Themeless(?) Renovation For An Ea Resale Flat

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Thought I'd start a t-blog on my own, although my renovation is already halfway done!

Spouse and I bought a resale EA flat at the northwestern part of SG earlier this year. Eventually we settled on an EA, approximately 142sqm.

Our floorplan:

Some points to note:

1. Balcony was already leveled by the previous owner, it is now part of the living room.

2. The protruding L shaped wall (not including the fixed beam) along the study room was hacked away by the previous owner.

3. The additional bathroom door at the service balcony was sealed up by the previous owner.

4. The MBR bathroom door was sealed up and a new entrance was opened up on the wall to the right of the bedroom entrance.

We thought that the modifications done by the previous owner(s) were very sensible, very glad we don't need to fork out extra money to do those modifications ourselves.

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Reserved for updates.

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Proposed Layout


Came up with this after many rounds of revision with the better half. No major hacking works besides the kitchen. In brief we found the house too dark on one side (the lower half of the layout), as majority of the light source came from the windows located along the top half of the layout. The kitchen was not well lit even with a ceiling light, so we decided to modify the kitchen layout to make it look more spacious.

Master Bedroom
Only two built ins: wardrobe with concealed dressing table, and a row of recessed cabinets below the windows. I really liked the idea of having a dressing table inside the wardrobe after seeing this:


It eats up wardrobe space, but we don’t have that many clothes anyway!

Common Bedrooms
Built in recessed cabinets for both bedrooms. I was inspired by another renotalker’s blog and used her design as a reference for the recessed cabinets:


I liked that the cabinets extended outwards to form a small ledge, so we’re gonna do this for both bedrooms. One of them is for my MIL, the other one will be left empty for now. We’ll use it as a guest room until such time a baby comes along…

Study Room
Recessed cabinets below the windows, plus a built in study table. Had to custom make the study table because of the awkward triangle layout. :/

I really like clean and white tables, something like this:


Living Room
We decided not to have a feature wall, and opted for a built in L shaped bookshelf instead. We have a lot of books! Because of the rectangular “hole” along the bottom wall, we decided to convert that space into a small storeroom.

Dining Room
We will use the balcony area as our dining room. Have a feeling we’ll be entertaining quite a number of people once our house is up. Already bought a 180cm teak table even before we got the keys to our house, hope to create something like this:

Kitchen
We decided to separate the kitchen to dry and wet; the dry kitchen will have a bar counter and some tall cabinets. The storeroom will be hacked and relocated to another corner of the kitchen, we’ll use it mainly as a pantry to store perishables.

Some ideas for the barcounter:

Edited November 17, 2015 by quarternote

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Theme

The spouse and I could not decide on a theme. We like white and bright, we also like somewhat minimalist. We don’t really dig the scandi brick wall trend, neither do we like the industrial theme. So we (well mostly me) just decided to go with whatever we thought looked nice.

ID vs Contractors
In total we met up with about 5 IDs and 2 contractors, the famous ones being Ideal House, Fuse Concepts and the legendary Mr K. With regards to ID, well their quotes were definitely on the high side, but beyond that we also found the IDs to be not very responsive to our needs and queries. The spouse and I are very particular about practicality, so we were not very impressed with the fancy ideas that the IDs suggested. We wanted our concerns to be addressed first!

Mr K was easier to talk to and he understood our requirements clearly. He gave us some tips and advice too, but ultimately his quote was beyond our budget as well.

Eventually we settled on a contractor recommended by the spouse’s friend, after close to 2 months of working with him, can say he’s pretty reliable and responsible, albeit in a typical uncle fashion. Haven’t handover yet though, so I’ll reserve my finals comments till later.

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3D Designs

To be honest we were pleasantly surprised when our contractor told us that he had 3D drawings ready for us! During our discussions, 3D drawings never came up and we were actually fine with his hand drawings. He told us he paid some guy $60 or something to do up the drawings LOL, but ok la, the drawings came in handy because my spouse sucks at visualising.

Also note that all the colours are wrong, the contractor did up the 3D drawings even before we chose our laminates.

Bar counter, wet kitchen entrance and main door

Dimensions for the bar counter are not correct, the tall cabinets should be flushed with the wall that is adjacent to the main door. For the entrance into the wet kitchen, we decided to change to black aluminum framed panels instead. One will be a fixed panel, the other will be a sliding door.

Wet kitchen

Well everything is almost right in this photo, except that the sink is too close to the left wall, and we opted to remove the drying rack above the sink. Quite a good job by the 3D guy I must say!

Living room bookshelf

Our "feature wall". You can see there's a concealed door to the left of the shelves, it will be a tic-tact kinda door that opens up when you push inwards. Decided to make that recessed areas into a tiny store room, we also moved the electrical box into the room. Previously the electrical box was located on the wall adjacent to the main door, pretty unsightly!

The 3D guy got 2 things wrong though: 1) there's a vertical structural beam to the left of the concealed door, his 3D drawing seems to imply that the beam will be laminated up as well. Contractor confirmed that that's not the case 2) Somehow the L box became laminated too? Cleared things up with the contractor, no laminating for the L box.

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As we weren't particular about getting accurate 3D drawings, we didn't ask our contractor to redo. The above pictures were good enough for our reference.

Edited November 17, 2015 by quarternote

[Skycrawl 0]

Hi, your Reno sounds interesting.

May I know your contractor?

Thanks

[KFC1189 11]

Hi Quarternote, I'm very interested to see the final results of your renovation project, especially the bookshelf and the wardrobe with concealed dressing table. 

Did you face any challenges? Please do share your experience.