Planning for My New House

:My new house is in design phase. We just got the keys. Some furnitures were ordered. What we left to do: Appliances, painting, flooring, cleaning, decor, media pc, fountain, and buying small small stuffs like spoons.

See our progress below. What you see here is where we end. We just got our keys and its time to put ideas into actions.
28th Jan 2006.

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Floorplan
  

We started with the floorplan. It was rough. We have to reproduce the dimensions bit by bit, using a 3D software.

This is what we got to start off. We have not moved into the house yet. And only seen it twice.
We reproduced the layout of the house, and inserted the objects supplied by the software -- Home Design Quick and Easy. It was pretty good for 2D drawings. We were able to create a constraint space ready to insert furnitures and objects. The software was fairly easy to handle. Doing this took me about a day of effort?
Layout   The software produced very good cross sectional view to visualize the space constraints. As we have not gotten the keys at this time, these were great hints to our designs. We were able to plan the movements and activities around the house. E.g. what we are doing in the livingroom, bedroom, stairs, doorways, dining halls, office, and meditation room. This way, furnitures and space can be located according to functions. Here beauty is not so important. The cross sectional view really comes in handy. Look at the details!
Layout
   Finally, we fill in all the major furnitures and decors, and produced a poor quality rendering. This rendering was really useless. The colors were off, dimensions were out, and things look ugly. But it adds fun to the task!
Aesthetics  

After the layout and we know how our house would look, we need to make it beautiful! We need to pick colors, wall patterns, furniture designs,... But Liping and I were no artists, so we got to look at what others got. In the end, we have to pick about 5 colors based on limitations in painters packages. Its really difficult choice. Since we are both Chan practitioners, we would like to go for Chinese-Zen-Contemporary designs and atmosphere.

What others have got.

I like this design. But it would cost a bomb to reproduce.

Furniture
  

Its time to pick furniture. This was a first step spending money. Most of our furniture are of Chinese style, since we know a supplier who would give us a good rate.

Handphone shots.

These furnitures are really hardy. Good quality stuffs.

Furniture   The centerpiece of the livingroom is the sofa. So its also the most important furniture. We would also like a comfortable one. We picked an L-shape sofa with modular parts. Since the main activities in the living room is watching tv, working with laptops, socializing, and maybe quiet reading, the components such as seats (movable), ottoman (double as coffee table), arm rests (triple as seats, book shelf, and laptop table), could be reconfigured to suit each activities. This is great design.
Art Pieces
  To me, home without art pieces is a person without a soul. This has to be of personal likings but need not be very expensive. Here are some examples I found on the Internet. I will probably buy some of these as I move along. Meanwhile, I decided to blow up some of my friend's digital photos, cut them up into shapes, and mount them on foam boards to create some contemporary effects.

I think this is really cool. I am going to make one myself.

Fountain
   Water gives life. And I think it gives joy too. We would like a fountain in my house. It costs a lot, or does it? Not really. DO IT YOURSELF! I did a bit of research and found its not really difficult to make a simple fountain. Bought a book from Amazon.com at about $30. I think its great investment. You may not even need the expensive fibre glass tank, rocks, bricks, and water features to make one!
Media PC
 

What do we do most of the time? TV, surf Internet, watch movie. They sum up to Information, Information, and more Information! Why don't we make Information handling simpler and go for a Media PC?! A Media PC is a PC in the living.Its also your DVD player, computer, hi-fi, all into one. Some says a pentium 3 can be converted into one. But it really depends on what you want to do with it. I would like to surf net, check emails, record TV programs, watch movies with dts and surround sound, store some data, store digital photos, and listening to quality music. Some of the components this PC need to have are silent casing and fans, high heat dissipation (its on all the time), high performance video and sound card, large hard drive, remote control and keyboard, video capture card, and a media handling program. I am not going to go into details. There are just too much. Email me if you like to know more.

Configuration:

1. Motherboard, recommend me, Sata, Lan, DDR2, PCI express,
2. Slowest CPU @ P4, 478.
3. Ram, 512 MB, DDR2, PC4300.
4. HD, seagate, 240GB.
5. DVD, RW, any brand.
6. Graphics card, MSI GF NX6600GT, PCI express
7. Audio card, Creative Audigy 2 ZX, OEM.
8. Video capture, Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150MCE w remote.
9. OS, MCE2005.
10. Casing, Li Lian PC800 White.
11. CPU fan, Zalman CNPS7000-AlCu P4.
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