ricepapergirl

Whilst everyone else seems to be using Taobao, I'm sitting here trying to figure out the best way to buy the side tables and coffee table I want from Rakuten Japan. Been searching on TB but cannot find the same kind of table and getting a little frustrated, especially since the Rakuten website insists on using EMS to ship instead of seamail (which will take longer but is obviously cheaper). Now checking with a Japanese forwarder to see whether they can help. Husband and I have already put in orders for a bunch of stuff from Rakuten Japan from one of the stores which offer seamail. So the leftover stuff are just my coffee table, side tables, shoe rack and iron door bell. I found something similar off TB for the iron door bell and maybe the shoe rack but the tables are killing me lol weep. Long and narrow medium wood coloured coffee table with foldable legs (so you can keep it away when you don't need it) Cannot find this set of rounded-edged triangular side tables anywhere else but Rakuten Japan (and only a few shops to boot). I don't know why I'm so obsessed with them.

*PATS* Actually it looks okay!! What is opposite the toilet bowl, just the sink? Or showers? Your door doesn't go all the way to the top of the toilet? I must say I like the black painted pipes! I had the same idea as well to paint all my big pipes black. If you can't hide them might as well show them off.

I must say, actually when we picked out the toilet tiles we only picked the white hexagonal tiles and were quite happy to have the whole wall in white hexagons. It was Andrew who suggested having some black and blue hexagons as well and assured us he would design something for us to see. If you see the 3D art I posted some time back, it was really his design to have all these different coloured tiles in the bathroom! All I did was approve it hahaha. So although sometimes Andrew feels like a contractor, especially in how he really knows his stuff operation-wise, we're very glad he's actually also technically an ID and can provide some design ideas, even though for most of the house we've made the design decisions.

Electrical and Lighting Plan, Paint and Doors We went down yesterday at around 6PM and met up with Andrew at our unit. Since none of the lights are up yet we had to visit the unit before the sun set (lol!) so husband and I took time off work to get there early enough. It was also the first time we walked around our unit together with Andrew since work has started, and it was also exciting to see some of the progress for ourselves! Our tillers are really on task! Andrew took the photos in the morning and by night much more had been done! My kitchen floor for example is about 99% finished, complete with tile skirting which looked really good! I forgot to discuss kitchen skirting (because we are only tiling the backsplash and not all of the kitchen walls) and was glad that Andrew made the decision to do skirting without us reminding him! They also started on tiling the balcony floors (looked great!) and part of the entrance and the utility room floors (first time we got to see our light concrete-colour tiles in action, and yay they looked good too!). Whole of the second floor's cement screed was complete as well, and we discussed very briefly the layout for the parquet strips (old-style herringbone style). But the major task of the evening was to confirm lighting, position of switches and power sockets. As is our usual practice, the husband and I spent a few nights discussing this by ourselves and marking it all out in detail on a layout plan, so we handed over the sheets of paper to Andrew and walked through with his help. He gave very good advice on where the switches should be located and which light switch should be co-located with another light switch, but generally he just listened to us when we explained we wanted double power sockets at this beam and another set here and can these be at switch height and this set at around waist-level height. We really like his style because for the two of us, decisions made are usually made with a lot of thinking behind it and it's great not to have to argue with someone about it. He even said nearer to the end of the discussion that he would not generally argue with us (lol!) but actually asked us why we would place power sockets at the beam in the living room but inside the indent of the beam for the bedrooms etc. (Explanation: we might want to place bookcases next time in our living room and would like to flush them against the beam, but for the spare bedrooms we didn't know what kind of layout we wanted yet so best to keep the power sockets in the indent instead.) We then firmed up the lighting and electrical plans through whatsapp after he redrew it his style. Lights, fans and switches plan. Blue are wall lights, red are ceiling lights, green lines point to the switches. Final count for electrical sockets: 25 x double 13A sockets, 5 x single 13A sockets, 3 water heater points, oven point, hood point, 2 LAN points, 1 SCV point. The balcony electrical sockets will have waterproof covers, and the 2 LAN points are drawn from the existing opennet point at our dining room (so we will also use the existing opennet point for a router. 3 routers!) We also picked out our doors for the second floor (the three bedrooms)! The original quote was for veneer doors with lever locks, but when we looked through the catalogue for the veneer doors we didn't really love any of them. In the end we asked Andrew whether we could change to solid wood doors instead and he showed us the catalogue for solid wood doors and we picked these! With traditional door knob. My husband commented that what with the retro-style rounded walls and the herringbone short strip parquet and now these old-fashioned solid wood doors (though in honesty he picked them as well!) our second floor now looks like it came from the 1980s. Maybe I should tag my t-blog with "nostalgic" or "retro" or "1980s style" or something. Well, we are both 1980s kids and grew up in such houses, it's not strange that we should now want to hark back to those times... Lastly, we popped over to a Home DIY store and picked up some paint chips. Andrew also passed us a book of Nippon paints so we picked out our wall colours. Mostly it's light blue, light mint green and light yellow for the three bedrooms upstairs, and then teal-green for the balcony, and one bright yellow feature wall in the living room, light yellow for the utility room. Rest of the house will be white. Hope it turns out well! With that, most of the decision points for the renovation had been made and decided upon. Installation of WCs, showers, taps, sinks etc will start next week, and electrical wiring will start shortly after that. Aircon installation has been arranged for 25 May. Painting should be end of the month. May will be all the glass doors, parquet etc. Sometime in the middle, we will be getting IKEA to come down and measure the kitchen and then we will start coordinating with IKEA for the kitchen carpentry as well as our MBR wardrobes, which are the last two large pieces of work we haven't really started dealing with. Then it's a matter of packing once May starts, hopefully in time to move into the place in end May, and coordinating all the various deliveries that will have to happen. I must say that when we first got the timeline from Andrew we couldn't believe that he could finish everything by the end of May but now it does look like the timeline wasn't too exaggerated! Fingers crossed for the rest of the renovation to be smooth as well!

