Last week, my wife and I sat down with the architect, the interior designer and the project engineer, to define the furniture layout to such a point that we can finalize the electrical drawings. It is unfortunately a well-known fact that furniture layouts frequently change, and I agree that whatever we decided on last week will probably change once we move in. However, since the concrete slabs will start coming up by the middle of September, we need to decide on most of the electrical layout by then. The location of the conduits will be determined by the rough location of electrical outlets, auxiliary outlets, switches, touch screens, TV’s, etc. And the location of these will be determined by the furniture layout.

So, we spent an hour going through the house room by room, looking at alternative furniture layouts, deciding options, and determining the most likely ones. Most of the rooms were easy, since they are so small that there were few options. But some of the rooms, like the living area and the master’s bedroom, required some more thought. In the end we decided that there are 2-3 layout options that we should be able to accommodate, and located all the electricals to match all options. In some cases, we therefore decided to have, for example, multiple TV antenna outlets in a single room. But it is much cheaper to put these outlets in now, than to have to add them in later.

This meeting was also a good opportunity to review the design of the house. We have not yet made any decisions as to the interior design of the house, other than that it must be in line with the Modern Asian style we selected back in January. By October or so we expect to start deciding on furniture, décor, colors, etc, although we have already started dreaming – indeed, the budget was partially determined by the “level” of the dreams. My wife and I have built up a small library of related design books. Our favorite one is 25 Tropical Houses in the Philippines, by Elizabeth V. Reyes (Periplus Editions, 2005). Two other fairly good books are Tropical Modern by Raul A. Barreneche (Rizzoli Publishing, 2003) and Tropical Interiors by Elizabeth V. Reyes (Periplus Editions, 2002), although the last one is a little too ”traditional” for a modern design. A book which takes a broader perspective on the “smart” in “Smart House” is The Smart House by James Grayson Trulove (Harper Design International). Finally, for the least important but most anticipated room in the house we continue to be inspired by Home Theater Design by Krissy Rushing (Quarry Books, 2004).

It’s funny, but today the house looked much bigger than it did last week. The retaining walls are almost done and the guys are busy finishing the concrete columns. They’ve even started with some of the hollow block walls on the basement level.

With the columns almost in place, and most of the retaining walls done, it’s easy to imagine where the walls and rooms are going to be. I walked around the basement-to-be and it doesn’t seem so tiny anymore. I mean, it isn’t a huge house and the rooms were never designed to be spacious, but of course we don’t want to feel cramped either.

The next step is for the beams to come up, followed by the ground floor concrete slab. Apparently it is better to put up the ground floor slab first, then install some of the conduits for the electrical system, and then the basement floor slab follows. They have now also decided where to place the two tanks for the sewage and for the rainwater: under the “dirty” kitchen and laundry area in the basement. Each tank will have a manhole, a ladder, and a pump. There will be one manhole underneath the staircase and another one in the laundry area.

Speaking of “dirty” kitchen, this is a term and a concept that I’ve only seen in the Philippines. Most houses here have two kitchens, a “clean” (or main) kitchen inside the house, and a separate “dirty” one where much of the cooking actually takes place. In the richer households, the maids do all of the cooking in the dirty kitchen, then it is simply prepared for serving in the main kitchen. This is also where the drinks, cutlery, etc is stored. And of course, I always thought it was a good idea to fry the smelly dry fish, which everybody here loves, somewhere outside the living area, i.e. in the dirty kitchen. In The Asia House, the dirty kitchen is in the basement and will serve many purposes. It will not only house a bigger freezer and a laundry area, it will also serve as a general area that the maids can call their own.

Oh dear. Now that they’ve done the concrete footings and started on the rest of the foundation, it’s easier to gauge the perimeter of the house. Yesterday morning I walked around the future basement, and it looks tiny. I mean, are we going to fit in enough furniture and stuff in this little space?

