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
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!
No comments:
Post a Comment