Let there be light

Last week, the carpentry people brought in the parts of the kitchen cabinet, and promptly proceeded to set it all up. In one afternoon, what was just four bare walls became recognisable as a kitchen, although still incomplete.

The parts of the kitchen cabinet, like a gigantic puzzle, awaiting asembly.

Within a few short hours, the cabinets have all been installed. The carpentry people then gave the surfaces a good wipedown.

 

And with the  lighting in place, the kitchen is starting to look warm and cosy. Now we have to wait for the delivery of the kitchen hob, hood and oven. We have left a void for the placing of the dishwasher machine, which we will acquire later when enrolment picks up.

The electricians have been busy installing the light fittings on the 1st storey, and we've finally reached a stage on Friday evening when we can admire the results of their work.

Here's the main entrance into the school, lit by a series of downlights. With the furniture in place, we hope it will become a welcoming space for children and parents every morning.

With the internal works nearing completion, we will begin the process of obtaining the statutory clearances. The first clearance that we need to obtain is the Fire Safety Certificate. The installations pertaining to fire safety are almost completed, but we're awaiting the arrival of the fire ecape staircase structure, which was held up in the galvanising workshop. It is slated to arrive on Monday this week, upon which the metalwork people will proceed with the installation.

The exit lights are part of the fire safety features within the facility.

The fire hosereel on the 2nd storey. In addition, there are also a number of fire extinguishers placed at various locations around the premises.

Tear down the gates!

It's a bit of a surprise to arrive and find the old gates already taken down. But that's a good thing because it means that the new gate is ready to go up. The team doing this metal work are the same people who will be setting up the fire escape stairs as well.

Honey, you look different today. Yeah, I feel so bare without my gates.

When we asked for a lightweight steel gate, we were not really expecting something of this heft.

It took the guys a fair bit of effort to lift the gate upright, and then slowly, through a combination of the principles of simple machines (levers, wheels) plus a huge dose of sheer brute force, to inch the structure towards the hinge.

Once the gate is in place, a final check is made on the alignment.

The gate is welded on the hinge, which had itself earlier been welded to the concrete column.

A few days earlier, the same guys were here to weld chequered plates onto the existing drain gratings. The chequered plates will later be coated with a layer of non-slip paint. This will provide a safer surface should children choose to walk over the drain gratings on their way in and out.

With the ceiling boards in place, the electricians can proceed to install the lighting fixtures in the classrooms. Besides them, we also have the plumbers and the painters doing their work in here.

The classroom lights are designed to fit nicely with the grid ceiling system. First the housing is aligned with the grid and fastened.

And this is what the finished light looks like, with the refectors and fluorescent tubes installed.

The painters completed the first coat of paint on the 2nd storey, and then moved down to work on the 1st storey.

The painter's creed must be to paint around any obstacle, hence our guy diligently goes around the tiles that are stacked against that part of the wall. Let's hope he comes back to that part again after the tiles have been removed.

In the adult toilet, the toilet bowl has finally been installed.

The children's toilet bowl looks a little overwhelmed by the space of the toilet, and this is one of the smaller toilets. It probably needs the wash basin and mirror to occupy some of the space.

Unfortunately the hardware people delivered the wrong wash basins, but happily the mistake was discovered before any of this was installed in the children's toilet. Surely no one can possibly mistake this gigantic specimen for a child-sized sanitary fitting. So it's back into the packaging box for these items, and we'll hopefully get the correct delivery tomorrow.

Safety and Security

The IT Show that was held over the past few days gave us an opportunity to shop around for various electronic products. Security is one important aspect that we considered. In order to ensure that only authorised people are able to gain access to our indoor areas, we felt that it was necessary to have a system for access control.

There is a variety of access control systems, ranging from the basic card system to the more sophisticated facial recognition systems. We had to make sure that the system is suited for installing outdoors, even though there is some shelter extending out over the main entrance doorway.

We decided that a fingerprint recognition system will be more convenient than the card system, since no one ever forgets to bring their finger along with them. This unit allows up to 5000 individual fingerprints to be stored - more than enough for every child and their parents, grandparents, uncles and aunties...

