I think today’s installation epitomizes the design philosophy at The Asia House: comfortable but invisible technology. Today I installed a wireless LAN connection in The Asia House. See if you can spot the access point!

Don’t worry if you can’t see it – it’s above the barely visible manhole that’s recessed in the awning above the outdoor deck. You might have seen a picture of this location elsewhere in this blog. The location was planned during the design phase of the house, and the wiring was put in early on. The location that I had originally planned was actually on a small shelf under the ceiling in the dining room, but John (our architect) refused to have it visible, arguing that it contrasted with the modern Asian style of the house.

I know what you’re really thinking now: “how could they have lived in The Asia House for a year before they installed WiFi?”  Well, what can I say; we didn’t really need it. We seldom have guests that feel the need to whip out their laptops, and we have a LAN jack in every room. But last week I got an SMS message from my sister Mia, who lives in London. She was leaving in 10min but wanted to have a quick Skype call first, to greet me on my birthday. We were having dinner at the time, and she said “why don’t you just open the laptop at the dinner table, and I can talk to all of you?”. Well, now she can…

I found an old Linksys WRT54G wireless router lying around. Unfortunately I had hacked the firmware of the WRT54G a few years ago, and replaced it with third-party open source firmware in order to extend its functionality. I used an old Sveasoft binary, but if I were to do it again I’d probably use something from DD-WRT. Anyway, I wanted the router restored to its original factory configuration so I first downloaded the binary for the original firmware from the Linksys website and flashed it using the router’s web-based interface. Then I configured the router and tested it before installing it at the deck.

Since the wiring was already in place, all I had to do was crimp an RJ45 connector onto the LAN cable and also tie the power supply in place so it wouldn’t fall out. Finally, I bent the router antennas a bit in order to get a stronger signal in the basement. I’ll observe the network conditions for a week or two, and if it’s not good enough then I might replace this old Linksys router with a much better one from Belkin that I know I’ve got lying around here somewhere…

I know, I know. It’s unforgivable to not update the blog for months on end. I have no excuse, except that since we moved in last October we still have no phone, Internet or cable TV connection. The installation of a phone and DSL line was postponed several times, and I guess I was just getting lazy waiting for that to happen. I could have gone elsewhere to connect, or updated the blog from work, but somehow it feels like a blog about the house must be updated from the house. Anyway, I didn’t want to end the year without a post, so here is one posted over a temporary and ridiculously slow GPRS connection from a laptop. When I’m lucky I get about 1kbps using this PCMCIA card.

We have had a good Christmas in the Asia House. Normally we’d leave town and celebrate somewhere else, but this year it just felt right to spend it at home. We have hit the sauna a couple of times, we’ve watched tons of movies, and we’ve definitely eaten too much food. Oh, and we adorned the garden with Christmas lights:

Belated Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and may you all have a wonderful, happy 2009! May I also very soon finally get that phone and DSL connection that Globe Telecom promised me last week…

Finally, after over a year of blood, sweat and tears, we have completed the construction of The Asia House and moved in!  We still don’t have a telephone, cable TV, or an internet connection (which doesn’t do much for this blog), but we’re happy anyway.

There have been a few mishaps in the past couple of weeks. The wires for the uplights in the staircase melted due to excessive heat and fused together. The drain in the guest room shower got clogged up. The pond filter overflows and needs redesigning. And I’m still not sure if the sump pump is working. But I guess these things happen; nothing we can’t fix, and overall we’re ok. Let me show you what the ground floor looks like at night, now that all the electrical wiring is in place:

The porch looks quite nice at night, with its uplights, wooden door, pond, and stone column. Inside the large window is the dining room, and at the end on the left-hand side you see the exterior light above the staircase leading down to the basement patio under the deck.

Here’s the dining room from the inside, looking towards the same window by the porch. The ten-seater dining table is made of a single slice of a tree. The large windows, the hardwood flooring and the raised ceiling enhance the "outdoorsy" feeling.

