The Finale

Our renovation has officially ended a couple of months back, but we were still getting our stuffs ready, hanging up clocks and photos, setting up new gadgets and completing our home. With our housewarming party due the following week, we did a mini photoshoot of our house so that we could compare how much transformation the house has gone through. We have always seen others posting their before and after photos so we had made it a point to do it too, else it is too late once the walls starts coming down and the carpentry up. So for those that does visit this blog, here is the preview of our home....

The entrance, where we had sealed up the original door to the kitchen.

Our shoe cabinet which also concealed the unsightly bomb shelter door.

The view of our living room once we step into our home.

Here's the open concept kitchen as well as the entrance to it.

Presenting the deep-end sofa for us to lie down comfortably to enjoy our movies.

A custom made sword case as our tv console. And a plain wall behind it.

which transform to anything we want at a touch of a button.

Open-concept kitchen which we have not been cooking much.

and the other end of it with our service yard behind those doors.

The corridor splashed with maroon and the doors framed black.

Our recreational room where we work out and namaste.

keeping the room simple so that it could be anything we want next time.

Here's our study area where we get the work done.

Took down much of the walls to combine both rooms into one.

Bedroom cum study room cum walk in wardrobe.

Our platformed curb for our beauty sleep.

which opens up to store (and hide) our future belongings.

Our wardrobe which closed up the original door to the masterbed room.

and the other side of the wardrobe.

A little changes to the toilet, with the toilet bowl remaining constant.

and finally, how our vanity cabinet had enlarged to this.

This is home... truly...

Touching up minor details

We have another clock up, this time at our dining area. Loving the classical feel of the roman numerals

Did some minor touch up to our living room track light. We usually keep this lights on during our movie time so that we could see what we are eating and not fiddle with our spoons in the dark. However, the track lights were too strong and overpowered the screen, turning it too orange-ly. So we cut some papers up to act as a filter, reducing the amount of lights to just sufficient only. It turns out great and we could now watch our movies while having our meals without compromising either.

Christmas is coming, time to get ready for it!

Glimpse of the Projector

With the last touch up completed and the final payment settled, our renovations for the house has officially come to an end. It has been a long long journey, one that we are almost too embarrassed to talk about. The planned completion was in May 2017, but it was delayed for almost half a year. Many things happened along the way and we gained many learning pointers which would hopefully help us and anyone with any future houses renovation next time. It has been an eye-opening experience for us, setting up our little place called home. We are definitely glad that this is all over, although it only marks the beginning of our beautiful lives ahead in this nest....

And showcasing a glimpse of our home entertainment system right now. A whooping 150 inch screen punched into our wall to give us the feel of a movie theatre. Although we have some light leaked from the glaring afternoon sun in the middle of the day, which we would touch up soon, the projector did a fantastic job at providing us our shows and movies. This is our first time exploring the projector world instead of a regular television, and we have to say... we are definitely here to stay.

Keeping the heat out while starting the fire within

We got ShieldShade International to do our solar films for the house. It was largely fate that we chanced upon them because when we were finding other contractors, we saw their leaflets at our house door, and with a very competitive price on it. A rough gauge on solar film is that 3M, a household brand, cost about $8psf. We got ours at half its price, but the catch is that the warranty does not last as long. In the previous post, they did use their gadgets to measure the heat and we were impressed and so, we decided to give this a shot.

The three installers were hard at work, cleaning the windows and getting the film up. Did a quick check after they are done and we thought they did a great job. The main reason we decided to get the solar film is that we do not want to come back to an oven-like house at the end of the day. Plus this keeps out the dangerous UV rays that are harmful to us and our furniture so it has multiple uses. Let's hope the next time we go up to the house we could feel the difference. Stay tuned!

Could you spot which window has the film up and which has not? We chose the 50% VLT because we did not want it to be that dark. Again the purpose is to keep the heat and UV rays out, not so much about blocking the views and making the room dark. We have our blackout curtains for that. It does dim down a little, but overall, it was still decently bright when the curtains are drawn. Regardless, the windows are likely to be opened when we are at home too anyway.

At our service yard, we decided to paste the film on the inner door/windows because we will be air-drying our clothes in the service yard and we wanted the heat to come in there instead of blocking them out. But the heat would be blocked by the inner door/windows so that they do not enter our house. This was the plan because we did not want to hang the clothes outside as it is cumbersome to keep the clothes one by one when it starts to rain (as you cannot keep the clothes by taking the whole rod in so you have to un-kiap one by one), and that it is still very dusty outside due to the many renovations taking place at our new BTOs.

Additionally, we got the darker one with a 10% VLT as we realized we forgot to take this windows into consideration for our projector. At the current situation, the sunlight from the service yard would cause half of my projector screen to be flushed out as it is too bright. Hence, we went with 10% VLT to keep the light out. We did not go with black out black because we felt it may be too dark and not look nice too. Turns out the 10% VLT is just sufficient for our projector.

We also done the frosted film for our toilet glass door but we forgot to take the picture!

Our queen sized mattress is delivered! It looked so small, but we guess it would be perfect for the two of us since we are considered small-sized. Beside, all the more reason for us to sleep closer to one another uh!

The Citygas installer also came up today to attached our gas pipe to our hob. We decided to go with the gas pipe so that we would never have to worry about running out of gas, or that we have to cater a space for that bulky gas tank. We did not go electrical too because gas is cheaper than electricity, and that we would save a lot more in the long run. The fires were shockingly strong and huge, and it made our current house fire feels so inadequate. Let's hope we can get used to this strength of fire and not injure ourselves in the future!

After the installation, we went to check the gas meter outside and we were shocked why there were bubbly soapy liquid at the pipe. We were about to report it to Citygas worrying that there are something wrong but it turns out (as indicated in the manual for the gas hob) that one should use soap liquid at the joint to test for gas leak. So apparently our installer had did just that and tested for gas leak, but we felt that it would be much better if it were cleaned up instead of left there. Ohwell.

We will be moving in soon! Real soon!