Things to Fix in the House - Part 2

2 months ago, in my previous post, I mentioned that certain things in the house are becoming an eye sore and we (or rather, I) have decided to do something about them. These are the following:

1) Spoilt Rubber Sealing Strips on glass doors
2) Bedside table lamp that we have used no more than 5 times
3) The big canvas photo of us in the study that has become yellowish over time
4) Window grilles in the house to prevent our future kid from falling down (choy!)

So far, we have replaced the rubber sealing strips on the glass doors, so #1 is solved.

I sold off the the bedside table lamp on eBay, so #2 is solved too.

We are left with #3 and #4, the more expensive "problems" that we have to take care of.

Previously, I mentioned that I have found a custom frame maker, so all we need to do is to decide which photo to use, print it out and bring it to the frame maker for mounting. We have been procrastinating cos we haven't really sat down to discuss what kind of photo we should use. As it ain't gonna be cheap, we have to consider our options carefully.

I finally know what to do with that wall after dumping the big canvas photo!!! You see, I have always thought our home lack display shelves for photos. When we were doing our reno, we didn't want too many display corners cos "more things = more cleaning". LOL. Our passageway to the bedrooms is like a photo gallery, with 6 pics there, but yet there is none in the living room. In the study, there is only 1 big canvas photo, a portrait of us in grad gown below it on the table, an 8R ROM photo on the shelf on the left side of the room, and another glass photo frame beside the wall cabinet that we customised from Tokyo Disneyland.





These are not "colourful" enough, I feel. And I finally know what we can do!! Instead of printing out another big photo and going through all the hassle of photo editing (we designed the current one ourselves) and finding a supplier to print out such a big piece of photo, why not do wall decals instead??? Had thought of installing wall paper, but that would be expensive.

So I came to know of Wink Play through Tai Tai and browsed through their website and thereafter many other wall decal websites too and decided to install wall decals, wahahhahahaa! All it took was 2 days for me to read up all I need to know about installing big wall decals, browse through other websites, and Kitty to do a mock-up of something we thought would look nice (it did not suit the colour of the wall though so forget about it), and I placed the order already!!!

The idea is to have wall decals to cover the left side of the wall and have them stretch to almost the middle portion of the wall, then we'll hang multiple photo frames, one of which is a smaller version of the current pic (don't waste it mah). In the future, we may even add words (if suitable for the overall look) to the wall, haha! Since the frames will hang on the wall without any shelf, there is minimal cleaning to be done, haha!

I will post pics on the progress. Now awaiting Wink Play to do the layout for confirmation!

Lastly.... #4 will have to wait. Expensive manz. Wahahahahhahaa!

Things to Fix in the House - Part 1

This is a 2 months overdue post...

7 Nov 2009

The old cat and I are starting to replace things in the house. Things that we (or rather, I) feel are an eye sore. Right now, there are a few items that have come to our attention:

1) Spoilt Rubber Sealing Strips on glass doors

2) Bedside table lamp that we have used no more than 5 times

3) The big canvas photo of us in the study that has become yellowish over time

4) Window grilles in the house to prevent our future kid from falling down (choy!)

We decided to deal with the first 2 items. They are "cheaper" to deal with, lol.

Somehow with some luck, I found this old, crumpled name card which I think the glass supplier gave us back then when we were doing our renovation. There is nothing on the card that indicated "glass", but I told the old cat to give it a try. He did, and yes I was right!!! Apparently, the vendor gets his supply from another company, so we had to contact that company. We did, and yay, they have the sealing strips! We went all the way down to Woodlands East Industrial Estate on Saturday (7 Nov) to get the strips. Got the U-shaped type - more sturdy and lasting.

This is the original sealing strip. Notice the rubber flap came off?



New U-shape sealing strips:



The old cat at work to cut the 2.7m strips to the desired length:



Tada! New strips for both the MBR and common toilets!

After getting the strips, we made our way to Toa Payoh. Philips was having a Carnival Sale. There wasn't anything that we need but after seeing people leaving the place happily with their purchases, I felt a bit... sad? You see, I don't like to walk away empty handed. Somehow I always have this mentality that when I go shopping, I have to buy something to make my shopping trip "worth it". It can be anything, doesn't have to be expensive. It can even be just an ice-cream and I'll be happy, haha! Sounds weird huh? So we scouted around the compound and I saw something cheap - a clock radio with mobile charging! Its the same one my boss bought to put in the office, except that its now selling for only $30!!!!!!

This is a good chance to get rid of the bedside table lamp and let the clock take its place!

