Where to shop for... lighting in Singapore

Trying to purchase lighting is a rather tiring endeavour as you are looking at buying 20-30 items at one go! And there's a whole different variety of styles and prices out that as well as those out to "chop your carrot".

Before  we went shopping, our ID gave us a specific list of lights that we needed for our house.

It went something like this below. I even asked her to give me a prices estimate. 

In the end, we only went to 4 places to look at lighting. Two were based on online recommendation, one from my ID and one is IKEA.

Our strategy was to go into a shop and asked to be quoted for all the items our ID stated. This gave us a rough estimate of the price range of the shop, as well as whether that shop had what we wanted.

The one from our ID (Azora) gave us the highest quote out of the lot and a lot of the designs weren't very exciting as the place was quite small. It was close to 4k for all the items.

The cheapest (aside from IKEA) was lighting.com.sg (LCS) which sells Philips lights. The designs were very functional but didn't really have that extra oomph factor that we wanted. I think it was under 2k. Staff @ lavender was knowledgeable and were able to give good advice. The thing I like about it is that there is a price guarantee. There's not need for haggling cos the price is fixed and guaranteed to be the lowest in Singapore. So that saves me the trouble of haggling and worrying that I got "chopped".

The middle pricing was from Chan Huat (CH) @ Balestier. They have 3 shops in Balestier. Make sure you go to the biggest one for best range.  I spoke to 3 staff, one local and 2 foreigners. All were pretty knowledgeable and friendly. They patiently accompanied me and my hubby as we scoured the entire place for lights that fitted our design. Kudos to good staff training in both CH and LCS. I felt that Chan huat had more "designer" lights while lightings.com.sg was more functional type. That is also reflected in the price of under 2.5k. You are expected to bargain here though to get discount of about 10%. They don't give deep disounts as their price is ok competitively and they seem to have brisk business, so it's not like they die die must close your deal.

In the end, we decided to mix and match as we really didn't want to bust our budget. It's really easy to get into this mode of "I HAVE TO GET THESE LIGHTS... cos you just love how they look" and end up buying expensive lights and busting your budget. It starts off fairly simple, you find one nice light that costs $300, then to match that look, you find another light that costs $500, and then guess what? You find another light going for $400 that completes the whole look. Before you know it, its $1k for just 3 lights! At this point, you should take a deep breath, walk away and discuss rationally with your partner over coffee.

That's what I did. Or more like, I got dragged away by my hubby for some pretty intense discussion! And guess what, when I stepped out of the shop, and mulled over for a few nights, the lights din seem that attractive after all! It's all in the mind!

Repeat my mantra: Keep to the budget!

This has helped kept our budget relatively on target.

So we picked out one key light which we were willing to splurge on - in this case it's this kerosene lamp from CH for our dining table

 

For the not so important areas, such as service yard, bomb shelter, common toilet, passageway, we went with Ikea. For the rest with went with LCS.

I have to say though, its really not easy to find lighting that suits out country theme as it really doesn't seem to be in vogue at all. Wooden lamp are really hard to find.

We went with this for our bedrooms and living room from LCS as it's got a wooden frame. This wooden frame has 2 "looks" as you can flip it around for a light brown wood border.

For downlights, we went for philips energy saving ones as they would cost less. Our rationale is that we would slowly swap the energy saving light bulbs for LED ones when they blow, so that we don't feel the pinch. :p

And one more thing, LCS has a 7 day guarantee whereby if your lights spoil or contractor spoil them during installation, you can bring them back for exchange. Lucky got such thing. Cos that was what happened to us - The white cover of our bedroom light was made of pretty soft plastic and was dented during installation. But we managed to return the cover to LCS and they replaced a new one for us, no questions asked. How good is that? :)

Hope this entry can help other people who are going through the same thing as me and can save you some trouble!

Things to take note during HDB renovation (Part I)

As I am 1 month plus into my renovation, I would like to share and document some of my renovating experience.

Point One: Be prepare to burn your weekends and also burn holes in your wallets.

Me and my hubby spent every weekend appliance and furniture hunting. We were lucky as I had almost free rein to my parents' car over the weekend. That helped us immensely, in terms of reaching the super ulu places like Sungei Kadut, Midview City, and other far flung corners of Singapore where there is factory and prices are cheaper. Of course, it also helped us to get to Punggol, to do some site inspection.

