Renovating a mid-terrace house in Sarawak

A mid-terrace shares a party wall on both sides, so the house grows by getting deeper, not wider. Every room lines up along one spine from the front door to the back, and that walking spine is the one thing you can't afford to block. Fill the width with loose furniture and the whole house starts to feel like a corridor.

Give the depth a job. Run tall, slimline storage — wardrobe, TV-living and display cabinetry — flat against the blind party walls where there's no window to lose, and keep the central spine clear for walking and sightlines. Full-height built-ins along the sides read as architecture, not clutter, and buy back the floor that stand-alone furniture would eat.

Only the front and back walls meet the outside, so daylight enters at the two ends and fades before it reaches the centre. The middle — often the stair, dining or a central bedroom — sits in permanent gloom, and a solid partition there makes it worse by trapping what little light does arrive.

Stop blocking the light you already have. Where privacy allows, swap solid partitions in the core for glazed or part-glazed screens and glass doors, so light from the bright front and back can travel deeper into the plan. Framed glass partitions and glazed internal doors keep rooms separate for sound and air-conditioning while letting the two lit ends lend light to the dark middle.

The centre of the house gets the least daylight, so a moody charcoal or dark-timber scheme that looks rich under showroom spotlights reads as cave-like here. Finish and colour are one of the few levers that cost nothing extra to get right — and carry a real penalty if you get them wrong across big cabinetry runs.

This one is your call, and the honest advice is to lighten the core. Keep the darkest, richest finishes for the bright front and back rooms, and steer the middle toward pale, warm, gently reflective surfaces that bounce artificial light rather than swallow it. Save strong colour for accents you can change later — not the large runs you'll live with for years.

Because daylight never really reaches the core, the middle of the house leans on artificial light from morning to night. A single ceiling fixture per room leaves shadowed corners and a flat, tiring glare — and it's the wiring and ceiling routes, not the fittings, that are painful to change once everything is closed up.

Treat this as a design task to settle before the ceilings go on. Plan light in layers — ambient for the room, task light over the kitchen and desks, accent light to lift the dark corners — with the circuits, dimming and ceiling recesses set out early. ALUMAX builds the cabinetry and bulkheads that conceal the runs; the lighting layout, wiring and dimming are coordinated across the electrical trade.

In the Sarawak terrace the heavy, wet cooking is pushed to the rear, often a semi-open wet kitchen against the back wall, with a drier light kitchen further in. That back zone lives with steam, splashes and daily washdowns — the conditions that swell ordinary board and blow it apart from the edges.

Specify by how wet the zone actually gets, not by the room's name. In the rear wet kitchen use water-resisting carcasses — ACP AquaGlass fronts, honeycomb or full-aluminium — and keep conventional board for the dry front kitchen and living areas. Moisture-resistant is not waterproof, so still seal edges and cut-outs and use stainless fixings. And directly behind the hob's flame zone use a non-combustible surface — solid metal, glass, tile or stone — because standard ACP is combustible and belongs on the splash walls, not over the flame.

With walls on two sides, the house can only breathe through the front and back. If those openings don't line up, hot air just sits in the middle and the plan holds the day's heat into the night. And the moment you open up for a breeze, you invite mosquitoes and the afternoon rain.

Build a deliberate cross-path. Use operable aluminium windows and doors at both the front and back so air can draw through the length of the house, and fit insect screens on those openings so the path can stay open in the evening without letting insects in. It won't replace air-conditioning on the hottest afternoons, but it reduces the trapped, stuffy load the rest of the day.

Cooking smoke and heat need to reach an external wall, but in a deep terrace the kitchen can sit a long way from the nearest outside face. A hood that can't discharge properly just pushes grease and steam around the room — and re-routing ductwork after the ceiling is up is expensive and ugly.

Settle the exhaust route before anything closes up. Work out the shortest honest run to an external wall or approved discharge point, and coordinate the ducting, hood and any make-up air across the trades early. ALUMAX builds the cabinetry and bulkheads to conceal the run cleanly; the routing itself is coordinated across the ventilation and building works.

Few Sarawak families do the whole terrace in one go. It happens over years — the wet kitchen first, a bedroom when a child arrives, the living room when the budget recovers. Done without a plan, each phase quietly contradicts the last: mismatched finishes, a socket in the wrong place, a wall you now wish you'd left as glass.

This is yours to sequence, and the move is to decide the whole before you build the parts. Agree the layout, the finish family and the services runs for the entire house up front, then execute in phases against that one plan. Get the messy, service-heavy zones right early — wet kitchen, wiring, exhaust — because they're the ones that hurt to open up again. ELS by ALUMAX can hold the master plan so each year's work lands on the same drawing.