Bathroom Reveal!

Hello Friends,
True to my promise, here I am back to share some time with you. As I had mentioned in my previous post, we got one of our bathrooms renovated a couple of months back. It was a long process. It took us long to finally select the tiles, given that mine and my husband's choices are normally poles apart. So, it takes us longer to arrive at a selection which is liked by both of us.
Since this was the renovation, where everything was getting changed, we had a lot of scope for shopping. Everything from floor tiles, to wall tiles, to bathroom fixtures to choosing a new toilet seat and a sink. End to End change. There were two things that both of us wanted for sure in the beginning – A wall mounted toilet seat and a sink with Vanity. We were referred to the 'Jagatpuri' market in East Delhi by my brother. It was not very far off from our place and boy! We were so glad to go to that market. It is a hub for Kitchen and Bathroom stuff at reasonable prices. That market was a pure delight for us.
Once we finalized the tiles, We started looking for the seat and sink and decided on Roca. For bathroom fixtures, we went with Jaquar except for the rain shower which we got from Hindware. As I am writing all this, it seems an easy task, but we literally went to each and every shop there and looked for options. But well, it was worth it. Because when we finally bought, we were sure that we were buying the best as liked by us. And after almost four months of continuous use, we still stand by our choices.
When we were thinking renovation, we wanted wall mounted toilet seat, and were adamant that we wanted sink with vanity. When we called the plumber, he was not sure if the wall space was enough to have the seat mounted. That was a big blow to our plans. But still, half heartedly, went in with the demolition process. Imagine our delight, when the very first day, the plumber gave us a go ahead on wall mounted seat. We were so glad.
But the same delight we could not get while selecting the sink with vanity. The reasons are multi-fold for this. First and foremost being, there were very few available within our desired dimensions. I was specific about the width – should not be more than 30 inches. Our bathroom size is small – 5’x8’ – which has two doors too. The layout is such that all three major installations – sink , toilet seat and shower need to be on the same wall. So, the maximum space we could afford for sink was 30 inches only. The ones which satisfied the criteria, did not have enough space and I could not imagine how on earth would I ever be able to keep all the things in them for which I have been planning for months and months. There still were two which got my attention, but those were priced at 25-30k , the amount that I was not ready to shell out (as against my hubby). So, instead, we bought the desired dimension sink – 2ft. (from Roca) and I knew whom I would turn to to get the vanity made. I will reveal the vanity in my next post. This post is for the Bathroom reveal.
In the end, All our efforts paid off and we got the desired bathroom done in our style. Yes, it was hard work, and yes, it took longer than expected, but well worth it.
Time for Pictures… Sorry, no before and afters .. These are only the DONE PICTURES.

The pictures I have posted do not do justice to how it actually looks. I will take some pics in the day time and will update this post then. Tell me, What do you think of this renovation? Does this look like a beautiful bathroom?

I was lost!

 

Yes Dear Friends!!! For the last few months, I have been lost. And the reason, I could not find a balance between blogging and work. Yes ! I have joined back work. I feel so relieved just to think about it. But, I do admit, I have not been planning properly and I just could not get back to blogging. Although, I used to think and promise myself again and again that from this weekend, I would start writing. But the weekends would come and go, My promised were never kept.

Anyways, Now, I will try to post at least once a week, so that I do not lose you!. There have been quite a few changes / upgrades in my home – one major being our bathroom renovation. That continued for almost a month. That really took a toll on our daily lives. Living with such dirt in the house, along with two kids, and that too when I had recently joined a new job. That was the time, that intent to blog actually took a backstage.

After bathroom renovation, I got vanities made by the carpenter. I will be blogging about that in my next post. So, stay tuned for that!!

Take care !!

JAVA/OOPS/Fundamentals in Daily Life

Hey All!
Yes, I know it has been too long for me to post! Somehow last few days, I just wanted to relax, and so, that’s what I kept doing! I have been a bit of blog hopper in those days. I did not open up my blog even once, but was going through other thought provoking blogs which talked about the topics that interest me the most.
Anyways, I will not bore you with the details, rather will come back to the post I intend to write today! Ever since I started this blog, I have been meaning to write about this but I could not gather my thoughts properly. So, last week, when I was doing the tit bits at home, I kind of scolded myself as to why I was procrastinating this post? What is the stuff that I want to gather? May be , I should just write what comes to me in one go, and when I get some other idea, I could write an update… Gud Idea right? Oh! Has it been too much of a suspense now? Sorry pals! I am going to mix personal and professional lives here….
Okay, so let me start now! I am applying my jobs fundas at home. Have you ever experienced that you are wearing, washing, ironing the same clothes again and again? What happened to the shirt that you wore three weeks back, that has never surfaced again? Where is it lost? ahhhhmmm… That is deep down in the laundry basket. The reason it happened ??? You practiced LIFO… Rather you should practice FIFO… No, it is not the name of another football league. FIFO stands for – First in, First out. LIFO stands for – Last in, First out.

