ricepapergirl

OMG @gumbokins That wall (I'll be honest though, I really can't tell whether they are upside-down or right-way up, but if it bugs you, then get him to change it!) ! And so glad to see some updates! Same Andrew? Hahaha. Kitchen pipes? My suggestion is to paint it white. Or black. I had this grand idea (which I might have done if I'm not bloody pregnant) of, after the pipes get painted, do a little bit of painting of lines on the pipe (I was aiming for my toilet pipes so I was going to paint hexagonal lines to match my hexagonal tiles) so that the pipe looks like it blends in a leeeeetle bit. Maybe can do subway tile lines for yours hahaha.

I'm assuming for mural painters you are getting them to paint star wars? I have seen a contact but I think he's more naturalistic. Yip Yew Chong (try fb.com/yip.yewchong) but apparently he charges about $2k to $3k for a 3m x 2m wall. Alternatively if you were interested enough and it's star wars you can try this method: http://en.rocketnews24.com/2014/04/03/guy-lifehacks-his-way-to-flawless-seven-samurai-wall-art/

This sounds amazing. I think I shall get my hands on it as well now hahah though my sink is only Ikea sink. Loving these cleaning tips!

Loving the fridge! It's a bigger-sized model than the one we have but I really love it!

I suspect the one you are looking at is a normal instant heater, which means it will only feed hot water directly to the showerhead (not even the mixer). You might not be able to push the hot water to both the showerhead and your tap. Think there are certain types of instant heaters that can direct to multiple points, I only know Bennington does it. On their website they say some of their heaters are "multipoint", maybe that's the difference. http://www.bennington.com.sg/index_files/Page1219.htm You better check properly because I bought 707 instant heaters and argued with the plumber for a long time before being told that the instant heater itself cannot take the pressure that connecting it directly to water pipes will require, that's why it needs to feed directly into the showerhead instead of back into the water mixer.

Lol that's basically my kitchen with a different countertop and backsplash... @stray Oh no! Hope you still get to solve your kitchen woes. I would say that if you're still intent on shaker doors you really can't beat the quality from IKEA for the doors, but if you're happy with normal laminate it might make sense to just get it all from the same contractor to save you coordination pain.

Hi! I actually think most contractors and IDs will do that "bring your floorplan to my office/to some meetup place and I quote for you". On the spot is nice though, some of them usually take it back after discussing with you for some time and then maybe give you the quotation after a week or something. Loving the ideas already given (@Catt I really love that floorplan on wall idea!!!), in terms of space planning, have you considered trying to do a quick 3D plan for yourself? There's the slightly more involved Google Sketchup (free), otherwise there are also loads of free interior design websites running on flash etc that you can input the size of your rooms, and then put in furniture and see it in 3D and figure out for yourself whether the space is enough. Google Sketchup allows you to input exactly how big your furniture/pieces would be so you can see real size, but if you don't have a good idea yet there are apps which can just put in generic furniture and you can kind of tell how much space is needed or whether it's far too ambitious to be putting all that furniture in that layout in that room etc. I personally prefer to have all of that visualized and can see it for myself before I talk to a contractor/ID, though the IDs would probably try and do space planning for you. Also depends on the ID, some of them are well-known for space planning rather than design. Another quite useful thing I think you might want to try out is to check out quotations. Some ID websites put out complete itemized quotations (usually for like a promotion or something) but you can see from that kind of quotation what kind of work is involved. And maybe what kind of decisions you would have to make which you never realized. Like, how much of existing wall/floor/ceiling are you going to hack? Do you need skirting (and what kind of skirting)? What kind of floor (tile? concrete? vinyl? wood?) Sometimes that helps in visualizing the full extent of works you would need to do.

Gosh I know this is a very late comment but am very flattered you've listed my t-blog as inspiration as well. Hope everything goes well! Too bad about the false ceiling, but at least everything will be nicely hidden? I didn't consider any false ceilings in my house but maybe your pipes are really distracting...

Didn't have time to comment yesterday but I really really love the sofa and the TV console!!!! Is that real leather? It looks really comfy!

Oh I remember reading your post on this long time ago! Yes I should go look for something similar then! The gel is for the ants to eat?

PHWOAR your MBR is GORGEOUS!!

Hi @bykaraanne! OMG thank you. Will pick one up today and see whether it helps! I tried rubbing lavender oil over my kitchen walls and it worked for a day or two (and smells yummy) but it's not a long-term solution...

