Welcome To The Doghouse

[wahlauhaha 0]

Hi Everyone,

My wife and I have been stalking the t-blogs recently, and are feeling rather inspired to do one of our own. Been procrastinating for awhile though, but decided today to get off my lazy butt and start writing. Oh well, here goes..

How It All Began (Introduction)

We looked at around 10-15 units in the West side before deciding on our 5rm HDB at Jurong West St 74. Although it's rather ulu, and far from any MRT station, it's close-by to NTU (where I'm still studying and near my wife's workplace at Pioneer Road). When we first started looking for flats, we had a long lists of requirements, but with a budget of <$500k, we had to narrow down our wants.

Hence, with our current flat, we were quite satisfied with what we had gotten:

Pros

• Within budget
  
• High Level (Top floor!)
  
• Relatively spacious
  
• Corner Unit
  
• North/South Facing (no afternoon sun hopefully)
  
• Unblocked View (ex-owners mentioned can see until JB sometimes haha)
  

Cons

• High COV ($24k)
  
• Had to let ex-owners stay for additional 6wks
  
• Horrible Flat Condition (Had to do a full renovation)
  

We had to factor in our little (not really that little ) dog's lifestyle as well, so the quietness of the neighborhood and close proximity to NTU (where we usually walk our dog) really appealed to us.

Flat Layout

We really liked the squarish-layout of the house as well as the size of the house (123sqm). We have seen a few 5rm HDB units, particularly the 270series at Jurong West Ave 3, and we didn't really like the size of those units (110sqm). In addition, the house had marble flooring, although my wife hated the color of the marble (broken marble). Said that it was ugly and old-fashioned, and that it would be hard to match our furniture.

Anyways, we decided that we could perhaps live with it, maybe even changing the flooring if the reno budget permits. We completed our 2nd appointment sometime in August and only started our renovation on 8th Oct after the previous family moved out.

With that, we started looking for IDs. Perhaps it's due to our inexperience, but we only looked at 3 ID firms, and settled with Summit Design since it had alot of reviews on Renotalk. With a reno budget of $50k, we though we would be able to overhaul the house and perhaps even change the marble flooring... but our quotation really ballooned up and now we can't really do anything with the flooring (more on that later ).

On my wife's wishlist, she really really wanted a kitchen island, although we hardly cook haha... and we didn't need that maybe sparerooms, so here's the 2D space planning done by our ID.

We decided to hack down the wall between the studyroom and kitchen, and open out the space into the living room. We also sealed up the entrance to the masterbedroom and hacked a small opening between the masterbedroom and adjacent bedroom to enlarge our bedroom. With this, we would consolidate all the doors together at one corner of our house. We didn't know what to do with the extra bedroom, so we decided to leave it empty for now, except for one built-in wardrobe for the future.

As for the theme of the house, I personally love the resort style theme (after coming back from Bali ) but my wife preferred functionality over style (initially she wanted to design our house similar to school dorms!!). Anyway, we managed to compromise so we will be using brown and beige colors throughout the house, while having closed-up cabinets to prevent dust from forming on open shelves.

Edited October 24, 2012 by wahlauhaha

[wahlauhaha 0]

Kitchen

So we will start with the kitchen (I guess this would be the main point of the house haha). I guess we were lucky that we were able to incorporate a full size kitchen island in our house, so we looked around for some design ideas.

We saw one that really suited our lifestyle:

No more eating out of fence-mounted bowls Pebbles!

So with a 3D rendering from our ID, we could get a better idea of our kitchen itself.

The kitchen floors won't be broken marble but off-white homogeneous tiles instead.

Also I did some Solidworks drawing of the kitchen island to show the carpenter in the near future.

We will be getting some warm light LEDs strips to incorporate into the underside ledge of our island to give it a floating effect (hopefully).

[wahlauhaha 0]

Balcony

To give in to my whims of wanting a resort themed house, my wife allowed us to get some pebbles-wash flooring (for our dear little Pebbles ) for our balcony, with some stucco brick wall for some effect (Craftstone was too expensive for us unfortunately )

To prevent our pebbles-wash flooring to look too much like HDB parks, we decided to change the pebbles color to white, and the tiles to dark brown. We also went with wooden blinds (for both living room and balcony) to give a more resort feeling, rather than day curtains. For our blinds, we would be most probably buying from Spotlight, since they are much cheaper.. (no enough money haha)..

[wahlauhaha 0]

Living Room

For our living room, we chanced upon this image on the internet, and really liked the concept of this feature wall for our TV console.

So, our ID showed us this 3D rendering of what we wanted, together with another stucco brick wall.