Meanwhile, in a metal factory somewhere, the people who are building the staircase for us sent us a few photos to let us know that their work is coming along. Once the parts are ready, they will be transported over to the site for assembly, sometime this week.

Not all the components are instantly recognisable. There is no mistaking the stairs though.

And these are the side railings.

More cleaning solutions

Our search for technological solutions is bringing us to remote regions. Yesterday we visited the far-flung showroom of Klenco, which is quite an established name in the cleaning industry.

Klenco has a nice building located in Tuas, which is somewhere right at the edge of the Universe.

Entering their showroom, we are greeted by a mind-boggling array of really interesting cleaning machines. It's possible though that people who do the actual cleaning work might not quite share the same enthusiastic sentiments. Great! Just the machine I need to clean more floors (cue rolling eyes).

This little fellow is what we're here to see - the Lava 351B floor scrubber and dryer. No more lugging around a broom, dustpan, mop and a pail of water from room to room. The Lava is a self-contained machine that replaces the manual processes involved in the daily cleaning of the classroom floors.

We are looking at the baby bear of the Lava family, but even this tiniest unit weighs in at a hefty 40 kilos when fully equipped. So, while there are no doubts regarding the effectiveness of this machine, unfortunately the classrooms on the ground floor are 2 steps up from the Hall area, so we'll have to get around this obstacle if we were to acquire this piece of equipment.

But Klenco wouldn't be the professional cleaning company that they are, if they didn't have other solutions. Their helpful Senior Sales guy proceeded to recommend the alternative Duplex series of floorwashers cum carpet cleaners, which at 28 kilos supposedly provides greater maneouvreability. Can't see Aunty jumping for joy.

Here's how the underside of the machine looks like. The machines generally work on the same principles. In a nutshell - water or detergent is squirted from the clean water tank onto the floor. The brushes on both sides scrub the floor, push the wet dust and dirt inwards, to be carried up by the rollers and deposited in another recovery tank, which can be emptied afterwards. Fascinating?

Besides machines, the Klenco showroom contains many other interesting innovations, such as a steam cleaner (hot!) and a flat floor mop that holds disinfectant/detergent along the entire length of its handle (quirky!). Also, a range of floor mats with different functions and different colours to suit any occasion.

A great introduction to the world of professional cleaning technologies. Many thanks to Ranald of Klenco for patiently explaining and demonstrating the various products. We leave today with just the liquid soap dispensers for our two adult toilets, but we'll likely be back for one of those cool machines.

Strong foundations

Over the weekend, the concrete truck was called in to cast the base for the fire escape staircase. At the same time, the steel components of the staircase structure are being fabricated offsite at the workshop. Once they are ready, they will be transported here and assembled.

Previously, the demolition team had removed two sections of the external corridor where the foundation of the staircase will sit. Since then, that depression in the ground had been crying out to be filled.

The same section today, with the concrete hardened sufficiently. No chance of those irritating stray footprints here.

Since last week, the ceiling board people have also been installing the metal frames for the false ceiling progressively throughout various locations around the building, and all the toilets.

Once the frame is in place, they can then affix the ceiling boards over the grid.

And plaster over the boards to arrive at a smooth finish.

In the morning today, a set of windows and grilles appear mysteriously at the worksite.

Window people apparently only start work in the evening at 5pm. They appear suddenly from a truck and within moments, started fixing the frames onto the openings. This is the kitchen window from which Aunty will gaze out of dreamily while washing her utensils.

Applying sealant around the edges - N1 classroom window. And then just after 6pm the workers were quickly ushered off the premises by their foreman. It's great that they abide strictly by the authorities' timings for construction work. Guess they'll be back tomorrow for another hour of work then.

Productivity, technology, innovation

MasterCard says that there are some things money can't buy. A loving hug, warm interactions, and playful banter between teacher and child. These are some of the things in preschool settings that investment in technology can neither replicate nor augment.

Fortunately, there are many other things that money can buy. So, heeding the government's call to improve productivity, we look into areas where we can employ technology to carry out the mundane tasks that are part of our preschool's operations. It certainly helps when the government is offering to foot a good chunk of the bill.

