The Burrow's Trials & Tribulations (Part I)

Life has just been one rollercoaster ride since my last entry two months ago. I had a tough time brushing away all the virtual cobwebs before finding my blog, buried under a mountain of abandoned websites.

Let's do a quick recap. In my last entry, I talked about our little ROM-moon and how we finally got the keys to our new home soon after.

Since then, we've named our home the Burrow, after our love for rabbits. The Burrow is slowly but surely shaping up. We started renovations on 28 October, right after Deepavali.

As with any big projects, hiccups are bound to happen. And we've had a couple of our own. There were little incidents like conflicts of ideas between our ID and us and slightly more serious issues which involved financials.

Perhaps you can learn from our experiences, so I'll give a summary of what happened.

Incident 1:
When the ID first presented his proposal, we came to realise that an ID is after all a designer. What do I mean by that? His first consideration is usually the form factor; whether something looks nice. But for us, besides having a home which looks good, we have to be practical as well. What looks good, may not be practical for everyday life.

For example, his proposed design had a long bench seating alongside a wall, but with a round dining table and 2 individual chairs on the opposite side. While it was nice to have bench seating, logically speaking, only one person could be seated comfortably on the bench and eat at the dining table. Anyone else sitting on either side of the person in the centre would not be able to reach the table without having to lean forward.

So we stood our ground and insisted on a rectangular dining table. Boring but at least it maximises our seating capacity.

Incident 2:
As a qualifying statement, I have to say that though we'ld love to save as much money as possible, we're not that hardworking, in the sense that we will not run all over the island, doing price comparisons for every single item in our shopping list, just so that we can get the cheapest possible price. We'ld do a cursory check just to get an idea of the going rate, and if we find that the item we want is reasonably priced, we'ld go for it.

I respect couples who'ld do their homework throughly and go all out to find the best bargains possible, but for us, it's just way too much effort and takes up too much time which we would rather spend more efficiently. For a couple who relies on public transport and have limited shopping time, this is the choice we've taken.

So, having said that, what happened was that our ID said that he'ld bring us to his recommended shop for our bathroom and kitchen accessories, promising us a reasonable price. But before our appointed date with him, we went off on our own, browsing at Sim Siang Choon to get an idea of the types of sinks we like and for a price review. To us, SSC might not be the cheapest place around but they do have a wide range of products and we get what we intended, a pricing benchmark against which we could gauge when we went shopping.

That done, we met up with our ID who brought us to a non-descript HDB shop where we were recommended one standard no-brand sink for almost $200. I recall in SSC where we eyed a similiar sink, also non-branded, going for $130. But that wasn't the main issue. The problem was that the recommended sink was way too large. Our kitchen is rather small and our counter space was severely limited, thus we just wanted a sink which was less than 800mm wide. That was a challenge in itself coz that shop had a limited range. We were told to choose our ideal sink from a file of catalogues instead, but the pricing was in the range of $300-$400 which was out of our budget.

We didn't want to buy something just because we had to and E told our ID that we'ld like to shop on our own and find something that's really suitable. Guess what happened? Our ID got upset with us. Obviously he stands to gain if we had purchased what we need from that shop. We were sorry that he couldn't get his commission, but we had to stand our ground yet again. Their product range just didn't appeal to us. So risking our prior friendly relationship with the ID, we went ahead with our decision.

In the end, I did a bit of homework online and found a couple of shops which came highly recommended. These shops are located in Jalan Besar. We checked out Poh Joo but ended up buying our items from Eng Soon Huat, across the road from Poh Joo. The people there were wonderfully patient with us and gave us extremely warm service. We were there for hours and even till the end, the uncle and auntie there happily chatted with us and dug up dimension details of the sinks we bought coz we mentioned that we needed in-depth measurements for the ID's planning.

I will talk a little about other hiccups we encountered in the next entry. Hope you guys can learn from what I've shared so far :)