Home improvement

talk about cause and effect. the following photos, i realized, aren't just the effects of the latest round of home improvement chez plazo. they also contain the cause of our severe end-of-the-month penny-pinching!

note to self: whenever you wonder all the money went for march, open your eyes and look around the house, won't you?

anyway.

one of the first things marlon and i did when i got back from manila some time ago was nurse my segunda mano hangover. i love, love, love vintage clothes and furniture. my mom and i had spent an afternoon poking around second-hand haven evangelista street in makati, alongside a surprising number of very handsome, very well-dressed, very buff and very gay couples. it was all i could do to not cart back any antique glassware -- imagine the potential mess in my handcarry!

back in lah-lah land, my little hands itched to get on some pre-owned furniture. and with a little scouring on the net, i discovered hock siong waste dealers. ignore the, er, unprepossessing name for a sec and get a load of this -- they have a warehouse full of furniture from hotels and model flats. it sounded great on the screen, but going to the actual warehouse on kampong ampat road totally blew me out of my socks, as the unfortunate kristy lee cook would say.

imagine a really good piece of furniture or painting -- then imagine a hundred more just like it. marlon and i had no trouble getting a pair of bedside lamps, or replacing the shade of one when it tore. of course, you can also imagine a hundred pieces of hideous faux french or overblown oriental furniture. there were pieces that just screamed HOTEL too much to ever be put in any other setting.

so, speaking of other settings, i now segue into the pictures of our hotel finds. out of the hotel and into the bedroom!


our little hotel-ish reading corner in the bedroom. the chair and bamboo floor lamp together cost less than a hundred dollars. after throwing a scarf from chatuchak over the lampshade, it is now dim enough to be a nice nightlight. the scrappy little rug was left behind by the previous tenant, and i wonder why i haven't thrown it out yet!

i can totally imagine this white and chrome lamp on a hotel bedside table.


the flowers are part of a spur-of-the-moment bouquet marlon got me one sunday afternoon. we don't have vases at home, so i stole one of the jars we use to store sugar and salad dressing.

marlon and i never had bedside tables, so now that we do, we have to cure ourselves of odd before-bed habits (i stick things under my pillow while he puts them on the floor). it's great having bedside tables. we now have someplace to put before-bed treats like good books, hot chocolate and freshly toasted coffee buns from bread talk. let me tell you, these things totally make our day.


i think marlon particularly loves evenings like this at the end of a grueling day at the office. here he is in "contented studmuffin at home" mode (pre-highlights, of course).


one of his nicest surprises for me when i got home from manila was a new lamp. he actually devised a whole wiring system for the two glass lamps we carted home from jaipur, and fixed them to a wrought-iron stand we bought specifically for this purpose. i swear i learned about circuits in high school just like he did, but i never would have pulled this off! it must be a boy thing.

he painted the whole thing silver and used a lot of chrome wire, which gave it a nice artsy look. it now stands in a corner of our living room and casts pretty patterned shadows on the wall.


the condo happens to have a special lighting fixture in the living room, the type that paintings are displayed under. it seemed only fitting that the first pieces of art that marlon and i ever bought together be hung there. we bought a pair of miniature paintings in udaipur, the first stop on our honeymoon in rajasthan. these paintings are gorgeously detailed beyond belief and i love that they now have a place of honor in our home.

finally, we dressed up the daybed with some ikea cushions, and bought an ikea paper lamp for some mood lighting.


the daybed will probably need another set of big pillows to get the sinfully stuffed look we want, but it's starting to look quite homey, don't you think?