The Oak Diaries

New pic

2009-03-17T14:25:00.000-07:00

More pics

2008-07-20T01:41:00.001-07:00

Our first meal in the dining room!

Living room furniture! Just need a coffee table now. Trying to figure out the optimal couch-armchair arrangement is difficult.

Dining room now furnished!

2008-07-08T23:53:00.000-07:00

- - -
Taken with my Blackberry

Painting!

2008-05-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

We spent most of the past Memorial Day weekend painting. Well, Sze-jun did and I helped by pointing out missed spots or attempting to use the roller.

Sze-jun: "But you'll get tired!"
Christine: "No I want to help!!"
Sze-jun: "Um.... ok."
.... after a few minutes of painting
Christine: "Ok I'm tired."

Here is the hubby painting the accent wall in the living room.

Our new 'atmosphere blue' bedroom!

The completed accent wall, now 'stone' colored.

We got our paint from Restoration Hardware. I was curious where exactly their paint comes from. For example, Pottery Barn branded paint is actually sourced from Benjamin Moore Paints.

Landscaping ideas

2008-05-12T17:19:00.001-07:00

We like to get ideas for landscaping simply by taking walks through our neighborhood and checking out what other houses have done. Houses around our area have done some beautiful things to their landscaping.

The video's a bit blurry, but you can get a feel for what this house did with their front yard. It's so organized and clean!

Strolling through the neighborhood

2008-04-29T14:12:00.000-07:00

Beautiful at sunset!

Paella fun

2008-04-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

We don't use our kitchen as often as we'd like because we have the luxury of being fed at work. However, this past weekend there was some serious cooking going on!

Early stages of the paella...

Paella simmering. Tasted as good as it looked, which was very.

Pablo and Shelley hard at work. Well, we helped a little :)

The entire Spanish dinner on our new breakfast bar/nook:

I have to say, I absolutely love this breakfast bar. It's extremely useful for dining, displaying food, for actually being a bar (we have yet to do this... we're waiting until we throw a real housewarming shindig), and of course -- displaying pretty flowers.

New chandelier!

2008-04-15T13:45:00.000-07:00

Check out our new chandelier, courtesy of Restoration Hardware and Craigslist :-)

The Allure of the Fruit Bowl

2008-04-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

An article Sze-jun came across today on WSJ:

The Allure of the Fruit Bowl: Home Staging ‘Twiddles’ With a Buyer’s Mind

Looking to buy a house? Beware the allure of home staging. The marketing technique, in which a home’s interior and exterior is carefully prepped, sometimes by a paid professional — can trip-up unsuspecting or naïve house hunters, says Curtis Seltzer, a land consultant from Blue Grass, Va.

Staging techniques like “non-casually tossed toss pillows, items arranged in threes, cleared-off counter tops, furniture angles that draw you into a room, a bowl of limes and lemons and other focal points” fiddle with buyers’ minds by making them respond to a look that “home-style magazines and television shows teach us to aspire to,” he writes.

Home buyers impressed by such good looks, tend to overpay. According to home stagers, staged homes sell for 3% to 10% more than non-staged homes. Mr. Seltzer advises reading up on staging techniques to recognize them when you see them. And when touring homes — “imagine the house buck naked and completely empty,” he suggests. “That’s what you’re buying.”

Or, tell your real-estate agent not to show you any staged properties — if you decide you want to buy a staged home, you’d “be competing against stage-struck buyers who have fallen under the stager’s spell” and may end up paying more, he says. –Lauren Baier Kim

After reading this, we felt quite smug that we did *not* purchase a staged property. It was far from that. Allegedly, my first reaction to the house was, "Ewwwww"... "Is this safe to live in???"... "I want to go home now." But eventually I was able to see what Sze-jun saw - the potential behind the house.

So if you're in the market to buy a home, don't be turned off by lemons. Think of the value of the lot and if you have the budget to fix up the house (or even tear it down and build from scratch). It's a huge pain in the ass, don't get me wrong. Expect a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. And money. But if you're committed to it and feel strongly about being in your desired neighborhood like we were, then go for it!

Design inspirations from hotels

2008-04-10T22:46:00.001-07:00

Hotels provide great inspiration for home design. I'm staying at the W Hotel Seattle right now, and already I'm forming a lot of ideas in my head.

Here's a shot of their bathroom vanity (do the toiletries look familiar?? If you've shopped at Sephora, they should be. Bliss products smell fabulous. The W rocks!):

Just for comparison, here's our bathroom vanity at home:

The hotel room has two adorable accent pillows. They're polar opposites of each other, but they look fabulous. If only I could find out where they came from:

Finally, the room sofa. It has shades of the Pottery Barn Greenwich sofa, although the back is much lower and the upholstery is microfiber. The cushions are down-filled, which is quite comfortable. Don't you love the colors?

Behind The Music: Our Bathroom Sink

2008-04-08T10:41:00.000-07:00

What: Our bathroom sink
Model: DECOLAV 1411-CWH Oval Vitreous China Vessel With Overflow, White
Source: Purchased from PlumberSurplus.com
Fixture: Grohe Tenso

I heart Costco and bamboo

2008-04-07T11:55:00.000-07:00

Ok, who DOESN'T <3 Costco? Frequenting Costco on the weekends and checking out the merchandise is one of our favorite pastimes. (By the way, I was disappointed that the Costcos in Hawaii didn't sell malasadas instead of churros)

They may have been doing this for awhile, but we just noticed in the last few months that Costco actually sells home materials -- flooring, lights, tiles, you name it. As with all Costco products, they have a limited selection but what they do have ain't half bad. In fact, we decided to purchase bamboo flooring from Costco to put in one room of our house.

