Ergo: Altar Ego!

Ok, so here's the actual implementation of the altar table. At last! After anguishing over the lack of a sizable wall space facing the windows (which was what my parents insisted is the only direction suitable for the ancestral altar) the only available space is just about 60cm wide on the floor plan when we conceived the design. That's a big reduction from the old 2 metre plus altar table we currently have. I remembered my unpleasant surprise on the day of our collection of keys, that I discovered that the wall actually only measured 54cm... The wall was already small to begin with and I needed every inch of space available. This altar table has an ego, and if I messed it up, I'd be living with my mum nagging at me every time she has to make offerings.

So, in the end, as you can see in the picture (or you may not see coz the wall is now hidden), I tried to maximize the altar table space by building the right panel of the altar "cabinet" wider than the wall itself. This meant that the right panel would be protruding further than the edge of the wall. And by doing so, we then needed to extend the right panel all the way to the back to become a "feature wall" that joined with the shoe cabinet. So believe it or not, in the end, the altar top has 27 inches of space (68.6cm) even though the wall behind the altar table is only 54cm wide!

Actually, there is another secret - the shoe cabinet is deeper than it actually looks by about 1.5 inches. When they constructed the shoe cabinet, they didn't built it over the feature wall (luckily!) but they took the trouble to leave a hole to mount the shoe cabinet into the feature wall so that the shoe cabinet is not too wide, but at the same time, provides a load bearing structural support for the "floating" shoe cabinet as well.

So, anyway I think in the end, what matters most is that my mum is happy with what the contractor delivered. A suitable design, a suitable colour, and actually all measurements were made according to "auspicious" dimensions. I'd write about the "auspicious" dimensions another time...