Posts from — June 2008

Most of you have trouble selecting the right colours to paint the walls of your homes. The root causes of this are because most of you are not able to mentally visualise the outcome, you’ve experienced that the colour charts provided by paint companies usually turn out a different shade than the colour on the chart, or you’re just too timid to make that bold decision.

If you want to have bold colours added to your living room or bedroom then here’s the rule of thumb: Choose 3 or 4 colours that you would like for a room. These are the colours you will apply to your walls and furnishings. 1 colour must be the dominant colour in the room and another colour should be used half as much as the dominant colour. The 3rd and 4th colours are used sparingly, as accents. If you’ve already gotten furniture in the room, then it may be wise to select a shade that is similar or complements the fabric colours on your sofa. Remember that contrasting colours will accentuate the structural details of your room but extreme contrasts will just mean that your guests won’t be able to enjoy the effort you’ve put into the room because they’ll be too distracted with the colours that surround them.

Here are some useful links to picking the right colours for your home:

Colour ideas from apartment-ideas.com

Five easy steps to choosing the perfect paint colour, by purecontemporary.com

Behr.com has an application which allows you to upload any photograph of your place and replace colours of any item/walls within the photograph to provide you an actual visualisation of your pad. Check out Behr.com’s Colorsmart Tool here. The downside to this excellent tool is that it requires a paid subscription.

All is not lost. If you’re keen on simulation but do not want to pay subscription for an online service then use Adobe’s Photoshop to perform colour replacement on your photos of your home! It’s easy- here are some links that teach the ‘colour replacement’ technique to help you get cracking simulating and testing colours for your home.

Guide from AdobePress

Guide from Artainium.com

If you only want to simulate colours for furnishings in your home then may want to do so using the Icovia Space Planner.

You try your very best to politely impose upon your guests to use coasters for their drinks. Yet, there’ll be a few who might conveniently forget to obey your orders. Best is to be assertive and walk around to ensure you’ve put a coaster under each and every one of their drinks. Your guests might think you’re a clean freak who’s anal about water marks but trust me, it’s worth being anal about this than to moan and groan about the stains they leave behind- which you have to clean!

Well, here are some tips for cleaning water marks off your wood/solid surfaces for those of you who weren’t anal enough about the coaster rule.

The low-tech method

Stir up a concoction of baking soda and olive oil in equal parts. Rub the mix into the stain and let it sit for a couple of minutes. Start polishing the surface with a damp cloth until the stain is completely gone.

Wikipedia even suggests that you can use baking soda as a cleaning agent to remove tarnish from your silverware.

A forum post on MalaysianBabesForum even suggest you could use baking soda as an exfoliant. Strange. Do this at your own risk, I say.

The hi-tech method

You’ll need a rag (an old t-shirt will do just fine) and an electric iron. Put the rag on top of the stain and iron over it with medium heat until the stain is completely removed. Make sure you don’t overdo this as too much heat may have an adverse effect on the surface you’re cleaning (especially wood) so lift up the rag every now and then to check if the stain is gone. Repeat until the stain is completely removed.

Whilst surfing 3dvalley, I came across this most intriguing concept of representing a light bulb as a human figure- designed by André Kutscherauer, a 3D artist. What’s impressive is that the bulb’s (this piece is called SelfIllumination by the way) taken on a very realistic human pose. Too bad it’s just a 3d image and not an actual lamp mass produced for retail.

Hang on now, what’s this? The LG722? Looks like a close cousin of Andre’s SelfIllumination, except that this is REAL and is locally available here in MALAYSIA!!! Hoorah! It was by sheer coincidence that I stumbled upon the LG722 whilst surfing G.D.O Malaysia’s site. I got so excited that I called them immediately to ask the price of SelfIllumination’s Asian cousin: RM329.

Albeit, nowhere near as elegant or intricate as SelfIllumination’s design, I still find the LG722 a cool item to have in a home. G.D.O’s site’s in flash so to get to the details of LG722, I’ve traced the link path for you:

G.D.O homepage –> Enter –> On –> 02OurGallery –> Lighting –> Table Lamps –> scroll to item #16

Thought I’d get totally relevant with current events i.e. the Euro 2008 and do a write up of products by designers from the countries which are to meet in the Euro 2008 tournament. The next big game, more like the first big game, would be the Dutch taking on the mighty Italians.

The Dutch are represented by Dick Van Hoff and his product, the Royal Tichelaar Makkum Work Table Lamp, while the Italians are fronted by Mario Nanni with the Si Gira Table Lamp.

