House Renovation: Week One

We are so grateful to finally have a place to call home. Plus, it's a land house, the one we've been dreaming of since we planned to start a family. And no no, we didn't buy a brand new house either. With our salary, even combined is still won't allowed us to own a house. You do know how expensive it is to buy a real estate now. *sighs*

The house that we have is actually an old one, a single storey and kinda spacious, belongs to my FMIL. It's more than 20 years old, even my husband used to stay there for a few years when he was a kid, so you can imagine how in dire state it's currently in. For the time being, we'll be continue paying the lease/rental at family's price. Thank God as it helps a lot! But someday, in 5 years time maybe (when we're in a really really stable financial condition), we're going to buy the house from my FMIL and change it to our name. *prays hard*

Looking for a contractor to start the construction work on the house was a headache. We have shortlisted a few candidates after looking into the budget and time frame. Mind you, we have a very limited finance to construct an old house to a comfortable place to live in, so budget constraint is number one problem. We finally resorted to these freelance Indonesian workers after seeing their works and how our budget suits their fees.

Since these workers are working on their own, we have made a very strict and clear instructions and what to do's and don'ts. We gave them a month to settle the interior construction and another couple of week to settle the exterior works. And we do make a compulsory visits on the site about 2-3 times a week to check on the progress. Alhamdulillah, so far everything is going well and works the way we want them to be, only faster. I'm so happy on seeing the progress.

The living hall. We installed a simple plaster ceiling and it was done a day after we requested for it. Super fast!

The dining hall with high ceiling and sun-roof windows.

The master bedroom, still in the midst of painting. Color in aqua blue.

The second bedroom, with high ceiling and sun-roof windows. The baby nursery will be in here. Room is painted in salmon pink.

The third room. It's in mint green. Just in case the baby is a boy, then the nursery will be in here. Haha!

The kitchen. Waiting for them to install new tiles then kitchen cabinet will follow suit. 

The bathroom in gloss cement. We're planning to put a seated toilet bowl. Hoping the outcome to be just as what we have imagined.

The toilet. We're going to put a seated toilet to replace the old one. 

The back area. It's really spacious outside. Because of budget restrictions, we have to postpone our initial plan to expand the kitchen and can only do with just building a concrete wall, put on cement floor and set up a simple awning. This will be our washing/drying area.

I guess that's all the updates on the house for the first week. Can't wait to see the second week progress. We can only hope that the construction works can be done earlier than we expected. Now back to the packing process in our old flat. I just realized we have a lot of unnecessary things at home. It's time to do some wardrobe cleaning and charity, yo!