The clothes that you put first in the laundry basket, should be the ones to be washed first! First cloth in the laundry basket, should be the first one to be out for washing! Simple !!! So, just practice FIFO in laundry and you will never experience the lost clothes in dirty laundry! And well – This has got nothing to do with java, but this is the one example I found that I can relate to the most in applying my work at home.
The maid came, cleaned the house, took out the garbage, but still you find dirty plates, or broken stuff or garbage at home? It does not look clean enough? Hmm…. May be you did not release your resources properly, so the garbage collector did not pick up the items and released the home of unnecessary stuff… This is the exact statement, one would use at work, if the application works slow. In simple language, If you are not using something, then release it and put in the appropriate place, so that when it is time to cleanup, everyone (including u) knows what stuff is to be thrown out. Makes sense????
Another thing, I have talked about earlier is – FTR – First Time Right… That is not java, just a methodology to follow no matter at work or at home. Whatever you do, do it FTR.
The other day, I was looking for something in the fridge, and was appalled to see, 4 different containers with curd, 4 containers with fruits, kneaded dough in 2 containers, used milk in three glasses. Ufff.. I immediately took a bigger container, and put the fruits together. One bigger container, and dough together, another container and mix milk.(Once the milk is cold enough we can mix). This is a day to day example. But I can relate this to normalization of tables, code optimization. Why take a bigger container and put a small dough ball? Why 2 spoons of curd in a big container which can accommodate half kg curd?? (Really, I am not exaggerating.. but that is how someone at my home works… wink wink)… Ha ha, Actually my MIL works this way. No, I am not criticizing, just different people have different ways of working. Why have same sabzi in different containers? Normalize dear Normalize!! Do not keep the same thing in different places otherwise it becomes difficult to manage. Why put the kadhai itself in fridge in which the dough is kneaded ???? No way !!! These little bits of things, I always relate with Code Optimization. Use the optimum sized boxes for related stuff. Similarly, the medicine box, I don’t prefer to keep it in bedrooms. That has commonly used medicines too, and so should be kept at a common place accessible by everyone (except the kiddo). Right????
Enough of fundas for the day!! Did you relate to any of the stuff I mentioned above? Do you apply any fundas related to your work, at home? I would love to know.

Solution to Laziness

 

Hey All!

I have been too lazy these days. For past few days I just did not feel like cleaning up or sorting the laundry. So the clothes were piling up in the room waiting to be put away. So, what do I do to clean up all the mess???/

Well, I resorted back to my old mantra. Earlier, whenever we lacked the will to clean up our house, we would invite our friends over. No, No, No. Not for them to clean up. But inviting them over for lunch or dinner on a weekend, would give us a deadline by which we just HAD TO CLEAN UP. It seems I work best under pressure. So, that invitation was just the right pressure for us to get to working and get the house sparkle clean.

So, this time I did the same. I called over my friend whose son is my son’s classmate and a very good friend. That invitation built up the right pressure and motivated me and I CLEANED UP.

Oh! Please don’t think bad about me! That’s how I work. UNDER PRESSURE!! MEETING THE DEADLINE. Completing the project well in time before the deadline. And well, That solved the purpose !

What is your solution to the laziness? How do you motivate yourself? Please tell me I am not the only one who gets lazy in cleaning… Or Am I ????

Leftover Wood Reuse!

 

Hi Friends!

Today’s post is completely inspired by a post on ‘www.dressyourhome.in’ post. Laksh today talked about the uses of leftover pieces of wood and that reminded me that although I had planned on this post when I started this blog, I actually never did it. Her post today made me come to reality that I am not being organized about writing my posts in the order they should be. Learn girl, Learn!!!

So, coming to the uses of leftover wood, Remember my post on ‘A Store to Store Stuff’. After that store, we had a few pieces of wood planks left over. I actually wanted to throw them right away and something came over me and I saved those pieces. It had been a few months and one day I was going through some Interiors magazine, Don’t remember the name or the article. What I do remember is, that there was some statement like – Stop saying that you don’t have a space in your home for something. Look around, create space. Creating space does not mean breaking walls, it means to look and think outside the box. Look for spaces where you would never think of doing something, and you will find a space which is perfect for your needs. This statement touched the right bells in my head, and I actually started looking around all over my home. And there it hit me….

