ymjp100

My wife and I live in an EM. Sleeping on the second floor, we can hear the sound of chairs beings dragged across the floor coming from the ceiling. Especially at night. We don't hear that when we are at the first floor. My views: It has long been discussed that the sounds are probably from the expansion and contraction of pipings/structures. I think this could indeed be the case. There aren't any pipings running between first and second floors of an EM. Maybe I am wrong. Do any other renotalkers living in EMs share similar experiences?

One more look at the cement screed wall, slab of butter and grass patch. Let me describe a bit more..... On the left is the balcony. One the top right, you should be able to make out a wooden pelmet for the partition doors. It is the strip of wood between the plastered surfaces. These doors are to enclose the living room when the air-conditioner is switched on. Also to keep the sound in when we watch movies. The white boxes on the ceiling are speakers. Finally, the two wooden stools that look like bastardised and stunted Panton S chairs. But really, they are just stools each carved from a single block of suar wood. Suar wood is a durable hardwood with fine bands of grains in a rich shade of dark brown. The salesperson who sold the pair to us likened the suar to mahogany. We are not sure if the stools come from a environmentally friendly producer. If I remember correctly, Suar is really just wood from the common raintree you see around Singapore. The two stools have been since been shifted to the foyer. We sit on them each workday morning when we are putting on our shoes. I know someone was asking about the coffee table we have decided on. I have yet to take pictures of it. Soon, perhaps.

Thanks for the compliment! We think our home looks nicer on pictures. Not because the pictures have been photoshopped to death, but somehow, things just appear nicer through camera lens. First, the good news: The finishing on the wall comes at no extra cost! Next, the bad news: The finishing on the living room wall is cement screed. I would think they were done by a designer but we didn't ask his name. Have to check with Steven, our ID. We had very exacting requirements when we asked for that stretch of wall to have a cement screed finishing. We are 90% happy with it because it is about 1-2 shades darker than what we had wanted. It is extremely difficult to gauge when it is first plastered. But if you ID/Contractor is experienced (like ours), please trust him/her. We did not. And now we are paying the price. The first time we saw the finished wall, we told him too light-coloured. He couldn't convinced us that it would get darker. His team finally got it right after re-doing it three times. The weird thing about cement screed finishing is that it dries at a rate that is in accordance with its temperament. Vertical surfaces (i.e. walls) dries alot (alot!) slower than horizontal surfaces (i.e. floor). And it is a rather organic finishing because the colour changes as time past. In all, we had three main areas that had cement screed finishing: balcony floor, living room wall (from balcony all the wall to the triangle section under the stairs) and the steps of the stairs. For safety, we had stainless steel strips embedded into the steps. Ironic. Since we have no railings for the first flight of steps. So our place is a little industrial, a little scandinavian and a little modern. By modern I mean mid-Century modern - design movement. It was a challenge holding everything together. We hope to have done an acceptable job.

You are right. They are not wallpaper. They are tiles. We have seen enough toilets with the same features - handspray next to mono-block toilet bowl with soft-closing hinges and behind it, a 4-5 mosaic tile wide strip running the way up. glass shower doors and basins on vanity counters. Would love to have the above if we had the money. So we opted to jazz things up by carefully choosing the tiles for your toilets. We stuck to a black-white combination and the results are as above.

That is a fine answer.

We never thought it looked like kaya....haha! My family has a schnauzer-mix which tried, twice, to pee on the carpet. Probably she thought it was a grass patch. Not the colour but the texture since dogs are colour blind. The repros of the artichoke, random light and arco lamp are all using incandescent. it is very unfriendly to the environment because it is rather inefficient but it is mercury free! Moreover, many of these designer lamps were designed to be used with incandescent. We sourced for a special chrome-based bulb from Osram for the arco lamp repro. It is the Decor range from Osram. We were lucky to have found it. This is important because the design philosophy of the lamp will be lost once you use an ordinary bulb. Ok, an alternate view of the kaya+butter on toast, towards the balcony:

Masterbed Room Toilet: Before. Please ignore the laundry....I uploaded this picture merely to provide a contrast after we had Steven to box up the pipes. After. Yes! A bath! Haha.....well, the previous owner had one...so we were tempted. And we rationalised the requirement for it. No regrets so far.

