Happy house

during the glee club’s tour of Europe in 2000, seventeen of us were thrown together into a multi-room nunnery in koeln, germany, left to fend for ourselves with no host parents – just a bunch of groceries, a kitchenette, the erratic and befuddled but well-meaning protection of a filipina we soon nicknamed tita lost (you can guess why), and each other.

maybe it was because we felt we had to compensate for our kawawa-ness (“ang saya-saya namin kahit wala kaming hosts!”) or because we really did have fun, but we soon came to call ourselves the happy house.

since then, the term “happy house” has been passed down in glee club/acs tour tradition as a house, typically small, crammed full with too many self-reliant, noisy, happy ateneans.

i don’t know why i chose this title for this post. it’s funny that my idea of a happy house is one that’s stuffed full of friends. because pretty soon, i’m going to start making a happy house of my own, with just two people rattling around in it – marlon and myself.

setting up our own home is one of the things i’m really looking forward to about moving to lah-lah land. apartment-hunting is scheduled for month's end, when marlon and i hope to find a two-bedroom place that won't make us wish we had just eloped and run away with our savings intact. marlon will move in in december, and will carry me over the threshold (he better start pumping some serious iron) in the second week of january.

(yes, my one-way ticket has been booked. eeek!)

i’ve been hoarding house magazines (real living mostly – just tried out a new mag called homestyle and i don’t think i'll be buying it again anytime soon) and make daily pilgrimages to my favorite house sites: domino, apartment therapy, design sponge’s sneak peeks. at the bookstore, i make a beeline for the house and interiors books: the relaxed home, nest for two, and jeline’s fab flea market style book are all on my wish list.

for the meantime, i’m stocking up all this information and just waiting for a chance to unleash it. since we’re just renting, though, and are on a pitiful newlyweds’ pittance (good luck recovering from the wedding), i don’t know how much of my knowledge i’ll actually get to let loose upon our poor unsuspecting apartment. and a lot of the places i want to shop at – evangelista street in bangkal, cubao x, landmark – will be lost to me once i step upon singaporean soil. still, it’s fun to dream

i realized how house-happy i’ve become when the first thing i thought of buying on our honeymoon was block-printed indian bedlinen and table cloths, the handcrafting of which rajasthan is famous for. and i was thinking in exclamation marks: can you imagine?!!! our bed made with block-printed indian cotton sheets!!! block-printed by hand!!!

not to mention how i gushed for a full month, maybe more, to anyone who would listen, about the gorgeous, 100-year old, pure silk carpet that ambushed my heart in mumbai:

i swear, marlon and i sketched out living room layouts in june with this in mind. except he's stopped, and well, i haven't.

and i'm already eyeing my bookshelf and calculating how i'm going to arrange them into something like this (from the domino site) when marlon and i combine our sh*tload of books. di baleng marami, basta cute.

and after living with so many dogs for so many years, it's my chance to finally have a cat! then again, a cat toilet-training (can cats even be toilet-trained?) on 100-year old silk carpet from mumbai might not a happy house make.