Hi @kstoh! Yeah we know about the dangers, so we purposely put all the heavier books at the bottom, and intend to keep the entire study room off-limits to our kids till they get older (probably with a stairgate!!). Eventually we will probably split up the bookcases to different rooms (the study is eventually meant to convert to a bedroom for the kids, together with the nursery) so we don't intend to drill it to the wall yet.

First floor housetour - 3 months later The thing I've learnt - you're never really really done doing up your home. Since my last housetour set of photos we've finally gotten the utility room windows changed, the utility room/storeroom racks up, the last two dining chairs and a display shelf in the living room for my husband's lego collection. There's also some changes with the second floor (shifted furniture around to accommodate the crib and single bed etc) but I will post those up once the curtains are installed in the nursery. Firstly, our front door/porch/recess area: Cough. We didn't buy the recess area but our ID tiled it over without us asking so haha *side-eyes* Anyway, I guess we will eventually buy it over and having it already tiled over makes that easier. The gate and main door are from the previous owner, with the door being repainted and new manual doorlocks installed for both the gate the door. Utility room window just has the window panes replaced with new frosted glass. Manual door-bell is my mini-obsession and affixed with 3M command strip lol. It makes a tinny high-pitched tinkling sound. I'm still looking for something much bigger and louder. Sometimes we hear it and sometimes we don't. Oh well. Most often than not we're not around in the house anyway. The "entryway" with a view of the main door (closed) and the open doorway leads to the utility room. It actually has a frosted glass sliding door but it's almost always open. Wall light on the left - very bright. Teal stool for husband to use when wearing his socks and shoes in the morning. The shoerack gets hidden by the main door when the latter is open all the way. Closer view of the shoe rack and our yet-to-be-used umbrella rack. My husband and I have almost an equal amount of shoes. I don't have a lot of shoes for a girl. Open shoerack keeps all our shoes well ventilated. Eventually we might end up replacing this with some closed door shoe rack when we have more and more shoes but for now, this works quite well. View of the utility room with our black Sim Win Liang boltless racks. We got them to customize it so that we could fit our big rolling luggage (if you squint you can see the pink and blue behind the stroller) underneath the lowest shelf on one of the shelves. The hanging cloth organizer is handmade by me to hold husband's and my socks in each of the pockets and the top long pocket holds the shoe spray. And a little photo frame. Cos we are too lazy to close the utility room door most of the time so this gives a nice feeling to the utility room instead of being rather messy (which it is). Showing off the rest of the utility room. There's enough space for a small single bed and a wardrobe if need be, though with only a small louvered window the airflow is not great. Nevertheless, we purposely made the room slightly bigger so that it can function as a bedroom (for a maid or if our parents want to live with us but can't climb the staircase) in the future. Our dining room, mostly complete. We added two more dining chairs (from Comfort Design) completing our sort-of-mismatched dining chairs concept (we usually end up sitting on the plastic bucket chairs and we sit opposite each other so we got lazy trying to shift the chairs around to make it look more mismatched) but all the chairs are quite comfy to sit on. Castlery sideboard in the background nicely filled with our first aid kit and random things we need around the house, and the Castlery shelf holds our toaster, telephone, ONT and my Click and Grow on the top shelf. Still missing some art on the wall on the right! The framers near our house disappeared! Then we got lazy to go look for new framers... Our living room in the day. With the balcony door closed. It's mostly the same from the last photo but with the new lego display shelf in the corner and some new cushions gifted from friends. My friends had never seen our house before and just appeared for our housewarming with the two long Ikea cushions. They work so perfectly in terms of colour and shape! If you squint you can see our Hitachi air purifier in white in the background. The view of the TV console wall of the living room. The display shelf (from Jottergoods) has glass doors in front and glass back, sides and bottom, and we use it to show off my husband's collection of childhood lego sets (there's some stuff in there that's close to 30 years old) including 2 castles, a petrol station, a fire station, a hospital, a Robin Hood secret hideout and several ships... I started repotting the mimosa I've been growing via my Click and Grow onto these cute Daiso pots which I hang at my balcony grille. They make me happy in the morning when I check on them and water them. Also, a sideways view of what my balcony shows me. Treetops and other HDB flats! Finally, a view of the first floor from the balcony, from the living room (and the lovely black Fanco fan) all the way past my staircase to the dining room. The middle is nice and empty right now, may change soon when the baby comes!!! We actually want to make the under-staircase area a little hideout for the kids next time, stick some low bookshelves and mattresses there etc.