VS

The Dutch lamp is made of Oak and glazed white ceramic, fitted with a halogen bulb. It’s strength lies in its unique square bowl shape lamp cover and industrial stainless steel for it’s stem, which neatly houses the wiring. The weakness would be the design and placement of the switch which I feel would’ve been better placed on the vertical plane at the front of the base. I would have preferred a push button switch over the flick switch.

The Italian Si Gira lamp oozes sex appeal all over. Made of oxidised aluminium which has the option of a matt silver or matt black finish, the Italian lamp is a recent winner at the Lights of the Future Awards 2008. The lamp is not all form factor alone but highly functional with extreme flexibility and adjustability. A must have for any modern study.

Designer Euro 2008 result

The Dutch matched the Italians like for like in build material, both utilising sturdy and functional elements but the Italians were far superior in attack and scored points over the Dutch from the contemporary design aspect. Once you’ve viewed the Si Gira, there can only be one winner in this duel.

Result: Netherlands 1 – Italy 2

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Euro 2008 prediction

The Italians were dealt a blow when talismanic captain Fabio Cannavaro limped out of training with ankle ligament damage. However, the Italians have been in good form in their friendlies in the run up to the tournament proper. The Dutch could be without Robben in tomorrow’s starting line up and that would put a sever dent in the team especially when Babel, the obvious replacement was ruled out of the tournament last week. I personally fancy the Dutch breaking down the Italians tomorrow, with Van Nistelrooy and Sneijder being the main tormentors of the Italians. However, the Dutch need to be vary of the Italians especially during set pieces in order not to fall behind.

Prediction: Netherlands 2 – Italy 0

Watch the Match on Astro Supersport’s Stadium Astro at 2:45am Malaysian time (10 June)

Have plenty of ideas for your home but can’t visualise how it’d look when put together? Having problems visualising colour schemes? Can’t describe your ideas to your contractor and wish you had a printout of your plans instead?

What you need is a space planning tool and what I’ve found is the Icovia Online Space Planner. I took the tool for a test drive by using their ‘try it free’ session (which basically means you can mess around but can’t save your work unless you have a paid subcription). The GUI is very intuitive and extremely easy to use. The left panel allows you to select artifacts (i.e. furniture, structural items, appliances etc) to drag and drop onto the main design panel. Each artifact can be resized, rotated and colour-filled.

Here’s my very amateurish attempt at modeling my living room:

In all honesty, that effort took me only all of 10 minutes. Hence, the amateur effect and uneven sized stairs. However, with proper effort, one can create professional looking plans with this tool. Even if you’re not planning to pay the subscription fees, you can still draw your plans with this tool and get a snapshot of your work taken so you can pass your ideas to your contractor.

Alternatively, you can create your layout models using Google Skethup (it’s FREE!)

Download Google Sketchup here

Another magnificent looking item sold at Generate- the J-Me Shoe Rack. I love the simplicity of this shoe rack design… yet another ‘why didn’t I think of that’ item. The shoe rack retails for an extremely steep price of USD99. An obscene price to pay for a U-shaped piece of metal strip to hold your sneakers, don’t you think? And yet, deep inside you feel that you simply must have one.

Well, I found two sources that provide a D.I.Y guide to creating variations of the J-Me shoe rack. Megan from Not Martha- a blog site that posts info on how to make things, provides steps to creating a shoe rack with two strips of wood and some L-brackets. These items can be easily acquired from your local hardware store.

Click here for Not Martha’s floating shoe rack instructions

The alternate J-Me shoe rack variation was found at one of my favourite sites- Instructables.com. This version uses wire shelving instead of wood planks to make the shoe rack frame. I’m not sure where you can get wire shelving locally, cut to size, but I’d probably just go buy me a cheap dishdrainer from the Pasar Malam as raw material for the shoe rack.

Click here for Instructable’s floating shoe rack instructions

For looks and level of effort, Not Martha’s version wins hands down. However, this version seems to only be able to hold sneakers. Most of us own slippers here and Not Martha’s version does not cater for this particular type of footwear (unless you broaden the base but then it’ll lose it’s designer appeal).

The floating shoe rack made from wire shelving is the more practical version as it can cater for most types of footwear (maybe not high heels), including your slippers. It’s just not as aesthetically pleasing as Not Martha’s shoe rack. You decide which one you want to make, unless you’ve decided to splurge USD99 at the Generate store for the actual J-Me shoe rack.

This just in: NST Online and radio stations have confirmed that the price of petrol will be increased by RM0.78 to RM2.70 by midnight tonight!!! Read about the petrol price increase on NST Online.

