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Table of Contents M O O D B O A R D 3 D P L A N C O N T R A C T O R S E L E C T I O N T A O B A O B U Y S B A R E U N I T A P P L I A N C E S H A C K I N G M A S O N R Y A I R C O N T R U N K I N G P A I N T I N G P A R Q U E T R E F I N I S H C A R P E N T R Y C A R P E N T R Y ( F I N A L ) L I G H T I N G G L A S S B A C K S P L A S H P L U M B I N G T A O B A O B U Y S 2 C O M P L E T E D L O O K ( L I V I N G, D R E S S I N G, Y A R D ) R E V I E W O F C O N T R A C T O R ( R E N O G U Y Z ) L A T E S T U P D A T E 1 L A T E S T U P D A T E 2 hi guys, so this is the start of my reno journey! pretty excited to have my own thread as i've always been awed by many beautiful homes here. for starters, floor plan! the wait for our 3 room BTO has been very long (5 years). i'm not exactly happy with the size as i've seen a couple of 3 room btos here and they all have way bigger living room and kitchen than i have. i probably have bigger toilets and maybe slightly bigger master bedroom but whats the point? i bake so i need an island this time round. will be very challenging but mostly likely it will be where the dining area is, and there will be no space for a proper dining table.

Well I guess I should have known I'd never been able to sustain a blog XP. Here's the final product - 1 bedroom + study, total 624sq feet, I didn't take any pics of the unrenovated balcony and store room. I knocked down the wall between the bedroom and living room so I just have a "Room". But the small study room remains for private alone time. Total damage S$45k before furniture and stuff like fake Versace cushion covers '

Hi! I've been lurking around the forum and t-blogs for information for my new place and figured, now that I'm halfway through (maybe more 1/3 way) my own renovation, its time to share my story too. Here's my original floor plan My place is a resale condo and this was the only floor plan I could find of it. Its abit oddly shaped in the living room and my HTB and I really wanted it to be spacious feeling. Its just going to be him and me and my dog. Its our first place together and we're really excited. There's that huge patio too, that we love (and am pretty sure my dog will love too) We spoke to some people and finalized on our interior designer. He's a really interesting person but thats another story altogether. Anyways, here's the floor plan that we have now. Thats it for now. I'll try to upload some pictures we took before we started hacking everything down later on today. Thanks for viewing! I'm so excited I've been making my poor colleagues listen to me go on about the renovations and every decision that we've had to make so far. I think they're tired of it. So this may be a better place for me to share.

Hello everyone!!! Beginning I've been a silent reader for many months now and I thought it should be my turn to contribute what ever I can back to this community! I had this sudden urge to pen down my experiences since we are 3 days away from the ACTUAL renovation. I am surfing the net for all the nitty-gritty stuff for our house, stressing myself out over those and thought coming here might be a good idea at 3am! So here goes! How it started... After my 'then' boyfriend proposed to me last year, we started looking out for properties in the eastern and north-eastern side of Singapore! R (now husband) and I prefer a newly empty space for us to build a home together so naturally our first choice was to ballot for a flat through "sale of balance". We didn't pin our hopes too high cause our queue number was out of the number of available units and there were little units among them which we shortlisted. We started browsing through resale flats for months while R was still optimistic about our ballot (never say die). Months and months of waiting and finally our prayers were answered! We got one of our favorite units! Search Early this year, we finally locked in our first 'love nest' at TPY HDB Hub and we started searching (almost frantically) for both ideal moodboards and ID/Contractors. Before we started anything, we sat down and had a serious discussion about finance. Zero loans. So we have extremely strict budget to work with and we broke it down into 3 sections. Renovation (quote given by ID/Contractor) Electrical (wirings, sockets, switches, lightings) Furnitures & Appliances (Bed, W/C, fridge etc) I must say this budget has been working extremely well for both of us cause we made it as detailed as possible, itemised, and did quite a fair bit of comparison! Be as realistic as possible and ask around with your family or friends for quotes! Most of them are more than happy to share! Back to the search for ID/Contractors. Thanks to renotalk, my knowledge about renovation widened, deepened and saved me from looking too noob infront of those guys. lol. Both R and I prefer engaging an ID because we both lack quite badly in the creative department and we are hoping to minimize the need to liaise between different suppliers or contractors. Nevertheless, all in all we met up with 4 IDs and 2 contractors (semi-ID) over a period of 2 months. This is by far the most tedious process for both of us cause it fried our brains so badly. It's not until we met these professionals that we realised renovation has A LOT, A LOT, A LOT of details and factors to consider. 1) ID A A was the very first ID we met and we had no idea what to expect from the meeting! We met up near my place, he was early, dressed well, pretty young and speaks well. He nervously took out few sheets of papers with drawings on them and I could see his hands trembled a bit. When I saw those papers infront of us, I like him already! He came prepared with proposed space-planning sketches according to my specifications through a 20-mins conversation prior to our meeting! Of course, he also prepared a drafted quotation based on what he drew and the quotation wasn't too bad! Though not all details were captured, he was really patient in jotting down our needs/wants and identifying any potential difficulties in our ideas. We were having our hopes high on this ID and really excited in receiving his revised space-planning sketch and quotation but sadly, he did not send us till almost a month later. 2) ID B We met up with B right after ID A and we weren't really pleased. First of all, he was late for our first meeting, I refused to wait for another 30mins so I called the meeting off. R was being kind and suggested we should give him another chance since he apologised genuinely, we did. Okay, so our first meeting happened and unlike ID A, he is very down-to-earth in both his dressing and his personality! He was punctual, cheerful and very approachable. He also came to us with a draft and he is definitely way more experienced than ID A. As much as he would accommodate all our crazy ideas and wants, he would stop us nicely to inform us of the pros and cons of materials/ placements/ appliances etc and the potential roadblocks we may face. The first meeting with him took 2 hours and he didn't even at any point sneaked a peek at the time. I couldnt remember how long, but he came back to us within 3 days with a hand-sketched space planning + 3D of EVERYTHING we discussed via whatsapp. We could feel his eagerness in our projects and was pretty sincere. I shall continue the rest another day. it's 3.20am now and I should catch some sleep! Will try to post the visuals next time Night night!