OMG. *drools* no way my bookcase will ever look like that. 1. Cos we have too many books and 2. we desperately need doors to our bookcase cos of the dust. My floor is still uneven. Even though we ripped up the old tiles, filled in with new concrete, and did parquet flooring. Oh well. Hahaa.

@Catt Don't get me started on IKEA hacks... ;_; If only I wasn't so pregnant when we were moving! So many things I would have loved to do but... ;_; Anyway we also had the 2x40cm and 3x40cm slanting slightly differently from each other but was "fixed" with some folded paper at the bottom Old-style fix. We didn't want all 5 40cm connected together in case next time we want to separate the pieces or even move them (would be a pain to move a really long piece)...

Ehh!! When we got our Billy bookcases, they actually helped us drill the bookcases to each other, which helps to prevent the bookcases from slanting away from each other (we insisted we didn't want them drilled to the wall anyway). Would that help? (We ended up drilling 3 of the 40cm cases together, and then another 2 of the 40cm ones together, so we ended up with 2 "bookcases" but the effect was okay).

WOW looks amazing!!! That ambience! Loving the colours and the curtains as well!

Oooh! This sounds good! Do you know whether it would work on tiny tiny ants? We have been having a problem with the really small ones (they found a hole in the grout of my subway tiles for my kitchen backsplash and have been crawling all over my kitchen ;_;) but the usual ant food-bait things are too big for them (like the "food" is like 4 times the size of the ant itself!). If this works I'll be reaaaaally happy. Today I found some crawling around my utensil draining rack and had to wash my utensils all over again. So far the roaches have yet to turn up again so fingers-crossed! We think they might be coming in from the chute and/or the always-open top-hung windows in our upstairs bathrooms so we've closed the upstairs bathroom windows unless necessary (also just in time for the haze + zika scares) and renewed the roach combat we stuck inside the chute door...

Hi @Mannequin! I believe it is made in Japan, though I probably need to go check the documentation to be absolutely certain.

Looking forward to see your big reveal!! So exciting! Good luck for your move as well! Enjoy your new home!

As I recall I didn't really give my contractor anything, besides the house address and when hacking can start. Why don't you ask him?

@stray, @Lazyfatcat007 and @catt , OMG thank you all for the wonderful suggestions! I never considered that there might be more "natural" pest-control methods, am now reading up those for roaches as well as for ants (we have a slight ant problem in the kitchen as well ;_;) ! I've already taken the liberty of placing a bay leaf in each of my drawers (I had a lot of spares) and am looking into tea tree and mint essential oils as well. I love the suggestion of Dettol + water, am so going to fill up a spray bottle with that, hope it works! And omg I really hope it's not an infestation, we did have that one incident with an adult roach in that kitchen drawer which hopefully we stemmed, and some days before that I killed a baby roach. Two days later we saw another adult roach in our bedroom (OMG CRIES) which husband calmly dispatched again with a plastic bag on his hand (he said to his mother after that, that it got easier with practice. ;_; my hero), which we think hopefully got in from the MBR toilet window, which we usually leave open, so now we only open the window when we shower. I really really hope it's not an infestation weep I HATE roaches. With ants apparently if you wipe down countertops and walls with a mix of water and vinegar they will be deterred, so I'm going to try that over the weekend!

Glad the drawer-inceptions were useful for you! I would have loved to peek into other people's drawers when I was designing my kitchen (had to learn the hard way about what depths work for under the hob and sink etc only at the point of working with the Ikea Kitchen Designers)! This is even though I had a lot of planning on what drawer would hold what things (I've followed it largely but some stuff has shifted cos of sizing etc). I really love my containers especially when the drawer is big and also deep and the height is good. The lower-height drawers like the top 2 you get with 4-drawer-inception configurations are very shallow so you wouldn't need much dividers, I actually just cop out and get the ikea drawer liner (transparent silicon-ish layer with bumps which prevent things from sliding around too much) and used it on most of my drawers. I'm a huge follower of sites like iheartorganising but I find it difficult for now to do the amazing things she does with segmenting of drawers etc, kind of waiting till my kitchen "settles" down before I do something more permanent. But yeah, I love my cleaning drawers, my husband is constantly amazed at how much I can fit in there.

Oh! I had the same problem with the adapter for my kitchen tap as well. I bought mine (Hansgrohe) directly from an online shop in Germany, apparently according to the plumber if you buy in Singapore they would usually remind you to buy the adapter as well. Anyway it cost us like $14 for the two adapters (one for hot and one for cold water, we have only instant heaters so both pipes give cold water but anyway) and our plumber ran down during lunchtime and bought it and finished installing that day... Hope it goes smoothly for you.