Concentration Camp

Met Owl last Sunday afternoon - half excited, half nervous. Waiting to see what the perspective and detailed drawings would be like - and hopefully gain a shared language for discussing the house further. He was great - there were 76 perspectives and about 30 pages of detailed drawings for us to get migraine over! He had to take us through the drawings, and teach us how to read them. (Detailed drawings can be difficult to decipher if one isn't inclined towards numbers, or has a weaker spatial imagination.)

Think Owl could see that much of everything he was telling us was just going over our heads - especially at 8pm, after 5 hours of poring over the perspectives and font-size-5 detailed drawings. So he piled us with 2 bulging catalogues of laminates and a Nippon paint catalogue, and told us to go discuss. And have our choices/decisions ready by this Sat. Yes, this Saturday! :-p No need to work one ah?!...

Over a tired and somewhat stressful dinner after, we decided that the only way to get the choices/decisions out within 6 days would be... for all of us to take leave and do a family retreat. We chose Wednesday. Full day retreat. Hopefully not from each other. Necessary because just based on the meeting with Owl, we knew we were going to ask for changes. For instance, the overall scheme was too dark for our liking. And even if we agreed to change something, we didn't agree on what to change it to. So a retreat was in order.

Three hours into Wednesday's retreat, I developed a fever and had to take Panadol. We had faced 4 deadlocks, and were only at Perspective #7. Lilac Butter-fried. Best solution for deadlocks? "Owl decides."

Finance Minister was looking at some laminates, going "This is black... and this is black black..." I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Granite Man showed a strong preference for some psychedelic, cosmic-patterned laminates. I tried to distinguish the grains of Italian wenge, Lorriane walnut, Wild teak, Ice Fukagawa... if looks could kill, the laminates would have died more than a hundred deaths.

A few ultimatums. More than a handful of polarised views. "How can people sit on this kind of material?"... "But the vinyl will tear and not last!"... Flipping back and forth the signed quotation to check for items. "I didn't remember it as paint!"... "Who ask you never check? Signed awreddy..."... The most important item in the room (apart from the drawings) was the measuring tape. Everything from shoe boxes to mattress thickness, height of hairspray bottles to pots & pans had to be measured at some point - in order to determine the internal configurations of the cabinets and wardrobes.

The amazing thing was, Owl was on call. Anytime we didn't understand a detail, or had something to clarify, we would just call him. Sounded like he was on the move somewhere, but he could recall the exact spot we had questions about. And clear things up. 

Seven hours later, we were somewhat done - common areas and master bedroom. Didn't have energy for the lighting plan or data/powerpoints. My room still up in the air. Major mental block. Worked on it yesterday - as good as it gets. Get Owl to decide.

"... advice on material selection. Just go as neutral as possible coz you must remember that in a space, there will be other stuff in it. Such as sofa, table, chairs, little displays here and there, bedsheets, curtains or blinds and many other things that lie around the house. When you pick something simple, it will make it easier for you to put anything in your place and it will still look pretty. The essence of a nice interior is to create something in its reduced form, geometry and texture." - Owl