For past sometime, I was feeling the need to have some showcase in our home where we could display the cute little knick knacks. I did not want to add a showcase on the floor space just for eye candy purpose. So, the place that I found was the purrrrrfect space…

Remember the photo from our first home….

Here are the two spaces that came to my mind :

The upper arrow indicates the space for showcase. And the kitchen entrance marks the space for medicine cabinet. Here is the AFTER picture for both these spaces:

Both these are made up of the leftover wood planks. I had enough mica left from the store to cover up for the showcase. But for medicine cabinet there was no mica left. I did not want to spend Rs. 500 on 8x8 mica sheet just to use 1x1 of it. So instead, I got creative. I had many greeting cards from my college days that were just collecting dust. I took a bright yellow chart paper, and pasted the cute flowers from those greeting cards and covered up the wood planks. For the edges, I bought a few fake sea shells from local market at throwaway prices and covered them. In the end, it looked so lively and beautiful and moreover it served the purpose well. There was no central space in our 2 BHK apartment for medicine storage. This place had a great function. This makeover is 7 years old. Had I been exposed to blog world that time, I would have put the bottles in a box and would have covered it with cute liners like I have done in this new home.

    

Nice memories I have of that home. All thanks to Laksh for making me nostalgic and inspiring this post.

What is your leftover wood planks story??

ILU’s 1st Birthday Party!!

 

Hey Everyone!!

  There is a Whatsapp message going around these days ---

“Most Important question facing the country these days --------

 

Tere bachon ka holidays homework ho gaya kya?’

(Translation: Is your kids holidays homework complete?)

And to which my answer is still no! The school opens in another two days now and we still are not done! This June month has been super busy in our household. Every weekend either we were out or we were busy planning for the little one’s b’day. I had mentioned about this bday party in my last post. And as promised, I am back with an update on that.

We planned for ILU’s party on 21st June, although her bday was on 11th. The party was planned in a restaurant where we had already attended another 1st bday party and we had liked the space and the food there. So, once we finalized the place, we started planning for different events for the party. First and foremost, I wanted to do a movie featuring our daughter – meaning, I wanted to make a video clip of her pictures aligned with appropriate songs. Song selection was one tedious task, but finally I selected three songs. Once those were identified, editing the songs to keep the required portions of the songs, aligning the pictures according to the song, and then joining all these together took most of the time. All of this took too much of my time, but I completely enjoyed the process. Actually I loved the process. Watching all the pictures starting from her birth took me down the memory lane and most days I was awake late in the night just going through all the pics.

This video clip was to be the star of the party. After this was planned and worked upon, came the bday party décor. We wanted a flex banner to be put up on the stage displaying few adorable pics of our daughter. The balloon colors were White, pink, purple and a few golden ones. Ain’t these the obvious colors for a girl’s birthday party????

Has it been too much of talking (I mean writing) without pictures????

Here are some of the pics from the party.

 

And the star of the party – The Video -

There has been some error in uploading the video on this blog.

Here is the link to the youtube where I have uploaded this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBsDi6sE04A

I had planned for two games in the party. One game for the kids, and one for the couples.

Kids game was simple – I made a face on a chalkboard , and the kids were supposed to put a ‘Bindi’ mark with chalk with eyes blindfolded. It was fun to watch the kids trying to adopt different means to manipulate the ‘Bindi’ place.

Couples game was interesting- One person picks up a slip which has the name of an object written on it. He/she has to explain the object in terms of shape without revealing its function. The other person draws the explained object on a chalkboard and guesses/identifies the object. This game was very well received by the couples and actually two of the couples took it on their ego –‘ Arre guess kaise nahin kar paaye???’. (Why couldn’t you/I identify the object??’).

Do you see the drawing there.. That is supposed to be a ‘Gas Stove’… Ha….

Overall, Everyone enjoyed in the party, and the games and the video were a good hit. After making the video I feel like I am an expert in songs editing, joining and video making. If any one of you wants to know about it, I would be more than ready to help.

After the 21st of June, I felt like I had no work left to do. I felt so free and EMPTY!!! But the sense of accomplishment filled me. (ha ha).

Overall the party was a success and everyone enjoyed a lot…

How did you spend your month of June?? The vacation time??? Was it as busy as mine???

Busy Bee!!!

Hey everyone!!!

 In case you are wondering why I am not posting these days, well,  I have been super crazy busy this month. Actually I am that busy that I could not even write the post about being busy.(wink wink)

Every weekend is super hectic and weekdays are even more work. This Saturday we are celebrating our daughter's first birthday and this whole week I have been so much busy planning all the operations and what not. I will be back next week, hopefully to give a detailed description about the whole event.



Take care !!!!