The magnificent bamboo plant in its natural form. Yes, it can do more than decorate your office.

Bamboo is gaining more popularity than ever and being deemed as somewhat of a miracle plant for its environmentally-friendly qualities and durability in homeware. If you haven't already been fed all this info before, here's an outline of the key benefits of bamboo (courtesy of Core77.com):

Green: It's the fastest-growing plant you can use to reforest an area, and it produces 35% more oxygen than an equally-sized batch of trees.

Sustainable: Unlike trees which need to be cut down, bamboo can be harvested without damaging the original plant, and it then regenerates in three to five years. None of this waiting-around-for-30-years for your reforestation project to kick in.

Strong: Harder than maple but lighter than oak, the tensile strength of bamboo is comparable to steel.

Plentiful: A stand of bamboo can generate around 200 poles in five years--the same length of time it takes one tree to grow big enough to cut down.

Profitable: Bamboo is essentially grass, and it grows way faster than trees--some varieties of bamboo can grow four feet in a day. For a lumber harvester, the yield can be 25 times what you'd get from regular ol' trees.

Costco sells bamboo flooring Golden Arowana by Wellmade, for about $2.00/sq ft. Each box comes with about 24 sq ft, so you get a pretty sweet deal by going with Costco. The quality seems good to us (at least it met Sze-jun's expectations, which means it's good). One caveat about purchasing this flooring from Costco is to MAKE SURE THE COLOR IS CONSISTENT WITH ALL THE BOXES YOU PURCHASE. We ran into a problem of having to get another box of bamboo flooring, only to find that we couldn't find the exact same matching color at any Costco we went to. The item number was the same, but somehow the 4-5 boxes we purchased were slightly more red than everything else. As a result, the last few inches of our floor is another shade of bamboo (slightly lighter). Hopefully people won't notice.

I'm particularly excited that we have bamboo flooring in our house, even if it's just in one room. Funny enough, I wasn't into bamboo for its green qualities; I was just intrigued by having bamboo because it was different from the standard oak/maple/etc. Plus, it looks cool. I'll have to post some pictures of our new floor soon.

My love of bamboo isn't just limited to floors. We put a number of made-from-bamboo items on our wedding registries. Some examples:

Flair Bamboo Bowls

3-in-1 Bamboo Board and Serving Set

Bamboo Salad Servers

Bamboo Tea Bag Box (probably the item I was the most excited about getting)

Bamboo Cutting Board

Props to Crate & Barrel for having so many bamboo products. You'll even find a slew of bamboo products at places like Target. I wonder if someday bamboo will become the new pine.

Tied the knot

2008-04-07T11:44:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been quite awhile since our last post. But to be fair, we had a lot going on. Namely, we got married! We tied the knot earlier in March and enjoyed some R&R in Hawaii for our honeymoon.

Here are a couple pictures of our gorgeous cake (which turned out much better than I had expected... doesn't it look like something out of a magazine?) and the bride & groom (i.e. us) sharing a kiss after cake cutting.

The Journey of 1000 Steps Begins With One Tile

2007-11-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

You don't consciously realize it, but the flooring you use for a room makes a huge difference. Install travertine and you get a modern sleek look. Use marble and the room suddenly becomes ornate and perhaps a bit pretentious.

SJ and I toiled many, many hours over what to use for the flooring in our kitchen and bathroom. We always like the idea of using travertine, as we'd seen this in an open house and marveled at its elegance. We soon came to learn the dark side of owning such a floor. Travertine is natural stone, which means it's porous. What manufacturers do is cut slabs of travertine into tiles fit for flooring, then fill up the pores with concrete. Travertine needs to be sealed every couple months with a sealant for damage protection. Also, no two travertine tiles are alike. You can get 10 in a box and each and every one of the tiles will look completely different despite being a similar shade. Despite this, we decided on travertine all the way for both the kitchen and bathroom.

Here is an example of travertine floor. Notice the clean, elegant look:

The rest of our house has wooden flooring, which we don't plan to replace. While it's in dire need of a refinishing job, you can tell it was put in with great care and will look fabulous once it's given some TLC. That said, if I could choose wooden floors for our house, I'd go bamboo. I'm not sure what it is about bamboo that moves me so. Perhaps because of its significance in Asian culture, or just because it's unique and trendy nowadays. Whatever it is, I love it and I hope to have bamboo in our house someday.

I'll post a close-up of bamboo so you can see what it looks like. Nice, isn't it?

So far, we've only had the kitchen floor installed and it isn't too impressive since the rest of the kitchen is empty. But I'll post some pictures of the kitchen floor soon.

Our mission: should we choose to accept it

2007-11-07T09:19:00.000-08:00

This blog is dedicated to our adventures in remodeling our very 1st home. The mission: remodel the kitchen and bathroom. We've learned tons already about what goes in to remodeling a house, from design to the little details like leveling your floors, to the best places in the bay area to purchase your materials.

Welcome and happy reading!