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Conveniently located above Buangkok MRT station, 25mins away from Raffles Place. Cosy room for rental furnished with double bed, wardrobe, mirror and shelves. Comes with internet and air-conditioned. Lined up right downstairs are 24hrs NTUC, Kopitiam, Wendy's fast-food, Breadshops, Dental, Clinics, Phone shops, Toy stall, kitchenware shop, optical shop, Guardian, hairdresser and beauty parlour. Makes life so easy. Nearby bus stop with bus 27 straight to Changi Airport Please call/whatsapp Mrs Fan @ 93528424 for viewing appts.

Hello everyone, Like many young couples, my SO and I are really excited to get the keys for our future home. Since then I have been lurking around renotalk, absorbing experience and ideas shared by so many passionate homeowners. As I will be starting my renovation soon, I feel that I should share my experience here, to contribute a little back to this awesome community. My home is a 4-room BTO flat, located at the northeastern area of Singapore. As this is a premium project, it comes with HDB flooring and I opted for HDB door. Below is the floor plan and pictures of the living room. Typical 4 room BTO floor plan. Realised many of my new neighbours hack away the wall between kitchen and dining area. Decided against an open concept kitchen as both of us are too lazy/busy to keep our kitchen neat and tidy all the time. Recess wall in the living room. HDB should just fill up the recess area to make life easier for us. TV console will be placed here. Still thinking of ideas for dining area feature wall. Dislike the wooden skirting around the living area and will be asking my ID to hack and replace them with matching tiles. We have collected our keys in early March but the last month was spent rectifying the defects with HDB and sourcing for contractor/ID. Both tasks are long and daunting, and I am glad both of them have been sorted out. During the meetings with different contractors/IDs, I have these criteria in mind: 1. Must incorporate our fengshui beliefs into the design 2. Pet friendly as we have a dog 3. Scandinavian theme (love the clean and simple look) with splashes of blue 4. Keep within our budget 5. The contractor/id must be able to commit and take care of our project personally, as we both work late Finally found our chosen one and signed the contract over the weekend, journey should start next week. Next, shopping time for air condition, hod, hood, sink and fridge....

