Week of annual renovation

Our first year anniversary is almost here and this week we're busy doing maintenance throughout the house. We've had a few leaks from our old roof so had to replace with a new steel cover on the Aurora room. The steel pieces had to be hauled up from outside the house to the rooftop.

All the walls are painted again. My dear designer assured me that we can buy some base paint and colorant and an experienced painter can hand mix the colors for our walls. It turned out that the colors for each room are quite subtle and impossible to mix by hand, so we ended up cutting out a piece of the wall from each room to take to the paint shop for the machine to do the job. Also, our colors have strayed from the original colors we picked from the color samples (color paints rarely come out exactly as you wanted) so manual adjustments were still necessary. Thank god that the color mixer at the shop had a good eye for colors. Because our walls are old, so tiny cracks are inevitable even with a fresh coat of paint. I guess this is why our house has an authentic Old Shanghai feel ;-)

We also picked a new tone on-tone-pattern for our duvet covers. This time we went for a bolder pattern and didn't use the color strip for framing. New towels and bathrobes are also made. What should we do with the old batch of linens? I'd like to donate to the victims of the recent Morakot Typhoon in Taiwan (my hometown) but the shipping may be difficult to arrange (too much to hand carry and too little for container shipment). Anyone can help?

It's been a week packed with sweat and labor (ok, not mine but my contractors'). It reminded me a bit of our original construction -- keeping up a house is hard work!