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A collection of things I sometimes write about. Comments? Questions? Get in touch.

Ringgits & Cents: Costing for the Meraki Project [Updated Dec 2019]

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

6 min

Ringgits & Cents: Costing for the Meraki Project [Updated Dec 2019]

How much building a house (and an eventual farm-slash-orchard) is costing the wallet. As per last year, I am conducting an end-year review of the finances for the Meraki Tiny House project, and updating the post to capture the ongoing work and accrued expenses. It’s been 2 years since the house was built, and within this year alone, there were several major developments that you will see reflected in the costing: the slope underneath the house was reworked into a working area

DIY Multifunctional Sofa for the Meraki Tiny House

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

5 min

DIY Multifunctional Sofa for the Meraki Tiny House

Putting together a custom Do-It-Yourself sofa because why not make life hard for yourself. My initial hopes and dreams were to DIY most of the interior of my tiny house, having participated in the building of the structure and exterior. In preparation, I must have watched thousands of YouTube videos on how to DIY everything from doors to shelves to dining tables. The people in the video made it look so easy, surely I can do this too? Well, turns out, no, I can’t. While YouTub

Rainwater Harvesting at the Meraki Tiny House

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

4 min

Rainwater Harvesting at the Meraki Tiny House

Installing an off-grid rainwater catchment system to water the tiny house with. Now that the rainy season has begun, at least in my part of the world, it seems to be a good time to introduce the water system I have going on at the Meraki Tiny House. The house is located up on the hill, with no access to the public utility grid at this point in time, which means I cannot plug into the electricity grid or the public water ways that my neighbours down below are on. Which is just

Ringgits & Cents: Costing for the Meraki Project [Updated Dec 2018]

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

4 min

Ringgits & Cents: Costing for the Meraki Project [Updated Dec 2018]

How much building a house (and an eventual farm-slash-orchard) is costing the wallet. Since I first published the costing for this project earlier in January, there have been ongoing work and expenses accrued as I attempt to put this place together. The end of the year seems like a good time to review and update, so here we go. Note: Items with a noticeable difference are marked in blue, and updated remarks are marked as such. Given the project is ongoing, the costs below are

Installing Solar Power in the Meraki House

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

6 min

Installing Solar Power in the Meraki House

Let there be (sun)light (to power up everything I need in life). Throughout this entire process of conceptualising, planning and building a house, I frequently found myself wishing I was doing this in the United States instead of Malaysia. That’s simply because the resources available there and the widespread DIY culture would make everything 10x easier, but never have I wished it so fervently as I did while I was trying to equip my little house with solar power, which, in Ma

Meraki Tiny House: What I Would Do Differently

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

5 min

Meraki Tiny House: What I Would Do Differently

All the things I would do differently if I were to build a house again Last week marks the anniversary of the start of the Meraki Tiny House build. We kickstarted the build in September of 2017, after approximately 1 year of doodle sketching on my own and another 1+ year of actual serious planning with actual professionals. The skeleton of the house was completed in late September of last year, and the finishing work has been sporadically ongoing since then. Now, a couple hun

Ringgits & Cents: Costing for the Meraki Project

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

3 min

Ringgits & Cents: Costing for the Meraki Project

How much building a house (and an eventual farm-slash-orchard) is costing the wallet. If you've been following my Personal Finance series, you will know exactly how I feel about loans and interest rates. So when I decided to build my own home, I was adamant about keeping the costs down so that I could afford to do it without having to borrow money. That meant: 1) I was limited by what little I have managed to save up or earn in less than a decade of working. 2) I had to look

House Building Diary: Final Week (+ Behind the Scenes)

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

3 min

House Building Diary: Final Week (+ Behind the Scenes)

Just a little bit more... The first week of the build was spent getting the basic structure up, while the second week was spent on wrapping all the steel with walls and a roof. We had hoped to be finished with everything in the second week, but that was not meant to be. Some of the volunteers were more than happy to return again for another weekend. However, while there was work that needed to be done, there wasn’t enough of it to warrant another weekend of building. I also d

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

5 min

House Building Diary: Week Two

Continuation of the house-building adventures. The first week of building was exhausting, and I was starting to think that I had gotten into something that was completely over my head (and honestly, I wasn't even doing the hard parts!). A typical day for me is usually spent glued to my laptop - both for work and pleasure. I’d be in a nice, cool room, with a very high probability of being sprawled in bed, and I’d get things done without really having to move much. Building a h

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

5 min

House Building Diary: Week One

The plan was to build a house in 3 weeks time. Naturally, nothing went according to plan. This house build has been a long time coming. I had first met with Epic Home to discuss the possibility of doing this little project in early 2016, and more than a year later, I still didn’t have anything to show for it. Much of the delay was caused by the pesky fact that I actually needed a land to put the house on (who would’ve thought?). That took me close to half-a-year to accomplish

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

5 min

Building a Sustainable Home

Efforts to build a home that meets all of one's requirements and yet produces minimum negative effects to the world around it. Being a longtime environmental geek, it was a no-brainer that I would want to make my first official home as environmentally-friendly and as self-sustaining as possible. After all, it would be dishonest to live in a space that violates the values that I hold dear, especially when the construction of it is fully (or at least mostly) under my control. I

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

5 min

Designing A Home For Yourself

When you're not an architect or a construction worker but you still insist on designing and building your own home. There’s nothing quite as luxurious as having something tailored just for you, be it a custom business suit that fits like a dream, a custom holiday with all your favourite activities, or... a custom house built with your lifestyle in mind! The beauty of building your own home is getting to have complete control over what it will be like. Rather than purchasing a

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

5 min

Get Inspired to Build Your Own House

When others do such a great job that you want to do it too. I am certainly not the first to attempt building a house, or the first to try squeezing my life into a small space. Plenty of others have successfully done either or both of the above, and it is from them that I drew inspiration and nerve from. The first thing that got me seriously considering embarking on this project was a news article I came upon in my newsfeed, about a woman who singlehandedly (with a bit of help

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

7 min

A Tiny Home for a Tiny Person

Building a home by yourself offers a gazillion possibilities - a terrace house? A mansion? A freaking palace?? Or the exact opposite: a Tiny Home. Once I abandoned the idea of buying a cookie-cutter house built by a big developer and became enamoured instead with the notion of designing and building my own home, I was able to give myself free reign to think up a structure specifically suited to me and all my quirkiness. Just like land-buying, I had a list of criteria: self-su

A Place to Park a House: Adventures in Buying Land (+ Free Guide)

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

6 min

A Place to Park a House: Adventures in Buying Land (+ Free Guide)

Lessons learned from 6 months of seeking and chasing after the land of my dreams. Almost as difficult as finding true love. Once I got the ‘grand’ idea of building my own home, I needed to figure out a place to put it. I toyed with a couple of options: Option 1: Buy land - but super expensive and difficult to find Option 2: Lease land - less expensive in the short term, less permanent and pretty feasible, though not easy to find either; Option 3: Takeover a relative’s backya

Atiqah Nadiah Zailani

4 min

The Trials of Getting Yourself a Home

Opting out of the debt-ridden house-buying tradition, and building one from scratch instead. The thing about getting older is that you start getting all adult-ish and buying adult things that cost a ton of money. The older we get, the bigger the money pool that we play around with. In my teens, I was spending only up to two digits (mostly on school lunches and comic books); in college, I upped it to three digits (on books and gadgets); and in my early working days, it went up

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