Level 2 Common Toilet: Before. After. The previous owner had changed the configuration on level 2. The bedroom nearer to the common toilet was made ensuite. In effect, two bedrooms (including the masterbed room) were ensuite. We decided to remain flexible by returning to the original HDB configuration which meant that only the masterbed room was ensuite. If you refer to our floorplan you should be able to understand what I am saying. This set of pictures does not show much. I apologise. Please use your imagination. Anyway, this toilet has a leak on the ceiling at the moment. It has been there since we moved in 5 months ago. The HDB Technical Officers and their contractors have visited my place and my upstairs neighour thrice. We hope the leak will be rectified soon.

Ok, more pics. This time the toilets. We aren't obsessed with the look of our toilets. We were happy as long as the toilets were functional. Level 1 Toilet: Before. After. If you are wondering if the space between the washing machine and toilet seat is sufficient, well, users with BMI >30 may have to take caution. I suspect this model of toilet seat with soft-closing hinges had a design flaw. When installed, the seat is too upright, causing the seat to fall automatically. Not friendly to users using it while standing up i.e. men.

thanks! so still no loft(y) ideas for your own home? instead of building a loft, could you just have a carpenter fabricate a loft bed and maximise use of the vertical space?

i managed to flip through a couple of pages at the local library. Reference section. I came home to google and found reviews and study guides on the book. i can't claim to have finished it. it was something that i had come across while looking for inspiration. the living room is incomplete....since that picture was taken, I had replaced the practical ikea coffee table with an el cheapo repro. haha! more on that later. i am also waiting for my prints to be framed up. it's a set of six retro railway prints by Tom Purvis which I bought from a railway memorabilia shop somewhere in Lake District. they will go up on that cement screed wall. after seeing image after image of black/brown/cream/white sofas in ID magazines, my wife and i decided to be bold and get a slab of butter as our sofa instead. and it seats atop a patch of bermuda grass. excellent for putting. if only we golf. that thing on the coffee table is a utensil holder. we used it for remote controls instead. you are right, it does look like a knife block. why no PLC downlights? my wife just do not like them. and i love my wife.

The source I provided is the only one I came across with the inner cylinder that shields the bulb. Which is a design feature found in the original. Local repros all do not come with this cylinder. And a copper top/white base repro lamp is equally rare. happy light-hunting!

This was how the living room looked like two months ago: We did not want to have any direct lighting in the living room. So it was cove-lights all round. At the same time, we wanted the option of having only the coffee table lit. Next requirement was: no PLC downlights. So the Arco Lamp design was practical in achieving our requirements. This is a repro (of course!). The three repro lamps: Artichoke in dining room, Random Light in stairwell and Arco Lamp in the living room forms a straight line. Not intended. Just happened to be. Whimsical serendipity.

different levels of tolerance for noise I guess....we have friends who live near Paya Lebar, Sembawang and Tengah Airbase, and you are right, they have grown used to the sounds from the aircraft. no choice anyway. Singapore so small. Many residential areas will be near a major road or above ground MRT tracks. if i recall correctly, the lamp was the only item we bought online from an overseas retailer. art prints do not count as furniture right? our dining chairs and sofa were made overseas (China/Malaysia) and shipped to Singapore but the retailer (Lush) operates locally. carpentry might have been made overseas (Malaysia) as well but our ID is local definitely. we know some people ship container-load worth of Indonesian wooden furniture. Another friend went to Denmark for his honeymoon and shipped back a huge carton worth of secondhand authentic Danish classics. Supposedly, this method of shipping is less expensive than buying through a local shop. ooooo.....pressure to live up to your expectations hahaha...... on buying replicas, we respect intellectual property. so we made sure that the design patents for the repro have expired. usually a patent lasts no more than 20 years from the original filing date. and the replicas we bought were in line with the original design considerations. for example the Artichoke - glare free and well distributed light, we found it very suitable for the dining room. moreover, it was originally designed for a restaurant in Copenhagen. we also bought an Arco lamp repro for the living room so that a specific area can be lit without affecting the cove lights and unsightly cables. I shall explain this with pictures in the near future. In any case, we were inspired by this quote and not too concerned about getting it right in our first attempt. Hence; a lifelong project: Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space I am sure you will be happy with the result. Patience pays dividends.