The house looks big in the blueprints, and the dimensions seem sort of acceptable. But now that the house is taking shape, it looks really small. Mind you, I’m also told that this is a common phenomenon, and that rooms (and houses) always look small until they’re inhabited and the furniture is in place.

Today saw more excitement than The Asia house has seen since construction started over a month ago. It was fun and it was so noisy that the neighbours came over for a look. Well, actually it wasn’t that noisy and the neighbours came over just because their 5yr old son really really wanted to see a cement mixer truck.

The steel rebars were put in place last Monday, and the rest of the week was spent preparing the site for the first concrete pouring that was scheduled for today.

The morning started with the construction workers pouring chicken blood along the perimeter of the foundation. It took several chickens, and some gruesome animal handling, to splatter all the corners. I’m not sure what the chicken blood does, but apparently the sacrifice helps keep the construction workers safe from harm…

After that we had our friendly neighborhood Feng Shui practitioner come in and plant some strange-looking ceramic-vase thingies in the ground immediately under the main entrance of The Asia House. He also wrote some strange things on some strange yellow papers and burned them in a hole dug right in the center of where the driveway entrance to the lot is going to be. I won’t try to understand this stuff, but as the locals say, it can’t hurt, right?

I figure that we must be pretty safe from harm ourselves now, after the pagan chicken ceremony, after the Buddhist ceremony, and later also after the Roman Catholic house-blessing ceremony that we’re planning to have once we move into The Asia House. The kids also tossed coins in all the corners of the foundation, for good measure…

Finally, the three concrete mixer trucks showed up. There was excitement in the air, not just among the kids but also among the parents and the twenty-something construction workers. There is something about those rumbling mixer trucks… Each truck took turns rumbling up to the mouth of the troughs that the carpenters had prepared. The trucks slowly disgorged 5 cubic meters each of premixed concrete into the troughs, while all the workers pitched in with shovels, buckets and customized wooden tools to push the concrete along the troughs and down into the pits.

Some of the workers were stationed down in the pits, scraping and shoveling the concrete into place around the rebar footings at the base of each column and each retaining wall.

What I loved about this exercise is the way the team members organized themselves, without any fuss. In a Western construction team, I would imagine that the carpenters would only do carpentry work and the masons would only do masonry. Here, even the carpenters got themselves knee-deep in concrete to simply do what had to be done.

In April I wrote about the dilemma I faced on how much to wire up, and to what extent we go wireless with the various electronic systems in the house. I continued thinking about it on and off since then, and earlier this evening I sat down with the two electrical engineers and discussed what I have decided.

The original plan was to have everything but the wireless LAN wired. Even the lights would be wired up in such a manner that when I later decide to automate the lighting control using my customized controllers, I could simply reconfigure the connections and connect all light switches and lamps to the controllers. The lights would initially be wired up in the usual manner, and after the reconfiguration the switches would merely be providing low-voltage inputs to the controllers, which would then switch the lights using relays, or dim them using triacs.

The problem with the original approach was not the fact that the local controllers had to be wired to the server. It was all the special cabling to the switches and lights, and my difficulties in explaining the cabling to the engineers, that made me decide that this may not be the way to go. In addition, I would probably not have been able to fit all the triacs and relays into the switch boxes, and would have had to install bulky remote panels in half the rooms.

Instead, we will wire up the lights and switches in normal fashion. When at some later point I decide to automate the lighting, I will replace the light switches with any number of available remote-controlled dimmers. In this manner the switching is done in the light switches themselves, and we don’t have to pull out any cabling to triacs and relays located in remote panels. Various remote controlled switches and dimmers are available from a variety of manufacturers, and are equipped with RF communication protocols such as ZigBee or Z-Wave, or even with Infrared (IR) controls. Also, in this manner I will not have to worry about safety and UL marking in the way I would if I built my own light dimmers.

However, we will still install a local controller on each floor. These will be wired up to the central Home Control System server, and will be used to communicate with user interface screens, occupancy sensors, IR blasters, IR receivers, smoke detectors, flood lights, panic buttons, pond pumps, and other auxiliary systems.