Hi everyone. We received our keys to the flat in end March this year. after meeting a couple of IDs, we confirmed one in April and started renovation work in the first week of June! Both of us like wood, and we like textures. Along with the fact that we are beach lovers, we thus wanted a "resort" theme for our house. Woody, white, beige, clean, spacious looking, etc. Just imagine a villa in Phuket or a resort in Maldives. i know it doesnt tally with the topic title.. but read on =) Our brief to the IDs: Platform bed Built-in TV console Huge shoe cabinet with design cover-up bomb shelter overlay tiles for both toilets replace HDB given toilet bowls, sinks, shower heads etc. No walk in wardrobe (too dusty and takes up 1 room) vanity dressing table in the master bedroom and the usuals carpentry wardrobe in master bedroom and bedroom 2, toilet vanity cabinets. etc And the theme must be uniform throughout the house Review of the IDs: I screened the names of the IDs and companies (except for my ID) because I believe different people might have different experiences with them. Anyway one bad ID does not make the whole company bad. My best advice is to look for IDs that have experience doing the theme(s) you like. The first ID I contacted was actually the company that did Xiaxue's renovation. I cannot remember the company's name now, but you can easily google it. This ID wasnt the one who did XX's house anyway. The ID Wi***e wasn't very creative, and the ideas she gave are the standard stuff. She's the template kind of person, either lazy or can't be bothered. anyway even though the quotation was pretty close to what we eventually signed but it's just the lack of confidence that she will do a wow job for us that led us to strike her off the list. We then met with R*x from Fuse Concept, whom we signed with eventually. On the first meeting he showed us a house that he did which wasnt what we had wanted. He showed his creativity and sincerity early, and we really appreciated that he took pride in his ideas and dared to think out of the box (what we call "think like an ID and not act like a contractor"). The extraordinary part was that he unearthed what we truly liked. Because we like wood and textures, we always assumed we wanted a resort theme. however he had the foresight and proposed so many 'new' ideas to us that we fell in love with, at the same time, still maintaining the wood, textures and things we wanted to build. along the way while reading lots of Square Room and Home Decor magazines, we realised that resort theme just would not be achievable to the standards we think we want (no spacious hdb, no high ceilings, no sea, no balcony...). R*x tried his best not to recycle the ideas and materials (even tho sometimes we insist at what he thinks is common. I always tell him it's common to him cuz he is an ID but to me, it's new and innovative hahaha). Most importantly, he used our budget very well. We managed to do alot of things + capentry with the limited budget we had. Third on the list that we met was Da**el from Id*** H**se. Well we met up with him because he did the renovation for our parents' current house (2 toilets and 1 room). He was around our age, and thus quite easy to talk to. he has some interesting ideas here and there but needs to be pushed/encouraged to explore further. However having worked with him before, we knew that he was 'bullied' by his contractors sometimes because of his youth and minimal experience and that means as customers we may get pushed back in terms of schedule or workmanship because he cannot win them over. the good thing about him is that he's upfront about practicalities and feasabilities of designs. he would not hide the facts from you but helps you understand the pros and cons to make informed decisions. He quoted us around 30k from the first round but alot of things we wanted were not included or were compromised. We then reminded him we still have budget to play with, so pushed him to rethink his proposal and quotation. however due to unknown reasons he took a long time to come back with the revised quote, and by the time we signed with our ID he still hasn't come back to us, so naturally we dropped him. any vendors who take too long to get back to you without any updates is a bad sign in our opinion. at least a "sorry i have been busy, i will come back to you by xx xx" is better than radio silence. Then there was this OMG and still laughable story about the 4th ID from Me**r Squ**e. His name is Ja***. For all the IDs above, the first meeting took at least 2 hours to go through our requirements in detail. however Ja*** was done with us in 20 minutes. he asked very little specific questions in terms of measurements, said he was very concerned about social media because nowadays (facebook, forums etc) have alot of influence (on consumers). Even though we could not really click with him, we gave him another chance to present his quotation cuz who knows maybe he can come up with something good. He proposed (or kind of insisted) that we should hack the wall between the kitchen and service yard because it will extend the kitchen and that we should do a open concept kitchen even though we did not want to. Plus he told us that our budget was more than enough!! At the second meeting, Ja***'s quotation came up to a good 10k more than the budget we gave him and which he claimed was more than enough. He seemed to have forgotten what he claimed.. okay nevermind. his ideas were mediocre (honestly can't rmb much of what he proposed), but he wasn't well prepared. Whatever sketches or layout proposals he showed us at the second meeting was what other IDs drew on the spot during our first meetings with them. and the killer sentence was when he proposed that we have shower curtains instead for our toilets because they are so small........ followed by laughter. thereafter, he also changed his mind and said he now proposes not to hack the wall between kitchen and service yard (errr... you proposed and then you killed it without good reasons or explanation to your client). when we asked him if a PE endorsement is required to hack walls, he wasnt sure... He then tried to arrange a third session with us but inside us we knew we were saying goodbye to him. we were not comfortable with his working style, nor his personality. totally zero chemistry. The other innovative ID we met was Ke*** from Spa** Se**e Stu***. He is actually an ID whom we admire very much as his works are unique and daring. He did not give template solutions and he is also a furniture maker. There were many things that he DIY for his clients, like buying table legs from Ikea and customizing the table top. He gave us unconventional and unheard of ideas, like building ceiling beams, wall pipes that act as bookshelves, and leaning walls and surprisingly his quotation was not that expensive. It was a very difficult choice to choose between his creativity and R*x's. The reason we chose R*x over him was because we clicked better with R*x. Chemistry matters to us because afterall it is a long period of working relationship and we wanted to be sure we chose someone whom we could feel comfortable with, in terms of discussing and rejecting ideas. Ke*** was extremely professional and so serious such that the discussion felt a bit uptight and we were worried we may not be able to communicate our ideas to him during the process. However we would recommend him if you like loft and industrial designs, which seems to be his expertise. Lastly we met up with J**n from The 80s S***o. She was open and easy to talk to, and was also someone who takes her job seriously with 8 years experience in the industry. Honestly I like their designs very much. They have this knick knack ability to use simple ideas or materials that you don't usually associate with home decor, to demarcate an area or transform the space. However her quotation was the most expensive at around 55k-60k. Comparing the various quotes, their carpentry costs were like at least 10% higher than the other companies. Because we have alot of carpentry requirements, we were not willing to settle. However meeting up wtih J**n actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise even though we did not work together. She gave us a brilliant suggestion to enlarge the master bedroom, which we later explored with our chosen ID. We're thankful for her help unknowingly. Sorry for the lengthy intro/review. I am uploading the pictures... Edit: here's our floorplan so you can see the overall layout.

Hello! I've been loitering in the forum for about 2 years now and its time for me to share my renovation process and document my first home renovation journey. Firstly, this is a Premium BTO named Compassvale Ancilla launch in March 2011. Fast forward exactly 3 years later and we've collected the keys to our first home on 5th March 2014. It was a long but fruitful wait. The main contractor's workmanship is commendable. We had only several minor defects and it was all rectified to our satisfaction. As usual, I shall start off with the original floor plan and some photos of the flat. Pls ignore the masking tapes and some uneven colors on the walls, some of the photos were snapped during defect rectification, lol. The living room view from the entrance The living room view from the window

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