April is nearly over, and The Asia House is far from finished. In my opinion we are at least three months away from completing it, although the builder thinks they can finish the house by early June: "only" 3 months late. At least they are well into the finishing stage now.

They have erected more scaffolding around the house so they can work faster. The stone cladding on the basement exterior looks quite nice, and I think it is accomplishing its task of helping the basement "blend into" the surroundings and making the house look like a 2-story building when viewed from a distance.

The carpenters have started installing the wooden louvers around The Asia House. The louvers are a bit of a signature touch by the architect, and we feel that they give the house a unique flavor. Here, they will also help hide the window to the guest bathroom:

The water feature surrounding the main entrance has now been erected, waterproofed and tested. The "floating" stone steps are under construction, and I am working with the project engineer to design the special filter that this Koi pond will need (more about that later).

On the inside of The Asia House, the ceilings are already up on the ground floor, and they’re now working on the rest of the house. This is what the ceiling in the living room looks like:

I just hope that all the cabling above the ceilings has been done correctly…    Here’s our happy electrician Perry, with his head stuck in spaghetti a few days before they closed up the ceiling in the kitchen:

Elsewhere, workers are busy waterproofing the bathrooms and installing tiles. Waterproofing, apparently, is done with tar paper and a blow torch.

There are various manners in which one can obtain a dinner table. You can take the easy route and go to the store and buy one. Or you can go a more difficult, but perhaps also more interesting, route. Some of you might remember the dining room design that our architect had in mind:

We felt that a regular table might be a little boring, and we subsequently received a tip for a really nice piece of wood available at an antique store on the way towards Tagaytay. We headed up there and took a look. Indeed, it was a gorgeous piece of natural wood; a single slice of old hardwood, from an old tree that was cut over 25 years ago. The slice is 250cm long and 130cm wide at its widest - the perfect size for the 10 seater dining room table we have in mind. It is also not square and the sides are irregular, which gives it a wonderfully natural look.

However, I was not sure if we’d really fit 10 people around it, considering that this table top tapers off a bit to to one side. So I whipped up a 3D model using Google SketchUp. I added a bunch of chairs and placemats, so we could see how close things would be, and I even added a seated person to the model, so we could see how close his feet would be to the support structure of the table.

It looks like 10 people will fit, so we decided to proceed with the antique, natural-looking table. We designed a couple of support "blocks" to the table, which we will likely also have done in old hardwood. SketchUp kindly allowed me to quickly put some rough dimensions to the support structure, and we fired off a copy to a local furniture maker to get a quotation.