Our Home In 50 Days

[dorayme 1]

We got married in 2009 and only started applying for flats in 2010. After 3 times of failed balloting, we finally got a decent 3 digit queue number in 2011. After 3 yrs, we finally got our flat.

As we were very eager to move into our home. We started finding contractors about 1 month before our key collection date and after talking to 3 contractors, we chose Valiancy Carpenter Enterprise.

Our reason :

Alex (the boss) has a background of carpentry experience and his company does their own carpentry. This made us feel that he could have a better control of the renovation schedule as carpentry is the major portion of our renovation. Also, we can talk to him about our carpentry details and he has the technical knowledge to immediately advice us accordingly.

After talking to him, we felt confident to let him renovate our house. Before making our final decision, we requested him to let us view some on-going projects so that we could see his workmanship. He was very nice to drive us to a few of his projects at night till 10pm . Afterwhich, we decided on him .

We managed to move in 1 month from getting our keys. Actually the house was not fully renovated yet. But Alex made sure our master bedroom was ready for us to live in. And the rest of the renovation was finished in another 3 weeks.

On the 50th day since we got our keys from HDB, we had our house fully handed over.

Review of Valiancy :

1. We risked our selection by going for a contractor that was not used by any of our friends and there were not much reviews on renotalk regarding this company. From reading renotalk for the past few years, I thought we would be approaching the ever popular Mr K, but we didn't in the end Cos we figured his works would be out of our budget. Luckily for us, Alex turned out to be a trustworthy contractor who is prompt on reply and does his best to address our concerns.

2. Although we wished Valiancy could have done our renovation even faster due to our needs, but actually they did deliver our place within the time stipulated.

3. Carpentry work is pretty decent. we are not experts in this area but overall we are pleased with the quality of our carpentry works.

We would recommend Valiancy to our friends if they are looking for a contractor and if they know exactly what they want. Valiancy is not a ID. However, they do provide you with a 3-D (not the super high resolution kind, but sufficient to let you visualise the house), after you provide them with the design and the laminates you want.

Edited May 22, 2014 by dorayme

[dorayme 1]

Our Floor Plan

Our Main renovation were mainly for our kitchen. As our house is a premium flat which comes with flooring, for the rest of the house, our contractor did

1. wardrobe for our main bedroom and bedroom 3,

2. installation of bathtub, shower screen and vanity counter for master toilet

3. Installation of shower screen with swing door for common toilet

4. L box for living room

5. Box up of aircon piping

6. Plumbering works for our citygas heater to our toilets

7. Service yard window

8. Painting

Our Kitchen layout overview

1 side of our kitchen

The other side

For this side, the counter would be built at the hacked wall between the kitchen and the living area. We made our counter to be the height of a normal table so that we could use the counter easily with our normal chairs. So far, we are loving our decision, as we can sit down and do our food preparation and watch drama on our computer at the same time . We also increased the depth of the counter to 90cm so that the counter will look more proportionate as our counter is pretty long.

Edited May 22, 2014 by dorayme

[dorayme 1]

Our 3-D drawing

The overview of our kitchen with our storage cabinet

Interior of our storage cabinet.

Our cabinet is about 60cm deep as we wanted more storage space and i wanted to hide our printer inside. Cos we do not have a study room and hence this storage will allow us to store all our books, stationary, etc... We changed our bottom 3 shelves to drawers last minute and luckily Alex haven't started doing our cabinets yet at that time.

The overall 3-D of the kitchen area

For the living area side, we did not do any renovation except for L Box for our downlights.

[dorayme 1]

Week 1

1. Installation of Aircon by Gaincity. We chose mitsibishi system 4.

2. Box up of aircon trunkings

3. Box up at recess area in Bedroom 3 to accomodate a queen size bed.

4. Converting of our telephone jacks to lan points by BTO home networking.

[dorayme 1]

Week 1 (continue)

5. Gas pipe by city gas and installation of our gas heater.

6. L Box for the living room

[crystaltiong 2]

Hi

I quite like yr kitchen counter top and cabinets , may I knwo the price roughly ?

So i guess u wont have dinning table ?

Thanks

[dorayme 1]

Week 2

1. Our hacking request was approved by HDB in less than a week and down went the wall. Made the house brighter and bigger after the hack.

2. Installation of doors by Yon tat.

3. Installation of our bathtub in our master bedroom

4. Installation of shower kerb in common toilet

5. Kitchen base cement

[dorayme 1]

Week 3

1. Painting

We could not decide on the colour and after looking through the nippon paint book for a few days, we decided to go for all white although we were allowed to choose up to 4 colours.

Instead of 4 colours, we chose only one and requested to Alex to paint our ugly red skirtings to white in exchange. and we are very pleased with the outcome.

2. Installation of window grilles by U-Gate

3. Installation of lights by my hubs. ( to save money and to learn some DIY). We only asked our contractor to install our downlights for our L-Box

4. Delivery of our bedroom wardrobes

[dorayme 1]

Week 4

1. Installation of our bedroom wardrobes.

Our master bedroom wardrobe is casement door. and we did drawers at the bottom so that we can have better organisation of our clothes and easy assess.

We chose this laminate colour to match the malm series in Ikea which we were going to get for our bedroom as malm is cheap and good.

For bedroom 3, due to lack of space, we did sliding door and we upgraded the sliding door mechanism to Hafale sliding door mechanism as we did not like the feel of the default sliding door.

2. Delivery of our kitchen cabinets

Our only blum system (tandembox which can take up till 100KG). This box is for us to put our sauces for easy access during cooking.

[tamandragon 0]

Hi

Do you mind disclosing how much was the total renovation?

I am looking at their services as well

Thanks.

[dorayme 1]

Week 5

The week with the most activities. Right before we move in.

1. Service Yard Window by contractor

2. Water pipe from citygas heater to toilet done. Due to space constraint at the top, they had to route the pipes to the floor and up again. We were concerned with safety. What if the pipe is too hot and someone or a kid touches it. Alex boxed up the pipes below for us for free.

3. Kitchen carpentry partially up

4. Carpentry for our storage cabinet

Edited May 22, 2014 by dorayme

[dorayme 1]

Week 5 (continue)

5. Shower screen in both toilets

6. Ceiling light fan bought and installed from Chan Huat. We bought Rainlite from Crestar

Love the fans. looks very cute!

7. Curtains from Kenneon curtains from JB

[dorayme 1]

Week 5 (continueeee)

8. Bomb shelter shelvings from yee-sin

9. Quartz installation from Iquartz.

Edited May 22, 2014 by dorayme

[dorayme 1]

Week 6 - day 50

After week 5, we moved in with some pending works. Electrical works for kitchen, paint touch up, carpentry, etc... Everything was a blur with so much to pack and unpack.

So we reached our final entries on the finished looks !

The Master bedroom

Bed and frame from Serta. Wished we could have nicer colour frame but since our package came with free frame, better don't waste.

Our drawers from Ikea, Malm series.

[dorayme 1]

Service Yard

Samsung washing machine wd0804

Stainless steel top from Ikea

Rinnai Citygas heater