Thank you for the detailed explanation!! Very useful!

Oh is that a storage heater for both upstairs toilets? Really like the red and blue tiles in the common toilet! Also I spot parquet flooring!

Day 15: More tiling and windows changed! Another batch of photos through whatsapp! Exciting to see things moving! Tiling looks complete for the MBR toilet! Yay! I think Andrew was trying to show off the floor tiles for the MBR with that second picture. I also see the drainage covers in, one at the dropdown shower area and the other in the old area! Looks like only the wall tiles are mostly up for the common toilet on level 2! A slightly different design for the first floor kitchen toilet! Looking good! Wood-like tiles for the kitchen floor being laid! It's been so long since we picked out these tiles I actually couldn't remember what colour they were supposed to be... Also, what used to be tiles at the vertical bits of our staircase (the horizontal bits are parquet and is being covered up) have been plastered over and to be painted! New windows also up in the three bedrooms! They used to be sliding windows but we asked for new casement ones. Also windows have been replaced for the kitchen, two top-hung for the bathrooms upstairs (kitchen toilet has no window, only a ventilation hole lol!) and new frosted glass sliding windows for the dining room which faces the corridor!

If it helps, I was also seriously considering getting 5 LAN points in our place, particularly cos we have 2 floors to think about. But husband was skeptical. My point was that we should have one point in the living room (for TV etc) and one point maybe at the kitchen or the dining room (he gave me this LOOK at the mention of the kitchen and I gave a weak "smart home"?), and then at least one in each of the bedrooms upstairs. His point was that we all are used to wireless connections anyway, you're going to end up connecting a router to the LAN points anyway. I pointed out our kids when we have them and when they grow up might use LAN to their computers. He pointed out that's about 10 years down the road and who knows whether Cat 6 would still be viable then. So our compromise is to have 2 LAN points and the existing TP at the dining room, one at the living room, one at the hallway on the 2nd floor, and stick a router on the 2nd floor hallway for all three bedrooms. I think if you have existing uses for actual LAN points in all of your rooms for now, it's a great idea. For us, it was a matter of scaling back because our needs are in the future and we didn't want to lock ourselves into a possible-outdated-tech-by-then.

PM-ed you! Goodness only one day a week to settle stuff?? That's really tough! My husband and I usually spend Saturday doing all our shopping but we've spent all our Saturdays before that to scout out prices and models and stuff so it was a matter of actually heading down to buy the models we wanted.

