Creating a New Living Space

Pre- Renovation : Post- Renovation
The Living room is a central part of the house not just due to it's size but also because of it's location as the first room of the house that greets guests. For our Living room, we dabbled in the following :

1. Walls

- The walls being HDB walls needed to be replastered as the original plastering was very crudewith swirl lines seen. Plastering of our 1119sq feet 4 room flat blew us back by slightly under $1500. However we deemed it necessary as this would affect the outcome of the painting.

2. Framing of sides of walls / entrances

- One thing about HDB flats is that quality control seems to have flown out of the window as ceilings, walls and door entrances are not built in a straight line. Thus, wall frames have to be laid at the edges to ensure a straight cut. You can see the wall frames installed below.

3. Removal of old cornices and false ceiling

- With the need to remove the cornices which are very 80s Roman design, and the requirement to install pulmets and downlights, our ID installed a false ceiling for us within the HDB requirement of floor to ceiling height of 2.4m.

4. Removal of entrance arch.

- The design of this 1985 flat was that the entrances to rooms designed with an arch. We asked the ID to knock off the arches and straighten the entrances with a straight cut design ( Below).

5. Insertion of pulmets.

- To hide the curtain tracks, we made a recess in the false ceiling to act as a pulmet ,at the windows(Above) and at the front entrance( for the string curtain track- seen below). Cost of fabricating a pulmet is an average $5.50 per feet.

6. Flooring

- We chose big squared white glossy homogenous tile ( Type FoS46000*3SW) at $2.80/ft sq from Hup Kiong located along the tile shops at Balestier (Above). This helps to brighten the hall since our colour sheme is dark and makes the hall looks big. In addition, the shiny gloss surface makes it have a marble feel without the ugly marble grains, in our opinion.

7. Light points

- In putting up the false ceiling and the electrical rewiring, we have to identify our lighting requirements and provide a gauge of the desired location of the lighting points. Our hall alone, we had 5 light points - 1 for the main entrance, 1 for the dining(part of our hall),2 for the downlights, 1 for the main hall light. The downlights should preferably be located to be used as a light source to highlight fixtures on the wall such as pictures, paintings or in our case,make a play on the shadows cast by our stylish funky clock from XZQT.

8. Built In

- Our initial plans for a custom built feature wall were scrapped of the high costs and we did our sums and found that the money could be put to better use in more critical areas like extending the kitchen cabinet and other more essential items. Not having a feature wall would also allow us to change our furnishings and look in the future much easier. That said, a feature wall would probably be useful to hide electrical wiring,provide lighting design and give the house a wow factor. It is really up to one's priorities and needs plus of course , budget. We did however have a built in shoe cabinet to house all our shoe storage needs plus an upper cabinet to hide the circuit breaker and provide extra storage space. (below)

8a) Shoe Cabinet Design

(Above) Slanted angled design of shoe cabinet shelving

- For the shoe cabinet, our ID did a slanted angled shelving design which allows for more shelving levels, a lengthened recess for shoes to fit in. The top shelf has a higher ceiling(below) to allow for shoes which require a higher height clearance such as my army boots.We had glossy black laminate to give the cabinet a classy feel in line with the colour and decor theme of our house. Our ID also recommended a flushed door handle below which provides a clean look.

(Above) Door handle of shoe cabinet flushed when not in use

(Above) Door handle lifted up to pull the door open.

9) Doors

-As we were combining the master bedroom and 2nd common room to house the bedding area, study andwalk-in wardrobe, we took out the separate doors to the master bedroom and 2nd common room and linked them out into one single room with the installation of one main tempered frosted glass door (See above). We also had the door of the 3rd common room replaced with a similar glass door. The glass door was cheaper than the aluminium framed doors that we wanted initially from Besglas. To allow for security of the rooms , we had our ID customised a door lockset for the glass doors so that they can be locked.