Home sweet home

i figured before i fly back to manila tomorrow, i should write about life in singapore so far. i don't know why i feel like i should -- although the manila trip is just for ten days to pick up my marriage license and do other odd errands (more on which later), i have the sense of it being kind of a no-man's land between two places. the first place is my life of leisure here in singapore for the past three weeks. the second place is still unknown.

maybe it's because i feel like i'm not going to have this kind of life for long. yes, feeling ko magkakatrabaho na ako. yan naman eh. so what i've had for the past couple of weeks is worth documenting. starting off with where i live with marlon -- former boyf, now current husband.

we rent a three-bedroom condo unit north of the city (which is what they call the main cbd around orchard). back when we first sealed the deal on it, there were already things we loved about the place -- the relatively spacious kitchen, the kitchen counter, the newly renovated feel, the bedroom-turned-tv-room, and not least of all the walk-in closet in the master's.

but living here now, i totally love it. i love the airiness and the big windows, and that it's so bare. i love having three rooms all to myself during the day, which is why i often wander through them doing my little odd things (watching tv, doing chores, surfing) while marlon is at work. lately i've come to love that we have two bathrooms, which is great when we come home from dinner out and both have to poop. romantic, i know.

this is the living room... so far. we have a huge custom-made daybed from tagaytay, outfitted with a mattress and gorgeous white cutwork sheets from india. i tell you, sheets were the heart-racing splurge of our honeymoon (heart-racing refers to us in relation to our present credit card bill). we also got lovely white-on-white block printed cotton as pamalit for the daybed.

the kilim rugs are a gift from my mom, which she's had since i was about eight or nine years old. i hated them back then, because they were twiny and scratchy, not plush and soft like other "normal" carpets. now that i'm grown up i totally love them, and i asked my mom for them last year. four of them are now layered on the living room floor.

oh, right, the bubble wrap on the floor. we had an insane amount of bubble wrap from all the stuff we shipped. having it in the house was fun for a while, but it's all gone now.

not all the stuff we shipped had to be bubble-wrapped though.


my tamad meals consist of vienna sausage (straight out of the can, no cooking, with lots of ketchup), lucky me pancit canton chilimansi, and century tuna spanish style. marlon threw in a couple of bottles of bangus in olive oil for himself.

but back to the living room.

remember this mirror? after being safely shipped all the way from manila, marlon put a nail through it as he was attempting to hang it up with a homemade rig of nylon rope and heavy-duty 3M hooks.

then we found out we could make paalam from our supernice landlady michelle to drill holes in the wall. so we had the cracked glass replaced, a hole drilled above the daybed, and voila!


i have happily organized our conjugal book collection by color, just as i was inspired to do by the domino blog many months ago. isn't it lovely?

marlon is ecstatic about acquiring my library. he started off beautifully with the last unicorn, and says he may even read my christopher pikes and sweet valley twins one day. i can't believe he hasn't read the griffin and sabine books, which he gave me for my birthday when we first started going out.

this is what the master bedroom looked like about two weeks ago.


it has improved by leaps and bounds since then, pretty much because we got a bed and lost the boxes. i've unpacked all my clothes, bags and shoes and put them into the lovely walk-in closet. i've also realized that i want to chuck a lot of my tops.

ikea is discontinuing the whole malm line of bedroom furniture, which we wanted at first. so we went with the noresund instead and spent two days spray-painting it white. that was fun, although cleaning up the white paint dust from 6.5 cans of paint was not. we also had streaky white kulangot for about two hours afterwards. but worth the effort, don't you think?

we relegated marlon's bachelorhood bedsheets to the guest bedroom and gave our (ehem) nuptial bed the royal treatment. when i mentioned that bedsheets were the big splurge of the honeymoon, i'm mostly talking about the pashmina bedspread in that photo. those babies (we got a couple of other colors and designs) deserve a whole blog post of their own. the indigo-and-white block-printed cotton sheets from jaipur (under the bedspread) are but a distant second in the splurge category. we also got nice white paisley quilt covers and pillowcases from ikea.

speaking of ikea, our tv room is a mini ikea showcase. however, it's way comfy and is probably the most furnished room in the house so far. on the left is the very first piece of furniture i assembled myself. i'm quite proud of it. on the right is the catchall for everything that should belong in a desk or dresser, which i don't have at the moment. for photo purposes, i covered it all up with the sheepskin throw.

the guest room, which we vacated just a couple of days ago to move into the master's, is a bleeding disaster. you really don't want to see it right now.

so that's the house, basically. there's still quite a bit of furniture we don't have plus a couple that are on their way from india. still, it's a huge improvement over when i first arrived and was shocked to realize that we had... no wastebaskets. the goal is to have it ready for a housewarming party sometime in late march or early april. plus, the guest room has to be in shape in time for my sister's and mom's visit in mid-april.

a peek outside our doorstep and around cactus drive, next up!