My Move to the Philippines

As I shared with you I will be adding a bigger kitchen on my house in Binan, Laguna soon. I hope to be able to travel there and keep an eye on the biggest part of the work. We already have a kitchen in the house minus kitchen cabinets and appliances so I guess it’s not really a kitchen yet. We have extra room on our lot around the carport. The kitchen will extend into the back portion of the carport and will feature a terrace on top for us to have parties and if we can find a decent outdoor gas grill we will do the outdoor barbecues.

I was reading an article that R.T. Cunningham put on his site Untwisted Vortex entitled My Custom Kitchen-Cabinet, Cupboards, Counters, and Electricity. This article written a few months ago when he was building his own kitchen has helped me make some decisions about my own.

In his article he talks about having a modern kitchen or as best he can in the Philippines. He and his wife looked at many kitchen designs  and made some decisions that my wife and I faced also. As far as the cabinets he decided to go with custom built solid wood cabinets and cupboards. The point was brought up about the corrosion of metal in the Philippines and I don’t think metal even came into our thoughts. As far the counter tops we will be going with tiled countertops vs granite due to the cost.

As far as appliances we are shooting for going with as much 220 volt appliances as we can such as microwave, refrigerator, and stove. We did send 4 balikbayan boxes full of brand new things such as rice cooker, can openers, and other small elctrical appliances but we will be using regulators for them. Since there is a wall built where we are adding on we have the pleasure of cutting a new door in the wall upstairs for entrance to the terrace and one downstairs for entrance into the kitchen. I’ll leave that one to the engineers and builders to figure out.

We had an architect come out and give us an estimate and of course this would have been with the full blown best quality everything including granite counters and ceramic tiles. His estimate was PHP500,000 but of course will not be paying that much (pray pray). This has already been quite an experience for me but I just keep thinking about how many people never get to do something like this and it seems to make it all worthwhile especially when it is done.