Beyond the dining room is the outdoor deck, with two sliding doors; one towards the dining room in the rear, and one towards the living room on the left. The deck will have a great view past the glass railing towards Laguna de Bay and Mount Makiling, as soon as we’ve gotten around to trimming the surrounding shrubs…

The living room is unfortunately still quite bare, and in need of some art. Speaking of "need", now that the house is finally finished, I need to get started on the real fun - the design and installation of the home control system!

Last week the last drapes were installed in the home theater, and the room is finally done. We’re quite pleased with the result, in an outrageous kind of way. The room was purposely designed to be so different from the rest of the house that you cannot but help feel transported into another world, which to me is really what home theater is about. The red drapes, the gold-colored moldings, the cornices and the crystal wall lamps are reminiscent of late 19th century Paris. The drapes also hide from view custom-built DVD shelves.

At the rear of the room, on top of the raised floating floor, is the reclining theater seating. The Velodyne subwoofer is placed behind the seating and rumbles the flooring (and seating) quite nicely during bass-rich scenes. I’m still trying to decide if I like the fairly directed surround sound coming from the angled Dynaudio speakers in the corners, or if I should add brackets and have the speakers face each other for a more diffuse sound.

The star ceiling provides a kind of "outdoorsy" feeling when watching movies and all the other lights are off. We didn’t place too many stars and the light is comfortably subdued, so we typically just leave the star ceiling turned on when we watch movies. Once your eyes have adjusted, the stars provide just enough light to find the popcorn.

A couple of small things still need to be worked on in this room. The aircon is just a little bit too noisy, but it’s due to a loose plastic panel which I’ll have to tighten up. The cooling fan that we ended up having to add inside the equipment cabinet in front is definitely too noisy, but considering the considerable heat generated by the Denon surround receiver and the Sony PS3 that I use as a Blu-ray player we really have little choice. One of these days I’ll have to add a temperature-dependent speed control on that fan, and maybe a baffle of sorts…

The house construction seemed to really have slowed down, the closer we got to completion. For several weeks now the house has looked as if it’s ready for us to move in, and yet there always seemed to have been something left that needed fixing. And then something more, and then something more… But now we’re really getting close - in fact we plan to move in by the end of next week. And after that the real fun begins - designing and building the home automation systems to connect to all the wiring I hid in the walls!  But more on that some other time. First we need to finish the house… 

The porch came out quite nice, once we got the steel supports mounted in the trellis above and the temporary post removed. We’re still working on getting the water feature around the porch working perfectly, so I suspect it’ll still be a month or so before we dare populate it with koi.

Finally all the floors are in. The material took several months to get, and we had all kinds of problems getting the colors we wanted, finding enough supply, etc, but in the end it took just a few days to install. We use an engineered hardwood that is available in several colors and uses a 7-ply cross-grain construction with real wood as its top layer, covered by 8 coats of a UV-cured high resistance coating. The dining room uses a rosewood tint; the rounded edge against the foyer gave us a special bit of headache. How to get a good rounded edge with no visible lines and a  rugged finish that can withstand years of wear and tear?  In the end we had it custom-carved out of a series of solid pieces of wood by a local sash factory.

We used engineered hardwood in the bedrooms on the second floor also. The basement floor, however, we expect to take a hard beating since we will use it as a workout area and people might be dropping weights on it. We also wanted a lighter colored material here to brighten up the room. We used laminated wood flooring, and this is what the basement looks like with our muay thai punching bag at the rear and my daughter’s ballet mirror on the right:

For my office we decided on a darker, more somber engineered hardwood. I felt that it’s more restful for the eyes and makes for a good contrast against the glass-and-chrome desk.

In my opinion the most interesting "room" is perhaps the smallest, least visible one: adjoining my office is the "hub" - really just a small closet with barely enough space to hold the home automation server, the routers, the media server, the PABX, and all the other equipment I plan to cram in there over the next few years. Into this tiny closet runs all the cabling from the rest of the house…