Wow this is really cool! I'm slowly reading through the Amazon and Logitech website, but can I just quickly check: how does this work? The hub connects to your devices via IR (does your devices need to be compatible? I can imagine hooking up my PS4 and XBox360 to this, but how about if I also wanted to connect a low-end DVD player and maybe SCV? Or even an Apple mini?) and then the remote works purely on RF to the hub itself? Did you get it locally or shipped it from Amazon?

Always exciting to see a new place being redone! Waiting to see more pictures!

PM-ed you!

[Edit: I answered my own question, dug around and found that hansgrohe does angle valves as well, called up a few hansgrohe distributors and found someone who would sell them to me cash & carry for $20++ each, so problem solved!] Question: my ID has asked us to buy taps that connect to our bidet sprays. His explanation is that typically you wouldn't want to allow the water in the mains to build up pressure within the bidet spray since the spray will spoil easily (it's not meant to take such high pressure) so you would install a mini-valve (like an on-off-switch for water) along the mains, but such mini-valves are cheap and typically wouldn't really last very long, so his suggestion was to buy a tap to be installed after the mini-valve at the mains pipe, and then the bidet spray goes onto the tap. (Edit: I checked around online and apparently they are called Angle Valves or Angle Stop Valves) Does anyone have experience buying such taps? where are good places to buy them? We have avoided buying no-brand or unknown-brand water fittings so far (hansgrohe, Song Cho) because we didn't want anything that was fixed in the toilet to have to suffer from pitting or rusting, but now we're at a loss where to find good quality taps. Any recommendations?

Hi @yellowteacups! For me, I asked to change all my pipes except for the super long two-storey one at my balcony, and the cost that was quoted to me was $2050. My ID did mention that HDB will charge less than $1k or slightly above but I couldn't wait for it. Do note mine is an old EM though, you may have less pipes to change (and thus cost less) if your unit is only one storey high.

Ooooh love to see your updates! So glad the lighting at the staircase worked out so well! The hanging lights at the kitchen look lovely as well!

