It’s starting to look like a house now. The finishing is in full swing. Most of the lamps are installed. The wood cladding on the outside is up now, although we have yet to tint it the right shade of dark brown. We got permission from the electric company to move the electric meter around the corner where it’s less visible from the main entrance, and where it’s attached to the utility structure holding the garbage bin. Hopefully we can have electricity installed in a week or two. The small diesel generator that the builder brought in is not large enough to allow welding of the stainless steel bars used for the staircase railing.

Most of the windows are also in place. These aren’t top-of-the-line windows, but with a 40% difference in price we are still happy with the choice, considering the huge amount of glass in the house. I think we have more glass than concrete in the outer walls!  Hopefully these Australian-made aluminum frames will still keep the rain out at the exposed location where The Asia House is located. The painters aren’t too happy with the window installers, unfortunately, since they are careless enough to scratch the walls and the ceilings when they swing around the large frames. Here they are, installing a hard-to-reach window under the raised ceiling in the Master’s bedroom:

The "special" boxes for my local Home Control System controllers are also being installed now. There will be one local controller hidden on each floor, managing the communication from the server in the basement to and from all sensors, switches, IR transceivers, touch panels and relays on that floor. Hidden beside the refrigerator in the kitchen is the local controller on the ground floor:

Fortunately, the wiring is made quite easy to install and maintain by the fact that it’s mounted in a vertical cable tray within the shaft intended for the laundry chute. I just hope there’s still space for the laundry chute itself within this 3-story high shaft. As you can see, it has been constricted already by the cable tray, various electrical conduits and some aircon piping:

I must confess, the least important room in the house has always excited us the most. There is something almost wicked in having a home theater in the basement. My family loves movies, but we were never been able to afford setting up a home theater. However, once we started planning it turns out that it may not be so expensive as we had feared; especially if we are willing to do things ourselves instead of pulling in professionals.

The first thing I did was to spend a couple of hours in the best specialty audio/video store in the city. I spent literally hours with their very knowledgeable staff comparing speakers, projectors, receivers, players and screens to find a combination that sounds good and looks good, and fits both the room size and our budget. It’s not an easy process - there are thousands of components out there, and sifting through the marketing-speak is not easy. After a year of on-and-off window browsing and sample listening, I was happy to finally find a group of experienced staff that know what they’re talking about. The best thing is, I also ended up getting better value for money there than I would have gotten elsewhere.

The plan is to convert a bare concrete room that looks like this…

…into something that looks like this…

I’ll keep you posted. We’re planning to do a couple of interesting things. Even though I don’t have the budget for fancy acoustic treatments or state-of-the-art materials, I feel that there are a number of things we can do with locally available materials and a couple of carpenters to turn this into a room with a quality of acoustics rivaling that of our local movie house. We also plan to try building a raised floating floor in the rear- I want that subwoofer to thump that couch!