The Birth of a Love Nest…Part 3

It’s been a long and tiring gestational period and finally we are in the final trimester! Our love nest is nearing delivery!

Renovating a new house is indeed an enriching, yet stressful event. It’s an event that is really trying for any couple. Any engaged couple or newly wedded couple, upon going through the renovation process, will definitely have many fierce exchanges. Sourcing for IDs, decision of designs, negotiation phase with ID, payment installations, frequent monitoring of progress, choosing of colours, choosing of materials, defect checking and rectification, all these are possible stressors and potential sparks for arguments. In addition to work stress, threshold for arguments is definitely lower. Renovation is not merely a simple affair of leaving everything to the ID and expecting a beautiful product. Gone are the days when there were honest professional contractors who has pride in their work and will deliver to their best ability, to give us the perfect product we so desire. Nowadays with the stress of high material prices, shop rental prices, workers wages and firece competition for business amongst companies, there is bound to be temptations to take short-cuts. Consumers, like us, have to make time and effort to check on contractor’s work in order to rest well at night. We cannot leave everything to our ID to settle (even though we so desire to do so), simply because we cannot convince ourselves to trust our ID.

Well, now that our renovation is coming to an end. I shall share the new look of our love nest!! Transformed from an empty space with concrete walls and cement floor to one which we can call our VERY OWN LOVE NEST!

Sketch and 3D picture of our living area

Sketch and 3D picture of our cosy area

Sketch and 3D picture of our MBR TV feature and MBR bathroom

The sketch and 3D picture of our MBR

Sketch and 3D picture of our kitchen

Of course, nothing is so easy in this world. Our ID definitely will cause problems along the way.
The first major problem….her plumber drilled into the kitchen water pipe within the wall while trying to install the backsplash! Of all places, the plumber have to choose a spot so close to the blue tape marking from HDB!

Notice how close it is to the blue tape?

Of course, the plumber have to fix it up! According to the plumber, welding is the way to go, really hope it does not create any future problems. HDB mentioned that we have to get our own plumber to fix it and HDB will not need any notification or report. Fine, ID have to do it and ID have to give us assurance that it will not leak in the future….Hope the water that spurted out did not cause water damage to the cabinets opposite as well as the oven.

Damage done

post welding

Patching up of kitchen tile

The next major problem is our kitchen entrance… …
It was initially planned to have an inner sliding glass door but just when ID have to order the glass, she realized a grave mistake…a rather amateurist mistake!! She got the measurements all wrong!! She mentioned that our original kitchen entrance is too big for her to make an inner sliding glass door. The glass door when pushed open fully, will result in our entrance narrowed to a mere 60cm width (this is because the side wall next to the fridge is not long enough for the glass to slide into, and the excess glass will eat into the space of our kitchen entrance). Ok, fine…so what next? She suggested extending our kitchen side wall, to make the entrance smaller, in order for us to have a swing open glass door. She says that the wall extension can also effectively cover up our fridge, serving 2 purposes. She is also very sure it will work. So it was made…

Wall extension

Guess what?? Surprise, surprise…now our fridge is jutting out of the wall extension! We did give our fridge dimensions to her before she proceeded to do the wall extension. As a professional ID, common sense tells us that there should a good distance between the back of the fridge to the wall for proper ventilation right? And it’s usually at least 5 cm…well, she only made allowance for 5 mm…..Isn’t this a super amateur mistake? Angry or not? Of course angry! Angry Bird!

Simulated fridge, showing the extent it protrudes out. Measuring tape shows height of fridge

So in the end, we ended up doing a sliding glass door on the outside of the kitchen. Not the best option but it’s one that definitely works. If only she has done her homework, if only she has foresaw this problem, we wouldn’t have to go through the agony and stress of making this kitchen sliding door! Stupid ID… …

The eventual clear glass sliding door

The next problem is our bathroom doors placement. Can you all accept this end result??

The exposure of bathroom tiles after door closed

How can anyone accept this? ID still have the cheek to tell me that some of her clients actually accepted this! She came up with a ugly suggestion of building a “kerb” outside the door along the passageway to “cover up” the exposure. OMG, no way man! We demanded a change in placement and told her to shift the door forward!

The nice end product! No more bathroom tiles exposure

Ok, now I shall show the readers around our almost completed love nest!

TV feature wall in living room minus the future 46" TV

Our cosy area, where mahjong and games will be played

Our dining area where Darling and Dar Dar will whip up and enjoy delicious dishes together!

Our MBR bathroom where we will make ourselves clean before Gai Gai or Orh Orh

Not forgeting the glass shower screen

We can dance in the rain while bathing!

Full height mirror for Darling to have the perfect view of herself after dressing up

Bedhead with crystals! Darling loves this to the MAX!

We have just completed a almost 30 item defect checklist for our ID to settle by the end of this week. Hopefully she can rectify everything and then polish our floor before handover.
Yay!! Our Love Nest is nearing the end….

Next event….Our Pre-wedding photography on 6 Nov 2011! Stay tuned… …