Phew! The end of a busy weekend for us! We ran around Singapore trying to finish purchasing all the stuff we needed Andrew to install. First stop, Song Cho at Plaza Singapura on Friday night! My mother-in-law has had Song Cho's Wel-Mi range of bathroom accessories installed in her home for 15 years and they really seriously have not rusted at all even when the other pieces she has in her bathrooms have gotten green and pitted! So we're definitely converts to the Wel-Mi rust-proof range. We bought 3 of their toilet roll holders (though the website shows it as a towel holder), 3 of their towel racks, and 2 of their glass shelves (we don't need a shelf for the MBR toilet). We were also originally going to buy their mirrors (Mother-in-Law also has two of these and no black spots at all!) but they recommended their safety mirrors which is actually metal with a sticker on it. Looked good so we got those instead. Saturday started with us heading over to the unit armed with some drinks! There were 6 workers working on tiling and cement screed for the second floor, and the work all looked quite good! I was particularly happy to see that my L-shaped toilet didn't make the remaining space in the kitchen too cramped! We measured some of the dimensions of our toilets (to figure out what sizes we could buy for our WCs and sinks) and ran off to our next stop! From Jurong West to Sin Ming! We visited the shop that Andrew and @twinklecloud visited, LE Bath and Lights. There really was a nice line of WCs on display, both with and without Geberit systems inside. The list prices were a bit scary but the salesperson assured us that they would discount them for us (especially since we told them we were Andrew's customers) and so we picked this one-piece Otto HF8377 WC for our MBR toilet and common toilet (S-trap). We particularly liked the shape and the fact that the toilet bowl lid was quite solid and could be easily detachable for washing. For our kitchen toilet WC, because the connection is a pipe that extends from the main pipe instead of from the floor or from the wall, the shop people told us we could only take a specific 2-piece WC that they didn't have in their showroom. We agreed to get one piece of that anyway. For our sinks, again, we got normal wall-hung white rectangular sinks for the MBR toilet and the 2nd floor common toilet, but had to buy a much smaller one for the kitchen toilet. Hope it still is functional!! >_< (The small one is the one on top...) They did calculate a good price for us so we just bought the lot from them. Saved us the trouble of having to trek through Jalan Besar, which was our backup plan if this shop didn't work out for us. As I've said before, my husband and I are terrrrrrrible at bargaining, we basically hate doing it and would rather just find something that's within our budget and just pay that list price. My husband did warn me that we really ought to try bargaining for WCs and sinks since they have been known to be severely overpriced, but thank goodness all we had to do was emphasize that we were Andrew's customers and that we came all the way down from Jurong West and please give us a good price whilst internally hoping they would come under our pre-agreed budget. Which they did by a few hundred dollars. So yay for us! Next stop, a bus ride down to Chan Huat at Balestier! Same thing here, we hate bargaining, but we had a secret weapon: my best friend works for the company that supplies bulbs to Chan Huat and had specifically told me to ask for one of their workers and tell him her name. Believe me, it worked lol. Not sure how much of a discount we were eventually given but we were WAY below our original budget (we probably did budget super conservatively though) so we were really happy. We bought our Fanco FFM7000 fans (x2, one for the living room and one for the MBR) from them, and also track lights for the living room and MBR. Because our living room and MBR were both 5m wide, we sat down with Sherwin for a long time working out what was the best way to run the track lighting so that the entire long room would be brightly lit. We originally wanted to put the fan in the middle of the room, and the two tracks at two far ends of the room, but Sherwin warned us this would mean the middle of the room would be dim (we didn't want light kits under our fans) so in the end we agreed to put the track lights lengthwise instead. Most of our lights are quite boring (lol) but we did get one nice "feature" light for our dining room! We then finished off the day by heading down to Universal Union at Paya Lebar and getting my Fujioh FS-890R hood (in Rich Silver - husband's choice! It's different from the usual silver display sets so I wonder how it would look!) together with the Rinnai 3-burner tempered glass hob RB-7503D and also the Bosch HBN331E2J! Today we popped by the Song Cho at IMM to pick up two bidet sprays (we looked around and Song Cho's was still quite attractive) and also some paint chips so that we can start assigning paint colours soon! Meeting Andrew on Tuesday night to discuss lighting and electrical plans, and also paint colours!

Awww no worries @alprakas! Maybe if you bargain hard enough they might give you a lower price!! My husband and I utterly suck at bargaining, we hate it so much we would rather go around looking for the cheapest price, go into the shop and just buy it at the listed price no questions asked (I have seen a few salespeople probably flashing $$ in their eyes at their luck at getting such easy customers lol). For us, online shopping is better lol.

Awww! I loved reading your renotalk t-blog! *shy* Thank you for the kind words!!

Hi! Just popping in to say that I'm choosing the FS-890 Fujioh hood out of the entire line, mostly because as far as I can tell, that model is still made in Japan (I went to Universal Union and said I wanted the Made In Japan model of Fujioh hood and indeed they pointed me to the FS-890). Not sure about the FX-900 but not sure whether this is something that something you might want to consider. For me, it didn't really matter what the hood looked like, but I did think the FS-890 was not that ugly. Hope this helps! In the end I got the Fujioh hood (in Rich Silver colour), a Rinnai tempered glass 3-burner hob and a Bosch built-in oven. Universal Union allowed me to combine different brands for a good price.

