The recent repair work on the first floor bay roof and the painting/treatment of the bay windows and front door inadvertently kickstarted a few much needed and long awaited mini jobs around the house.

I like having art/photos on walls but to date after all these years, I only have them in a few places but the living room and main hallway on the ground floor which essentially should have been the first place to have had them after painting the walls back then. When I was a student in uni, getting IKEA or Athena prints were all the craze because it was relatively and pretty easy to obtain. Taking a leaf from my own choice of media for the rest of the house, while having SCANDAL gig posters were among my favs, these were not suitable for the two areas I wanted to decorate.

I had been getting this ads of trendy looking city maps on soc media, and as alluded in a recent post, I ordered two maps – one of KL/PJ and another of Tokyo. I knew the Tokyo one would be great for the hallway in combination with a console table, but for some reason when I saw the final printed KL/PJ map, it actually looked too much of a real map as opposed to an artistic depiction of one. One thing I should have done was to zoom out and included the Selangor coastline as if you were to look at the Tokyo one, you could see Tokyo Bay. The juxtaposition of the sea and land is more visually appealing than that of a land locked city.

The living room was then first decorated with a canvas print I bought on Amazon which looked good above the two seater sofa. It is of an 18th century ukiyo-e by Isoda Koryusai titled 秋の美人図 (Aki no bijin zu – Beauty in an autumn field). Now as the KL/PJ map is no longer in the picture, I decided to use what I already have – photos that I had taken all these years. I remembered seeing the Moriyama Daido exhibit at the Tate Modern in London a few years ago and thought of a collage. I did think of choosing the more “abstract” photos for this but went for the more pedestrian shots without making it look like a TDC ad. There was a company in London that looked that it could do the job great and indeed it was.

The 120 cm x 120 cm canvas is a collage of photos that I took during my travels to Japan between 2014-6 unimaginative titled 俺の日本、2014-16 (My Japan) as these 12 photos encapsulate what I love about the country.

The hallway was relatively simple – a console table which I think serves a function other than “making the hallway look nice”. Apart from the framed items on the wall above it, a table lamp, a scented reed diffuser (*koff*) and a couple of books should suffice. All it needs now is a couple of family photos which need printing on the inkjet. To complement the console table is an umbrella stand and a stool to sit on when I put my on shoes. As if lol.

And on the wall relatively opposite to these new additions, is a framed photo of the missus I took when SCANDAL performed live in Vienna back in 2016. I actually thought of placing the KL/PJ map but nahh.

A couple of weeks later, I had an idea of rearranging the stuff on my shelves in the living and dining room. At the mo, the living room is done and it includes a dedicated shelf for my anime figurines (yes, the weeb is out – and proud) lit by LED lamps. This leaves the dining room which includes a shelf that requires more than the kitchen step ladder to reach. It’s for the books I have read (I don’t/never re-read). Will put photos of that up on soc media as usual when its done.

And talking about the dining room, I finally had the halogen pendant lamp replaced by a Lindby pendant that can be height-adjusted. It houses four E27 bulbs and I am currently awaiting a set of dimmable LEDs as the ones I bought by mistake were bog standard LED ones.

And since the electrician had to do this installation job, I got him the install an outside LED lamp with a motion sensor in the “corridor” at the side of the house.

As it is winter, my little buangruang6 micro-jamming studio arrangement in my bedroom has a little upgrade. I hope I don’t fall asleep despite coffee (I know I will). And my next mini project for the bedroom is a drawer unit. Apart from organising my T-shirts and jeans, I can imagine a Samsung QLED perched on it now.

Watch this space!