The Minton: Ideas and Renovation – 36 – Day 33

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Looking at the carpentry work done so far at our Minton home, we now really understand why so many homeowners complain about carpentry in their own home renovation projects. If anything can go potentially go wrong in renovation, it’s here. We never had to deal with such degrees of woodwork in our current home. Every piece of furniture at our Rivervale home was bought off-the-shelf. So, it’s an interesting experiment for us for sure. I guess if we had a bigger home, we wouldn’t need to do so much customization. Guess carpentry is almost a necessity to provide a functional home that’s still minimally pleasing to look at visually.

Given how important this renovation aspect is, we’ve been making time every day this week to by to check on things. Which we did again in the late afternoon today – Day 4 of our carpentry installation. On the plus side, the woodwork is coming along very quickly. If nothing else, the carpenter assigned to us is very fast for what we’re guessing is still a one-man-show. But we noticed a few more issues – but fortunately, our designer was in the compound, and as he knew we were checking on the state of progress, came up to observe with us.

Our partially completed TV Feature Wall in the Living Hall. It’s a pretty simplistic design, but offering pretty good storage options near the surface’s base.
Cables drawn out and to be connected into power sockets that will be built into the drawer end.
Lots and lots of light switches everywhere, with the Living Hall’s fan regulator too.
The study tables in the workroom. Following through with yesterday’s post, Ling has asked our designer to get the carpenter to rectify his goof, or maybe April Fool’s joke. Not sure how he’s gonna do that, but as our designer said, it was the carpenter’s mistake and it’s his job to fix it now.
The just-installed 48″ fan in our Master Bedroom, and it seems capable of generating very good air movement, though not quite to the extreme cyclone we’re getting with the 50″ fan in the children’s room!
Our King-sized bedframe as seen from the opposite angle. We’re quite pleased with this too so far.
Our massive wall shelves in the +1/study room. This one is coming along very nicely, though the Crestar fan was giving out a lot of noise when turned up to the highest speeds. Our designer will be getting his electrician to check on this, and hopefully it’s not because we’ve got a cranky fan. The wind circulation generated by this little 30″ fan is also somewhat weak, but guess it’s to do with how little space the fan has to move air around.
A closer look at the shelves. We asked for double plywood shelves here, which our designer provided as part of his design, on account that these are going to hold very heavy stacks and piles of thick books. We’ve had very bad experiences with Ikea shelves, so hope these custom-built ones will fare better.
We appreciated too that our designer got our carpenter to bring out the light switch and fan regulator and flush it against the cabinet shelf’s wall. Looks very neat!
These Ikea lamps worked very nicely too. They just barely clear my head when I stand underneath them, but it won’t be an issue since the two lamps will be directly on top of the dining table.

Now we had another issue with our nearly completed shoe cabinet. This isn’t evident from the picture, but the haversack pigeon holes and the main shoe cabinet aren’t really flushed with each other. There’s a small but still obvious 1 cm elevation difference between the two structural components. We’re not certain why the carpenter did not align the two components, but guess it might be because the haversack component was mounted first, and it was only then that the carpenter realized he should had provided a bit more clearance for the LED downlight just in front of it. In any case, Ling was not pleased with the misalignment, and asked our designer to get the carpenter to rectify it.

Not sure how the carpenter is going to re-align the two structural stacks (the main shoe shelfs, and the haversack shelf).

And one more issue. It’s also not evident from this picture, but now that the TV feature wall has been mounted, we realized that the two downlights on top of it aren’t equi-distance. I didn’t spot this in our afternoon’s check, but trust the wife with her eagle-eyes to notice it quickly! In the picture below, the left downlight is closer to the feature wall’s vertical edge than the right downlight. Our designer himself had to stare at it for a minute before he realized what Ling was pointing out. But yes, our designer will be getting his electrician to correct it too.

Drew guidelines in this picture to show what Ling saw.
Drew guidelines in this picture to show what Ling saw.

All these said; things are still about ballpark alright and progressing along at least with no holdups. We’ve heard a lot of horror stories of renovation project’s carpentry going haywire, so we’re thankful that at least the errors made so far are still minor (well, aside from the incorrect cabinet and wall-hung shelving placement in our workroom!), even if they’ll require some ingenuity to rectify. More updates to come soon.:)