The Kitchen Corner

Last year around this time I decided to set up a workspace for myself. For that, I required the garden table to be placed in my bedroom. So I decided to shift all the green goodies on it to a new place to free up the said table. The corner outside the kitchen window was most appropriate since a fabricated structure was already in place.

I found a stone slab of approximately matching dimensions and placed it on the fabricated iron cage. Then I arranged my plants, the log of wood and the old letter box on it.... and voila! there was some more green added to the backyard.

Over a period of time, I moved around some of the things to give the place a fresh look. These small planters also substituted to add the touch of green to my bathroom.

The old letter box cleverly hides some leftover painting materials like sandpaper and brushes. And the flowers bring in the much-needed occasional bursts of colour.

Tying Up Loose Ends

We just completed two months of living in our new residence. These have been two months of hard work, trying to tie up all the loose ends that keep popping up once you start living in a new house.

Remember the grill painting exercise that I talked about here? Well, much as we tried, hubby and me could not progress beyond one balcony. So we finally hired some painters to finish the paint job for us in all four balconies.

One of the painters busy painting our kitchen balcony grill

We also got additional grills fitted on the windows of the living room and the kids' bedroom. Security is one aspect where there is no compromise, so this was another major loose end tied up. Phew!

A peek of our living room grills

Leaking faucets and WCs, broken latches and sundry other work also took up our time.

Almost all our weekends zip by in getting these loose ends tied up. But we aren't really complaining (at least not yet!). After all nothing beats the pleasure of living in your own brand new home. :)

Painting Our Grills

We have had some harrowing times with getting odd jobs done around the new house. For one, due to the high demand for skilled masons, carpenters and painters in this area (due to lots of new construction projects), the workers charge an exorbitant sum. Imagine paying 150 rupees to get a 70 rupees worth door latch fixed!

Secondly, the quality is never guaranteed. In fact, we realized that despite paying a princely sum, we were very often at the mercy of completely unskilled labour. Like our fabricator who used inferior quality primer on our grill work, causing parts of it to catch some rust.

That is when the hubby and I decided to do the paint job for the new grills ourselves.

And so we’ve been hard at work the past two weekends trying to figure out how best to tackle it all. We bought some metal paint, a thinning agent, a couple of brushes and got down to it. Though our pace is rather slow, at least we know that the quality won’t get compromised. We just completed the grills on one balcony – they don’t look too bad, what say?

Will keep you posted on how and when the remaining ones get done.

Any tips from anyone on how best to finish our grill painting?

P.S: I must admit that I found the painting exercise immensely therapeutic. And got to spend some quality time with the hubby in the process. Talk of killing two birds with one stone!