Pumpkin Carving

What to carve what to carve?

Meeku and Rafiki...
Matt and my pumpkin
Derrick's pumpkin

Amy's pumpkin
The artists with their jack o lanterns

Nangka

Choon Ping and Pei-Sun brought over a nangka (jackfruit) today....

At the store, the checkout clerk thought it was a durian.... and charged them $1.49/lb instead of $1.99/lb....

Look at Pei-Sun cutting up the delicious fruit... We all enjoyed it very much.... It's my first time eating nangka in the US....

Ice-cream

Have you tried these before? Ching Tji says yummy..yummy.
We'll bring you some to HK when possible, okie?

Foundation Done!

Some updates for our renovation project....

After all the sewage and other piping was in place and inspected, the progress for the foundation nearly came to an end as well. The re-bars & other embedded elements were secured in place and inspected by the City last Thursday, before they could pour the concrete in. A special inspection was done on last Saturday as well... meaning our structural engineer came on site to directly supervise the installation of all threaded rods/holdowns into the existing concrete. As shown on the picture - retrofitted sill place anchor bolts into existing concrete with the used of epoxy adhesives.

So Monday, which happened to be Columbus Day, was the official day for the completion of the foundation. The concrete mixer truck came at 3pm sharp. In about 7 minutes, the concrete was poured from the mixer truck into a concrete pumping truck that was connected to a long flexible pipe. The concrete then came out of the tube that was moved, by hand, and by a guy with a remote-control device hanging around his waist (to control the amt of flowing concrete), where a bunch of guys with various tools spread and smooth the concrete. It was quite fun to watch the whole process and indeed every efficient to transport large quantities of concrete over long distances. The last time I saw the process of filling in concrete was loonngg time ago back in Malaysia... using wheelbarrows and buckets. :-/ Shown below was one of the location to be filled with concrete. Can you recognize which part of the house is this? ... thanks to our decision regarding moving the toilet! So mUCh work! ...breaking the concrete, digging, excavating, piping, and finally filling in the concrete.... yes, it's the bathroom & the office! It looks like crap indeed.
After covering up all the pipes, they went ahead to fill in portion of the kitchen/garage foundation. Below is the picture of the foundation at the new addition area.It took them about 30 mins to finish 50% of the area, and another 30 mins to complete the other half.
Another 5-10mins to smooth out the whole area... there you go, our new foundation was done at 4:20pm on Monday! Total of 2 truckload concrete was used for our project. Apparently they dug 2 inches deeper than they should. So our new concrete foundation is 6" thick instead of 4".
I came back again in the evening to pick up mails... and this was how it looked on Monday late afternoon.
When I was about to leave... I saw this 'thing' hanging in the middle of the air at about one foot away from my face. !&%^!#$!@*!! It was a freaking HUGH spider!! The stomach was about an inch big! With the legS and all... it's about 2 inches wide!!! I HATE spider!! Of course... I 'sent him to heaven'.
When I got to the construction site the following day, around 10:45am. they already had the exterior framing done! No photos though... forgot to bring camera. :P But here's a photo of ChoonPing relaxing... after looking at the photos that I took last night.

2 weeks later

We started our renovation exactly 2 weeks ago. Now the demolition is done. The roof is off. And yes, the house looks like was just hit by a hurricane. The demolition actually didn't take very long. It probably took 2 days to strip the siding of the house. Removing the roof took another 2-3 days. So all in all slightly > 1 week for demolition.

With the roof off, the view is very nice. It's like a big skylight!

I lost count, I think we are now on our 4th load.



The front wall was demolished in about 2 days.



We have proceeded laying out new pipes for the house. Preparation work for the foundation has also been started.