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

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.

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

The deal is inked and sealed; last Thursday we were at our lawyer’s office to put signatures on the final purchase agreement, assignment deed, and on the mortgage deed to the bank.

We have the keys to our own apartment in sunny Discovery Bay, and it sure feels good to own your own piece of property!

We purchased an apartment on Seabird Lane, near the Discovery Bay Residents Club, and a short distance from ferry, plaza, shops, etc.

Our ‘new’ place is not exactly new; it’s about 20 years old and the inside sure looks like it… So there is a lot to do to get it to our taste and we will do several upgrades and renovations in the next 6 to 8 weeks.

A new kitchen, a new wooden floor, two new bathrooms, and renovation in the living room are the main projects need to be done.

In Holland we would probably take a few weeks holiday and do a lot of this work ourselves, but in buzzin’ Hong Kong most people will have everything done by a contractor. So this weekend we had several contractors come in to the place for a site survey and they will all provide us quotations in the next few days.

Stand by for more news on the house via this site - I’ll try to put in a regular update on the renovations of our place.

c u l8r - Marc