brighttlights

Island Hood As we wanted an open kitchen to have a visually larger space, we decided to have a kitchen island/dining table. This meant that our hood/hob will be on the kitchen island. Prior to deciding this design with our ID, we did not realise the price difference between an island hood and a chimney hood. We had budgeted $700 and assumed that it'd suffice for our hood. We only learnt of the difference when we were at Mega Discount Store (MDS) whereby the salesperson told us about the price difference! There weren't any island hoods on display at either MDS outlets. I'd advise for those looking for island hoods to go to the Harvey Norman Coffee and Cooking Concept Store at Millennia Walk. They had several brands on display; Bosch, Brandt, Electrolux, Fisher & Paykel, Miele etc. You can have a touch and feel of the hoods/hobs/ovens/coffee machines there. The salesperson who served us, Victor, was very knowledgable and polite. Bosch was the most impressive in terms of functionality and make; the charcoal filters were thicker and the lights were LED bulbs. But of course it also came with a bigger price tag. In the end, we bought a EF island hood at MDS at a lower price as we figured we may only end up doing some light cooking like steaming or stir frying in future.

Electrical Appliances - Purchases Till Date 1. Washing Machine (Samsung WW-70HH5200) 2. Oven (Bosch HBN331E2J) 3. Fridge (Hitachi R-VG560P3M3) 4. Island Hood (EF CHBS85A) 5. Hob (Bosch PBD7231SG)

Electrical Appliances - Shopping We received the renovation schedule during 3rd week of March and were given the green light to start purchasing home appliances for the house. Our ID advised us to purchase the appliances to be built-in first. Namely, the fridge, washing machine (we are putting it under the kitchen island), hood, hob and oven. As M and I were only to run errands on weekends, we went ahead and purchased these items rather quickly. We visited Mega Discount Store (Kallang/United Square), Harvey Norman (Millennia Walk/Kallang Wave Mall), Gain City (Changi City Point/Marina Square). The prices for most appliances were quite on par for MDS and HN. HN had a 5 days clearance sale last weekend but we found the prices still very similar to MDS. The salespersons at both stores (all outlets) were very knowledgeable and polite. We were bracing ourselves for hard selling but were pleasantly surprised by the salespersons. That helped us to make our decisions very quickly and decisively. However, we did not quite enjoy our shopping experiences at Gain City. GC at Changi City Point was an odd outlet - the store front was really small and mainly had some TVs/aircons/fans on display. In fact we were shocked when we arrived at the store. We tried to look around the rest of the mall for "other" Gain City outlets but to no avail. GC at Marina Square was bigger. But we were served by a salesman at the Hob/Hood department who seemed very unsure of the products they carry. The TV salesman was better but we decided to park the TV purchase for later. We also headed down to the Food and Electronics fair last weekend. The TVs and fridges were going at rather good prices however we had already made our fridge purchase. We had expected such fairs to be quite gimmicky without real price cuts but turns out that we misjudged. Perhaps we will head down to such fairs when we need to buy our TVs.

While i was overseas in Tokyo and Copenhagen last year/this year, I focused much of the non-business leg of the trip on shopping for the soft furnishings. I lugged tea towels, tabletop mirrors, candles, frames, crockery, wash tapes, brass tableware (love the rose gold brass trend!) etc. all the way back to Singapore. M was supportive but very gently reminding me how I had managed to accumulate so many different objects of very different colours, themes and textures - he was afraid we'd have an overly cluttered house! I wish we had Zara home or H&M home here in SG. They are quite affordable and very abreast with the current trends. Think Zara home is present in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand. I still remember how my huge brass holder (it's like 30cm in diameter) was clanking around with me as I shopped around Copenhagen! The danes and swedes are really really good with home decor - everywhere, cafes or hotels, were all very inspiring. All the zakka stores and department stores in Tokyo were great places to shop at too but the style of course differs from the danes/swedes. In terms of quality, I still feel that the Japanese do their crockery better than the danes/swedes. Setting up a place of your own is indeed very exhilarating. But it probably will be less fun when I have to organise all my stuff when we move into the house.

Since our preferences were so extremely different, we decided to brainstorm together again to reach consensus. Eventually we decided that we'd aim for a (sort of) Scandi-industrial look as I really wanted to keep the white, wood and grey elements and we both agreed to have bold black accents around the house. Regarding the final 2 IDs; 1 leaned more towards the softer Scandinavian look and the other ID seemed more confident to pull off a stronger more industrial look. Ultimately we chose the first one as we had also decided to rewire the entire house and have black conduits/trunkings running all over which would provide more than sufficient strong black elements. We thought that we should probably opt for a slightly softer look for the rest of the house to balance this. We eventually signed with the ID in March '15. The delay was predominantly due to the seller requesting for a 2 month extension as his new place was not ready yet.

However, M had a completely opposite view. His dream house featured dark colours all over with a more understated luxury feel - very guy-ish.

We then had more meetings with 2 of the IDs that were recommended by friends/families - they were the final 2 that we felt more keen to engage. It was yet another tough decision as we managed to work out something more reasonable with both IDs and they each presented ideas that we were impressed with. Oh, another big struggle we had during the ID selection process was our house theme/look. At the beginning, I was very adamant on achieving a white and wood look for the house; like an airy, bright Scandinavian loft you often see on Pinterest. My personal favourite colour was grey and I thought a white and wood base would bring out grey accents well.