The window of our bedroom faces the CTE which is about 120 metres away. It does help that there is a primary school in between to act as a sound buffer. But in the dead of the night, the constant drone generated from the tyres of the vehicles moving along the expressway can be unnerving. Being on the 2nd floor (our unit) may not be so bad because sound travels outwards in all directions. So with the school and trees blocking, we should count my lucky stars because it could have been worse. We noticed that the sounds generated from roads tends to be heard at the mid-levels of a high rise flat. My guess is that sounds are attenuated by the trees and structures when you live on the lower levels. And at the higher levels, the attenuation is a result of distance and there is a coefficient factor to this. At the mid-levels, it is actually louder. But this does not apply to the noise generated from the basketball courts, playground etc etc that is directly below the block of flats. Of course I may be wrong. Just my casual observation. My humble advice is not to underestimate this noise. Get thicker curtains if you are a light sleeper. Or ear plugs. Regarding the pendant lamp, it is a reproduction of the Artichoke by Poul Henningsen. I have scoured the various lighting shops around Singapore and none had a good reproduction. You will find many similar ones but they are not glare-free which was a key design consideration. Finally found a satisfactory model online and we had it shipped from China and assembled it ourselves. I shall PM you the online retailer and price. By the way, the lead time was about two months.

You are right about the laminate-panel on the ceiling. My wife and I agreed that the laminated panel on the ceiling has no practical function except to hold the aesthetics of the dining room and rest of the house together. It also forms an invisible partition to indicate that the space under the panel is the dining room. Looking forward to more pictures of your renovation.

Thank you. Enjoyed following your t-blog. Hope you can buy the Ikea bedframe by Jan 11! It is worth waiting for the bed that you really desire. Especially so when it is one which you will spend hours upon hours upon it.

Thank you idealistic! Will post more pics when able. 3D pictures can be quite deceiving 3D pictures are great for visualisation, but still we paid alot of attention to details which cannot be re-produced by the 3D pictures. Happy viewing.

And this was how the stairwell and steps looked after renovation. It looks very unfinished without railings and cement screed steps. Our neighbours, parents, friends and the assortment of visitors we received were constantly asking when will the railings be installed and why isn't there any finishing for the steps. It is a running joke. This is a similar picture as above but with the dining room light switched on. Even the HDB Technical Officers that had visited me 4-5 times to inspect my complain of a leak in the common toilet on level 2 commented that without railings, the steps were dangerous. Not child-friendly. By the way, the picture above shows where the glass panels are fixed. Only on the top and second flight of steps. As you might have noticed, the glass panels are fixed on the sides of the steps instead of the edge. This way, we can retain the side profile of the steps which we really love. If you are sharp, you might also notice that the wall overlooking the stairwell from the masterbed room is glass. Let there be Light! Well, at least for the stairwell which can be quite dark even in the day. A glass wall will solve that problem. But create another. More of that later.....

For leechaorui who asked, this was what the original stairwell and steps looked before the renovation. It was well-maintained and tiled. This set of photos show the state it was in before our 2nd appointment. The previous owner was very accommodating. We could freely bring Steven, our ID from Ideal House, to the apartment for site visits. We could take measurements, photos and roam around the entire place.

We had viewed three unit in that estate and I recall the first was a unit on the ground floor. The valuation then was $503K and the owner was asking for $80K cov. Like yours, it was a tenanted unit and conditions were bad. However the good thing about buying a re-sale in poor condition is that you will not hesitate to do a major overhaul on the unit. Top floor is great! Especially if it is situated further from the PIE and the Bukit Timah drainage system. The neighbourhood is very quiet and amenities are relatively nearby. Enjoy the renovation process and hope to see your t-blog soon!

I see that your EM is at Jalan Rajah! We were looking at the area too. Was the previous owner a Malay family? Or was it the unit on the top floor? I shall post more pics this evening.

Thanks leechaorui. The railings have been removed. It was a pity because they were in a fantastic condition. Probably only needed re-varnishing. We had wanted to retain them but felt that they do not fall in with the rest of the design. In the end, we had glass panels to replace the railings. Like those found at shopping malls. We asked for the glass panels to be fixed only at the top and second flight of steps. The first flight is without panels. However, we had our ID cater for "future growth" by having the option of fixing two more panels on the first flight of steps. I re-read the reply above and it confuses me. I shall take some pictures and post them.

One last set of 3D drawings. Living Room: Living Room (alternate view): I will post what our home looks like about two months ago next.

Well in the end, round about sometime in middle of March 2010, we started the renovation. The final 3D drawings are posted below. Foyer: Dining Room: Dining Room looking into Kitchen: Kitchen: Kitchen (alternate view):