Our first stop is the showroom of Canon Singapore, located at Harbourfront. We enjoyed a largely problem-free working relationship with Canon throughout the Mothergoose years, so we're pretty happy to place our trust in them once again.

But copiers are no longer mere printing machines. They can be a key component in office productivity solutions. Amongst the machines available here, we hope to find one at a reasonable price point that will allow us to centralise our administrative documents, forms, worksheets and checklists in a single location, accessible by all our teachers, easily managed and updated wirelessly, and printable with a single click (maybe a few clicks).

At the showroom, we are greeted by a range of copiers and printers. Canon now makes CCTV systems too. Sneaky!

The account manager Emily brings us through some of the useful features of the proposed model. Besides the standard print and scan functions, the machine comes with a pretty competent OCR software that shares its origins with Apple's Siri app (is that good or bad?), but what we were really hoping for was to be able to easily print materials from various electronic formats (jpeg, word, pdf) into booklet form. People who have done booklet printing will understand how it always takes a few tries to get the page order right. Unfortunately, it looks like that function is still not perfected, but it is not a deal breaker since the end result can still be achieved, albeit through a workaround method.

imageRUNNER Advance C5235 - your fate has been sealed. You're coming back with us to Tanjong Katong. We're not bringing that bulky auto sorting and stapling module though.

Continuing with the productivity theme, we made another stop at KitchenHub, a distributor of commercial kitchen equipment, to check out their dishwashers. Aunty Chai Hong will probably scoff at the idea of getting a dishwashing machine,"Aiyo, just wash by hand lor."

She might grow to appreciate it later when the children numbers grow.

This model might just be a little too much for our small kitchen, but the clever people at KitchenHub had this demo unit modified by installing glass panels in place of the original stainless steel hood so as to show prospective customers what actually goes on during the wash cycle.

We brought along the familiar melamine crockery used in Mothergoose for the demo. The items are arranged on a tray, which is then placed inside the washer.

The hood is closed, and the one-minute wash and rinse cycle begins. In truth, all we see from the outside is a blur of jet spray, supposedly from both top and bottom (who can tell anyway). It's a bit like sitting through those auto car washes.

Hey presto! Oh well, they were pretty clean to begin with. Should have eaten some bak chang (glutinous rice dumplings) in the bowls before bringing them over. That would have provided a sterner test of the machine's cleaning capability.

So it's all well and good then. Each cycle uses about 5 litres of water (is that good or bad?) and the water is heated up to more than 90 degrees celsius during the final rinse, so there's the disinfecting effect too.

On the other hand, each tray can hold only 15 bowls at one time so multiple wash cycles will be required after each meal. Furthermore, the bowls and dishes must first be hosed down separately to remove food waste, before they can be sent to the dishwasher. That sort of diminishes the productivity gains.

We'll have to sleep on this a bit. Don't worry taxpayers, we'll spend your money prudently.

There is one other thing that we desperately need innovation to overcome.

Please invent a tree that doesn't shed leaves.

Selecting sanitary wares

With the tiling of the toilets completed, work has now commenced on running the piping. At the same time, we head to a showroom nearby to select the sanitary fittings. This isn't one of those showrooms with the widest range of products, but even so it took us three hours to make the selection.

The most important component is the child-size flush toilets. Unsurprisngly, not many distributors carry these miniature products. The height of the toilet bowl, excluding the plastic seat, cannot exceed 350mm from ground level.

The selection of small basins here is not really intended for preschool use, but more for space-challenged toilets, hence their designer styles. We selected this longish one which is also narrower so that our toddlers do not need to stretch to reach the tap. There is also space for them to place their mugs while brushing their teeth after lunch.

Designer taps to go with the children's designer wash basins.

We're not going to splurge on the adult toilets, but this reasonably-priced item should sit well with the teachers and parents.

The adult toilets are quite narrow too, so this basin should fit nicely...

...together with this decent-looking tap.

Instant water heaters are more energy-efficient than storage water heaters. Haven't tried Ariston, but Joven delivers a fairly satisfying experience.