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Hello renotalkers! I have benefited from this forum immensely and it's about time for me to pay it forward. I bought a resale apartment and obtained the keys only in late July. It's a 1 BR, only 52 sq metres (560 sq ft) in size. I was drawn to this space as it was relatively square-ish, not many bay-windows, no balcony, 2.9m ceiling height and floor to ceiling windows in the living room. Knowing that size was a limitation, my challenge is to make the space feel bigger than it is. The original floor plan (ignore the PES - the apartment does not have any PES) This was how I envisioned the new layout Red lines indicate the walls which I wanted to knock-down Blue line is where I would like the new wall to be erected Yellow lines is where I envisioned a concrete plaster appearance Besides the challenge of opening up the space, I wanted to keep the budget low and time-line relatively short, yet achieve a specific industrial look. I'll be dedicating quite a bit of my blog on how I kept costs low while maintaining decent quality. That means I will describe my thought process for contractor selection, material selection, purchasing from taobao etc Hope new home owners that plan to renovate will benefit from my blog. I shall post the before pics soon and some interim pics as reno is currently on-going. Happy reno-talking! EDIT: I realise that it is very cumbersome to go through an entire thread without a contents page. So I have compiled the links here 1. My thoughts on ID vs contractor. All home owners struggle with this question and meeting IDs/contractors can consume a lot of time and effort. 2. How I shortlisted and chose a contractor. The key considerations which led me to chose among the shortlisted contractors. 3. My taobao shopping list. With all the links from taobao sellers which I bought from. 4. My before pics. Demolition pics if you're into that sort of thing. 5. General Info on shipment of bulky taobao items to Singapore. 6. Since it's very difficult to estimate how many cubic metres each item is and the shipping charge is based on cubic metre, I came up with a way to estimate total cost of the bulky taobao item based on my first shipment when I purchase through peeka. 7. Some chinese keywords for shopping on taobao. Although taobao is cheap and therefore tempting, there may be instances of dissatisfaction. To provide a balanced view, Another poster's negative experience with taobao items. How I minimize risk of purchasing low quality items on taobao. 8. Info on the fibreglass concrete panels in my living room. 9. A guide on choosing paint colours for your wall. 10. Kompactop final pics 11. Info on artificial turf for balconies/planter/baywindows 12. Final pics - after 6 months of living in my place, this is more or less the final look of my place, though it tends to evolve with time (and clutter). To be included at some point.

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After months and months of reading the various t-Blogs on Renotalk, I finally managed to get down to starting my own t-blog to document my renovation process and journey. My apartment is a ground floor unit with a huge patio and the reason i bought it is (besides the location) is actually the big patio that I could make use of for hosting dinner parties since space is a luxury these days. Oh well, if given a choice obviously I wouldn't get a ground floor unit given it's potential privacy issues. Below is the original layout of my apartment: I got the keys to my apartment during mid-June and the renovation started on 5 Aug.. phew! I actually spoke to a few Interior design firms before choosing my current firm as I feel that the designer is able to achieve the look i want. My last experience with another ID firm wasn't good at all but that doesn't deter me from choosing to use an ID again. I'm just more cautious this time round , hoping that my ID is able to deliver what was promised! keeping my fingers xx Many people actually asked me why am i doing such a major renovation when the apartment is actually pretty much done up. The reason is becos im really tired of shifting around for the past few years... i think my record is 4 times in the past 6-7 years.... really very tiring! Therefore, i wana make my apartment a place i could call HOME . Given the new property measures, it's impossible for me to sell my apartment for the next few years so i might as well do it up to my fancy and park myself there for the many years to come

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