… This pic is in our bedroom - note the terrible yellow wall:

Some work needs to be done on one of the ceilings. Above the ceiling on the below picture is a terrace from our neighbour upstairs. Although it is not leaking there is moist build-up inside the ceiling. So we have to tear off parts of the plaster (or all), treat it with galvanizing paint, re-plaster, and re-paint… The upstairs neighbour has just waterproofed his whole terrace, so hopefully this will do the trick…

Here’s a box of our old teak floor - to be replaced by Brazilian hardwood…

I’ll update more regularly through this page.

Please scroll down two articles to see some more overview pictures we took in September.

Till later,

Marc