If we didn't have a car,  I think we would have bought from Courts, Novena etc just for convenience's sake.

We even ventured as far as Malaysia - Nusa Bestari (near Legoland) to look at furniture and even Batu Pahat!

Tip 1 - Buying furniture in Malaysia -  while the price is cheaper across the causeway by ~25%, you have to also factor in the cost of transport (RM800 from Batu Pahat, RM400 from Nusa Bestari + 7% GST). As we weren't buying a lot of items, after factoring all these extra +++, plus  hearing horror stories from my malaysian friends who bought stuff from JB that weren't properly assembled in Singapore, causing them undue stress... we ended up not buying anything from Malaysia, except for this...

which we will transport back ourselves. :)

Tip 2 - Buy Saturday Straits Times and pore through them for deals. Go to atas expensive shops to know what kind of good quality money can buy, and go to cheap cheap imported china furniture shop to have a feel for the price range and quality. Then decide on what your budget can afford.

I was lucky to get be doing shopping for furniture over Xmas, New Year and CNY as there were always lots of promotions.

Tip 3 - Don't be tempted by promotions, you will find that promotions are almost always extended or repeated. And remember, things, especially appliances tend to only get cheaper...

Tip 4 - Keep a file. I kept a file of my newspaper cut-outs and I would bring it with me when I go shopping. Then using this as a reference, I would bargain, "So and so offering this price, see? Can you do better?/ Give better price?" etc.. If you show that you have done your research, shop assistants are less likely to scam you.

Tip 5 - Use Google Docs - I use google docs to tabulate the costs of my purchases real-time to see if I'm keeping to budget in my iphone


Second point -  There is actually order in this mayhem. 

Being a kancheong spider,  I had a massive panic attack after we got the keys... because WE HADN'T BOUGHT A SINGLE THING!! And because we were on a budget (trying not to burn holes in our pockets), this meant we had to be on the look out for good deals.. but the sheer number of things we had to purchase got to me.. How can I be on the lookout for a good sink, fridge, bathtub, sofa, dining table, lights, taps in such a short timeframe!?!?!?! You get the picture?

But I soon realised that there was an order to this!

I only had to settle a few major items per week, as dictated by the renovation project schedule!

The timeline went like this for me:

Preweek one: Meet ID to choose tiles

What I needed to buy/find for Week One: Bathtub
Week One: Hacking + laying of tiles for living room and 2 toilets + build support for bathtub (hence bath tub needed to be delivered that week)

What I needed to buy/do for Week Two: Dishwasher (see my previous post); Meet ID to chose laminates for carpentry, finalised dimensions for all carpentry, drawers, and paint colour
Week two: Kitchen mortar base (need to know dishwasher dimensions so that can leave an appropriate gap in mortar base for dishwasher)

What I needed to buy/do for Week Three: Fridge/TV/Oven ((dimensions for mortar base, and to fit carpentry) , find aircon
Week three: False ceiling is up, install aircon piping

What I needed to buy/do for Week Four: Find lighting for the house, find aircon
Week Four: Install lighting, first coat of paint

What I needed to buy/do for Week Five: sink/tap/hood/hob
Week Five: Carpentry starts to take shape...? (the stage I am at now)

Broken done into smaller more digestable steps like this, we were able to shop more effectively.

Point three: It's worth spending a bit of extra money for the drawing
This is so you have an idea of how your flat will turn out, especially if it is your first renovation. We managed to correct a few design flaws that we din like based on the 3D drawings before they started working. This saved both sides unnecessary trouble and grief.

What you see in your mind may not be what the designer imagines and vice versa. 
 
I cite an example of our bathroom

The blue mosaic tiles were too broad for our liking.

The blue mosaic tiles were too narrow for our liking

So like Goldilocks, we went for the not-too-cold, not-too-hot option:  the average of the two widths.

Point Four:  Make an effort to monitor the project as well
We went on weekly jaunts to our flat to inspect and monitor the progress. And I would recommend that, no matter how busy you are. Because we caught a one or two jarring things, such not laying protection sheets in the bedrooms, and one of the false ceiling being much bigger than we envisioned. In both cases, they were rectified by our ID. It's good to catch such things early before they become a bigger hassle to rectify once the paint job is done etc. Unless you have worked with the ID before and have absolute faith in them, do do some form of monitoring.


That's all for now!