Day 11 - New pipes in! More tiling! Every time I see there are photos uploaded to the group chat I have with my husband and Andrew, I get so excited to see the progress! Today, Andrew asked us whether we were confirming parquet for second floor (yes!) and revealed more of the tiling that was done! Waterproofing done and most of these two walls of the MBR toilet done! Really like the blue and black, grows on me! Tiling mostly done for this corner (for the shower head) of the common bathroom on the second floor! Looks like they're changing the windows as well to top-hung. Tiling in the downstairs L-shaped kitchen toilet! The design is slightly different for the kitchen toilet tiles, can't wait to see a photo of a more complete wall! Kitchen backsplash up! White 3D subway tiles! Rest of the wall plastered and to be painted! I asked for dark grout for the kitchen backsplash to show off the subway tiling and also because I really didn't want to handle white grout made yellow from smoke and grease. Finally, pleasant surprises all around with Andrew showing off the new pipes. We asked him to replace all of the big pipes even though we might get HIP in the next ten years (the unit is quite old) and if we replace our pipes then it would be cheaper, because we seriously wanted to get all the trouble over and done with at one shot. And thank goodness we did! The existing pipes were scarier than I thought! Remember my terrible kitchen pipes? Not only was the overhang from the ceiling really low (which might restrict my ability to have a high wall cabinet or in fact my original plan was to have a tall unit there), but unseen in the photo there was also a piece jutting out around 20cm above the ground!! Original kitchen pipes! Today Andrew posted in the whatsapp chat: kitchen pipes up. kitchen pipe change position. I am so happy with this! No more fiddly pipe sticking out at the bottom, and the position of the new pipes on top mean that my tall unit can continue to exist in that corner! YAY! Wall and doorway up for the utility room as well! Heh heh. Quite excited to go down personally and look at the place tomorrow morning. We'll be taking the opportunity to check on the work, but also quite importantly to be measuring the toilets so that we know exactly what size of sinks and toilet bowls we can buy.

Hi @twinklecloud! Actually we already picked out all our lights and our fans (my fast hand fast leg reputation) previously so we're probably heading down to Chan Huat at one shot and order everything. Really hoping the dining room light I wanted is still in stock!! Still waiting to see your blog though!! Yeah we probably have to go down to one of the Song Cho and just check what stock they have and whether we can pre-order anything they don't have currently in stock. Fortunately still have time...

Hi @alprakas ! Okay, just checked, we put in our order on 20 Feb and the order arrived around 10 Mar (I think it might have been one or two days before 10 March but 10 March was when I opened it up to take pictures). So around 2.5 weeks? Do take note I did order from the website mostly stuff that was in stock, I think only one item said it needed a 1 week leadtime. In terms of price differentials, the stuff I bought from Xtwostore.com + shipping is around 850 euros. After conversion with my credit card it ended up as S$1398.20. I paid another S$80 for import tax when it arrived in Singapore. The price available at Aqualife was the same as the one on the Hansgrohe website promotion right now (still ongoing!) http://www.hansgrohe.com.sg/27072.htm For example, for the basin mixer I paid around 48 euros each (I bought 3). Even dividing the shipping and additional fees evenly amongst all my items it's around 80 euros each. At the conversion rate (at that time) of 1 euro to S$1.64 that's around S$131 (around S$140 if you split the import tax by item again). If you stare at the website promotion the same single lever basin mixer 100 costs S$189 in Aqualife. Similarly, the bath mixer cost around S$150 via Xtwo and S$195 at Aqualife. Etc. I must forewarn that it really depends on how heavy your purchases are though. The shipping and handling was 299euros for me but when I had a slightly different product mix last time it jumped up to the next tier to I think 399 or 499 euros or something which might load quite a bit. Your mileage might differ from mine. But all in all I calculate I saved around S$400 to S$500 at least? Hope this helps!

Oh dear. so sorry to hear about your issues with the kitchen floor. So how is the vinyl in the kitchen? Wouldn't you still have worries about the water seeping in? Though isn't Evorich supposedly the brand that has waterproof vinyl? Wow! I don't know how your electrical quote is structured but mine just looks at the number of Cat 6 end-points and charges me $150 each. If your quote is also doing that + charging for the cable itself, how about you buy the cable for them? Lol. No way the cable is going to be worth $600. If however you have maybe 4 Cat 6 end points then $600 would be the same as my quote. My current electrical quote is more than $5k but it includes changing all my electrical wires and I have a lot of lighting points (cost about $60+ per point for point + installation of the lights itself) and a lot of power sockets ($65 for double socket, $55 for single socket).

Oh I didn't know you could request for switches at your water pipes! Do they charge you extra for it? Shall check with my ID!

Hi JohnJohn, That's true since they only install the accessories (like toilet paper holder and towel rail and mirror) much later. So we intend to get those hopefully later. My only worry is that we initially were hoping to get all of those from Song Cho (Wel-Mi line - rust-proof!) but they seem to have run out of toilet paper holders? So I might pop by the PS branch one of these days to "book" mine hahaha.