Cars are already packing up the petrol stations queuing to fill up their petrol tanks before the new rates apply in several hours time. Pump up if you have half tank and below for it might not be worth the time and effort if you have little to fill up. Your choice tonight to pump at the current rate but come tomorrow, we’re all subjected to RM2.70 per litre.

I acknowledge that this piece of news is not related to interior design or home decoration but I just thought I’d share the news with those of you who might not have heard it through your friends or other media, yet.

Man, my ‘kai fan’ (chicken rice) is gonna naik harga… along with almost everything else.

FYI- In an article in The Star, dated 31st May 2008, Najib brushed off claims that petrol price would increase by 40 sen. The man sure is correct in saying so- it did not increase by 40 sen… it just increased by 78 sen!!!

More news and related news at Meshio.com

Eco-friendly and uber-cool is what I’d define the FlexibleLove chair. The Taiwanese company that designed the chair used the concept of a collapsible honeycomb structure that when compact, seats ONE but when fully expanded, seats SIXTEEN! Incredible!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aQxEEi7I0Q&feature=related]

Having a party? Not sure how many guests will turn up? No fear because seating’s not going to be a problem with the FlexibleLove chair. It would be fantastic to own one of these to flaunt and use when you have friends coming over to watch Euro 2008 games at your pad.

I emailed the guys over at FlexibleLove.com to get pricing details and here’s what I found out- USD580 for the FlexibleLove 16 (sixteen seater) and USD390 for its eight seater cousin, the FlexibleLove 8. Pretty hefty price to pay for recycled materials, eh? And shipping fees aren’t even factored into the equation yet.

Despite the steep price to pay for what essentially looks like cardboard, I’m going to applaud the guys over at FlexibleLove for designing products with environment conservation in mind. I’m really hoping to see more furniture made out of recycled materials hitting the local market in the near future. Many of us aren’t aware of how quickly our environment’s resources are being consumed. You only need to watch ‘The 11th Hour‘ and ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘ (rated 93% on rottentomatoes.com) to understand.

***

Other interesting eco friendly furniture to check out:

• Molo’s Paper Softseating

• Newspaper Extendable Bench

• Paper Softwall Room Divider

Tired of how your bookshelf looks and wished it were some other shape? With Arianna Vivienzo’s Elastic Bookshelf, you can change the shape of your bookshelf at any time.

You can sit your books right on top of the elastic bands or stick a piece of wood in between the bands and make a crevice for your books. What a marvellous and simple concept. Definitely going to try and see what I can find to create something similar. I do wonder what will happen to the shelf over time when stacked with items- as with all rubber items, they tend to lose their elasticity after a period of time and may never get back to the shape it originally was. Gotta find an economical way to get hold of large enough rubber bands. After all, we’re in Malaysia- the land of rubber trees.

Here’s a close cousin of the elastic bookshelf- elastic wall straps! Sold at online store- Generate. Manyak mahal man… USD49 a pair. Perhaps I should go look for Ah Leong (no link lah- he not IT savvy, no website), my usual mechanic and ask him to sell me timing/fan belts to make my bookshelf/wall strap?

Here’s a nifty little idea for when your wall-o-memories reaches the edge of the wall. The Cornerframe, designed by a German designer group called Details allows you to decorate the corner of walls, almost always space that is unoccupied, with custom sized picture frames. It’s one of those items which is so fundamental that when you see it, you’ll get that ‘why didn’t I think of that?’ thought. Well, Details did think of that and they sure are charging an arm and a leg for it- a “29,5 x 29,5 x 3,2 cm, hight 40 cm” frame sells for 224euros!!! Folks, I’d rather spend that money on a EURO2008 ticket right now (I know it’s a lot to pay for a football game, but heck, I’m CRAZYYY about football… but not crazy enough to pay RM1k for a photo frame)

Well, here’s what you can do if you must have something similar to the Cornerframe.

• Get any normal wooden frame (e.g. RIBBA, NYTTJA from IKEA)
• Remove glass/perspex cover and internal backing board
• Cut across frame (vertically) at desired point (lengthwise). Also cut backing board to size of the two newly created individual pieces

• At joining ends, cut at 45degrees to give it a sloping edge so both sides can join perpendicularly

• Nail or glue separate pieces together

• Basically, you can do without the glass or perspex cover unless you have glass-cutting tools to aid you in this process (or if you’re anal and feel that you absolutely must have a glass cover, go to a glass shop to have the frame custom fitted). Just bend your photo and insert into frame. Clip backing onto back of frame and you’re ready to hang your frame at the corner of any wall.

Total estimated cost = <RM50 + time + effort