I cleaned the lamp and packed it into the store room. It is now on my eBay selling for $25. Any interested buyers? It's in very good condition. Switched it on no more than 5 times. Usual price $250.

Actually, we already have a clock in the room on the TV shelve but its ok, no harm having another one. This is better. You can control the brightness, set weekday/weekend alarm, set alarm to buzz or radio and best of all, you can charge your mobile! Now our bedside table looks "cleaner" and "simpler" without the table lamp, haha!



It has different plugs for different hp models, and a USB hub for me to charge my iPhone!

Haha, now we are only left with 2 things to "solve", the big canvas portrait and the window grilles. I have found a custom frame maker, so all we need to do is to decide which photo to use, print it out and bring it to the frame maker for mounting. Sounds relatively easy but we are sort of procrastinating, cos we haven't really sat down to discuss what kind of photo we should use. Wedding pic? Honeymoon pic? Scenery pic? It's not gonna be cheap, so must consider carefully before we dump our current $167 canvas frame for good.

As for the window grilles, we'll start looking around for suppliers and costing next year. We can still afford to procrastinate for this, cos 1) it ain't cheap and 2) Plan B will only kick in after our US trip. If fail then too bad... we'll have to wait for the next trip, lol. So we still have about 1 year ++ to settle this issue??

First home cooked dinner in 2010

3 Jan 2010

Steamed egg with egg tofu and century egg. Got the idea of adding egg tofu from a website and decided to try it. The dish tasted yummy! The egg tofu gave the steam egg extra smoothness!

Deviled Eggs on New Year Eve

The annual oldies gathering was held at Qihao and Carene's place and each couple was supposed to bring some food. After much consideration, we decided to prepare our own food instead of buying it. The old cat surfed online for recipes and came across the recipe to making Deviled Eggs. It looked pretty easy to prepare and we decided to go ahead. So after work, I went to NTUC to buy the ingredients.

Back at home, we prepared the eggs first by hard boiling them. That was easy. The difficult part came when we had to peel the shells off the eggs. They were so difficult to peel that I flared up after 15 mins, lol. Somehow the shells were sticking kinda firmly to the eggs and it was hard to peel them off neatly. After removing the shells off a few eggs, I gave up and left the rest to Kitty to handle. We had to remove all the egg yolks from the eggs. I proceeded to prepare the mixture. Mixed egg yolks, dijonnaise, mayonnaise, bacon bits together and added some water. I then put the mixture in a zip lock bag, cut a tiny hole and started to fill the eggs with the mixture.

Close up view:

In the process of preparing the mixture, we ate so many samples that I am now so sick of eggs, lol. In fact, both of us thought the final product was just so-so only.

Kitty sprinkled paprika and dill weed over the eggs to garnish them.

We brought the Deviled Eggs over and to our surprise, they were very well received! The oldies asked us how we made them and said they were delicious! We were like....

It was good catching up and the guys had their annual "Kiap" Championship. They play this card game every year and losers had to clip on clothes pegs on their skin. Yikes. The 4 guys who have the most number of clothes pegs on them will get into the final round where the final loser will have to clip on ALL the clothes pegs on his body! Mind you, there are more than 200 clothes pegs!!! Painful manz! And so Yong Tao "won" the championship for 2009 waaahahahhaha! Lixian (his wife) was quick to help her husband by quickly taking clothes pegs from the bucket and started clipping them on his hair (won't feel any pain there). The other guys gathered around him and started clipping clothes pegs on his body. Soon, all the 200+ clothes pegs were clipped all over his body, especially on his chest and stomach area, wahahahhahaha! What a sadistic game huh? There he was, the poor fella, sitting on the sofa trying to mask his pain while the rest of us took turns taking photos with him, lol.

Those with kids left after the photo taking session. The rest of us stayed and we played the card game again. This time the losers have to finish off the leftover food. We girls formed a team too, but we were stress free cos whoever loses, her husband will have to eat the food, wahahhahaha! Luckily, I only lost twice, so Kitty only had to finish the hot dogs and po piah, haha.

Within minutes, it was 2010. Happy New Year everyone!

Dinner on Sunday (27 Dec 2009)

We encounter the same problem with our rice cooker again - the inner pot refuse to fit into the holder. This is our 2nd set of the same rice cooker but we still encounter this problem. Sianz got to go down to the Philips Service Centre again this Saturday. I used the steamer to cook the rice instead. Takes longer but better than nothing, lol.

I set the timer to 40mins. At 20mins, I added the chicken and at the remaining 4mins, the veg.

