Lily Pang Art

Lily Pang Art and Design, Gardening, Painting

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Home Maintenance and Lessons

I was sick with sore throat for a few days and spent most of the time resting. Meanwhile I tried to build up my balcony garden and fix some of the house problems.

I used to put a lot of green plants or trees such as palms in my garden. But this time, I feel that it is much more interesting to have trees with flowers. I bought a wrightia last time that has small white flower and sweet scent. It gives us a lot of pleasure to look at the flowers and feel the fragrance.
Today, I bought a tall murraya tree with fragrant small flowers. Murraya tree is type of jasmine and medicine plant in India. It can be used to treat many problems according to Ayurvedic practice. I hope that I will have success with these type of plants.

Just share some stories about my home repairing jobs. I have some problem again with pluming and lighting. I found that the bathroom washing basin cabinet bottom is wet after every use of the basin. I asked some plumbers and they all told me that there must be pipe broken. They need to break the wall to repair it. The price they quote to me is about SGD$1900 to fix it.

It is really expensive and I think I better do some research myself. After try and error, I found and fixed the problem without costing one cent. The problem is due to the leaking of edge of the basin top and also the connection point of drain pipe from the basin outlet to the wall inside the basin cabinet. I use some teflon tape and silicon gel and the problem is fixed.

I also have problem with a chandelier that its dimmer is broken again. This is not the first time that the dimmer is not working. It was repaired two times and every time it costs about SGD$50. This time, I was wondering if I should keeping using dimmer because I thought that probably dimmers are not good to be used with chandeliers. I asked my neighbor who is very good at electrical job to take a look. He immediately told me that the dimmer has not enough power. My chandelier electricity load is exceeding the maximum  dimmer load. I need to use a more powerful dimmer. I never knew that there is such thing as dimmer load and the electrician neither mentioned this to me nor use a dimmer with correct load.

The lesson is that for every small job in your house, we better do some google search to equip ourselves with basic knowledge about the job. Otherwise you end up wasting money and also not get the thing done correctly.