Because we actually started our renovation on 8th Oct, we had already bought our sofa set from RocoBoche. It was way above our budget, but we were psycho'd by the salesperson... kept promoting the quality and style of the sofa

We didn't like the sofa in red!! So we chose another type of color instead (2sets of fabrics)

The darker colors would be the fabric for our sofa itself, while the lighter colors would be for the 4 cushions. Pebbles really shed alot, and he loves to jump onto the sofa, so darker colors would help to "hide" his fur . We chose microsuede because he loves to scratch on the sofa (and our previous faux leather sofa had scratch lines all over!!). Wife also bargained for a free gift, since the quoted price of the sofa didn't include the gst yet, so we got a free sofa side table

Edited October 24, 2012 by wahlauhaha

[wahlauhaha 0]

MasterBedroom

We didn't really know what to do with our bedroom, except we wanted a little kennel for Pebbles to sleep at night together with us (I doubt it, he will jump onto our bed to sleep with us most probably).

We showed this image to our ID to help us design our bedroom:

So he came back with this 3D drawing:

See that little half bench at the corner? There's a little entrance to Pebbles' den. Don't know if we were ripped off, but that little half bench cost us $900 :(.

The actual masterbedroom would be converted to a study with a 10ft wardrobe for our clothes. My wife didn't like the idea of a walk-in wardrobe due to open shelves which would collect Pebbles' fur all over our clothes!

We also bought our mattress early (Serta diamond suite). We didn't want to buy early actually, but the salesperson give us a price guarantee to seal the deal. We bought the mattress together with the bedframe from Serta, and they gave us 4 pillows, 1 mattress protector, and a bed-end bench.

(Bedframe something like this)

The renovation works have already started, so will start detailing it later.. plus the household accessories that we purchased (aircon, kitchen and toilet stuffs mainly).. Going to take a break from writing now haha

Edited October 24, 2012 by wahlauhaha

[wahlauhaha 0]

Some Purchases

Aircon

We bought the York System 3 Inverter (3x9k BTU) for the 3 bedrooms. We couldn't fit an appropriate aircon unit in the living room due to the hacking of the kitchen walls. Paid around $2595 (plus a little topup for 5 years warranty and better insulation). If I'm not wrong, York is a new aircon brand trying to enter into the residential aircon market, so the prices should be slightly lower than the more established brands. Heard it's quite popular in Malaysia so we decided to go with it.

Kitchen Faucet

Although we bought most of our kitchen stuff from Lite Fusion, we wanted to have a kitchen faucet with pull-out spray. Found it's quite expensive here in Singapore, so we decided to take a risk and buy one online (Paid around $120, less than half the price found in Singapore). The quality was pretty solid, so we regretted not buying more from that particular online store. Delivery was quick too (less than 5days)!

Whistling Kettle

Wife feel in love with this particular kettle, so we decided to get it Price was comparable to those 1L electric kettles in Courts.

Antique Clock

Thinking of whether to buy this extra large clock (diameter around 50cm). Looks quite nice and fits into our theme. Price is around $110 online, so not sure whether can get a similar one here in Singapore at that price.

[smartgold 0]

Hi, care to share the online store for your kitchen tap? It's nice and worth the price I think.

[retchlow 7]

wow! u r incorporating the dog bowl idea into the island kitchen!

i have 2 dogs & a cat but too bad my kitchen size doesn't allow me to do something similar.

looking forward to seeing your completed house

[gglg 1]

hi, can I ask how much did you pay for sofa pls?

thanks.

[mrrobert 0]

Perhaps for the benefit of the readers, you could share the prices too?

[wahlauhaha 0]

Hi, care to share the online store for your kitchen tap? It's nice and worth the price I think.

Hi,

We purchased the faucet from:

http://www.wholesale-faucet.com/

They have quite a good selection of items, but we were initially skeptical of the quality since it's from China

Edited October 25, 2012 by wahlauhaha

[wahlauhaha 0]

hi, can I ask how much did you pay for sofa pls?

thanks.

If I remember correctly, we paid around $2700 for the sofa set (2.8m long), with 1 extra set of fabric to change and a side table (free gift).

Also, the price that the salesperson will quote you might not include gst yet, so please be aware of this...

[wahlauhaha 0]

wow! u r incorporating the dog bowl idea into the island kitchen!

i have 2 dogs & a cat but too bad my kitchen size doesn't allow me to do something similar.

looking forward to seeing your completed house

Thanks for the vote of confidence haha... Initially we were unsure of how to renovate our house, so we decided to just design it around our dog

Will update my t-blog whenever possible!

[wahlauhaha 0]

Perhaps for the benefit of the readers, you could share the prices too?

Hi,

Thanks for coming in. I will try to include the prices whenever possible, but if it's not stated in my posts, it means that I can't remember the prices off-hand ... Need to check with my wife first since she was the one mainly responsible for the purchases..

[mrrobert 0]

Hi,

We purchased the faucet from:

http://www.wholesale-faucet.com/

They have quite a good selection of items, but we were initially skeptical of the quality since it's from China

So hows the quality? Inclusive of shipping?