This time I did not marinate the chicken except for rubbing it with a bit of salt. Instead, I heated some olive oil in a small pan, stir-fried some garlic, added some sesame oil and 3 Tbsp of soy sauce and poured the mixture over the chicken when it was ready. Although this is nice, but I personally prefer the taste of the chicken the previous Sunday when I used oyster sauce and had it marinated before steaming.

Shanghai green with oyster sauce



Opened a can of luncheon meat to make the meal more complete. Been ages since I had eaten it.



Dinner

Dinner on Sunday (20 Dec 2009)

Cantonese steamed chicken

I got the recipe for this dish by combining 4-5 different recipes. This dish turned out to be super nice and Kitty loves it too! Its so simple to prepare. All I did was marinate the chicken with 1 Tbsp of oyster sauce, 1/2 Tbsp of soy sauce, some sesame oil, 1 Tbsp of corn starch, 1/2 Tsp of sugar and some pepper to taste, then steamed it with slices of ginger on the chicken for 20mins. Tada! Delicious! The meat was tender and the chicken essence combined with the the marinade made the gravy really tasty!

Old cucumber soup with spare ribs



Kitty's fave soup. All you need is an old cucumber, a packet of spare ribs from NTUC, 7-10 pcs of dried scallops (I put more), 5-7 pcs of red dates and 1 honey date (optional). Boil on high for 20 mins, then switch to low fire and let it simmer for the next 2.5 to 3 hours. Tada! Done!

Xiao bai cai:

This is easier. Just steam it for 3-4 mins (I steamed it for 5 mins and find it a lil too soft for my liking) and leave it on keep warm mode. Pour some oyster sauce and mix well. Done.

I finally tried out the flavour booster thingy on the steamer! Cut up 2 cloves of garlic and put them inside the flavour booster. I was hoping that it would make the chicken smell nicer, haha!

Major headache over LR light

29 Nov 2009 - Sianz, something is wrong with our living room light. By right, all we have to do is to change the tube, but turned out it was a lot more troublesome. Its the kind with the I/C. The kind which you switch on once, 2 daylight tubes light up, switch on the 2nd time, the middle warm light tube lights up and upon the 3rd time, all tubes will light up. Anyway, the old cat tried to fix it but someway somehow things went wrong. The wire broke, the nuts got lost inside and refuse to come out...etc. We had to ask The EL to come over since he is very good with electrical stuff.

Unfortunately, despite testing this and that, he still cannot diagnose the problem as to why the 3rd tube refuses to light up. In the end, he said most probably the main circuit has problem, better to get an electrician to check. So yesterday evening, Tom, our electrician came down to check. Even he cannot trace the problem. Said most probably the main I/C controller is spoilt, which is almost similar to what The EL had said. Solution? We are gonna remove the I/C and re-configure it such that all lights will light up together when switched on. As we hardly use the warm light, we will change it to daylight. He will have to dismantle the whole thing from the ceiling to do so. Haiz, got to wait a few more days before Tom has the time to come down again to proceed. In the meantime, we will just have to live with it.

6 Dec 2009 - Tom came over on yesterday morning to fix our light. $50. Heart pain manz. Unfortunately, the problem was not solved. Someway somehow, the holder and the tube connection was not good. Too loose. Tom said to get another brand of tubes. Sianz. Went back to Chealsea Lighting again (for the 4th time??) to change the tubes, but the uncle said that we ought to change to another holder instead. Sianz. Another $30 cos need to get their electrician to come down. Tom had already configured the switch to light up all 3 tubes. The I/C has been removed. So now, we need Chelsea's electrician to come to remove all the previously bought new holders and fix on the recommended holders for the tubes.

Nightmare. Chelsea's service has gone downhill! Nevermind that the uncle was loud and rude, but they messed up the timing! The electrician was supposed to come after 2pm on Sunday (6 Dec), but no one turned up. The old cat called and was told that "the guy has gone out already" aka on the way. After waiting for another 2 hours, the old cat called Chelsea again only to find out that they have made the arrangement for the electrician to come on Monday instead! Worse, the uncle kept saying its not their fault blah blah blah. The old cat got pissed and retorted, "Not your fault then whose fault? My fault ar??!" Anyway, the uncle said he will ask the guy to come between 7-8pm. MAnz!!

Anyway, the electrician FINALLY came at 8.45pm and thankfully, solved the lighting problem. He replaced all the holders, removed the single warm light tube and fixed on the new daylight tubes. Now our living room is super bright with all 3 daylight tubes switched on.