Seeking Renovation Ideas

Things have been moving quite smoothly after my last blog post on our journey to a new home. We have already met our appointed lawyer to accept the option to purchase and had put in our application for a bank loan with approval in principle. We are currently estimating to complete all transactions and for the current owners to hand over the keys to us by mid-Dec (total of 8 weeks).

The next thing we will be dwelling into will be the home renovations. My wife and I quite like the current layout done by the owner, especially the European feel which is quite different from common modern contemporary feel of most houses today. However, some renovations needs to be done to the kitchen and bathroom, which were left the way they were since it was first built.

Original Kitchen

 

Original Guest Toilet

Our main theme of the renovation will be based on a modern Greek-styled theme - by this we mean using a very bold (aka unconventional) colour combination of light blue and white. Our intention is to paint the top half of the living room walls and the master bed room walls, as well as all bedroom doors and window grilles in a light blue color. For the renovation, I will be getting one of my friend of over 20 years, Keith Wu, who is an architect to do the design and renovation for us. Keith just came back to Singapore after spending quite a number of years in Netherlands, Hong Kong and Beijing. He now co-owns a local architect / designer firm called Materium. The firm had recently came in third for the Bukit Panjang Hawker Center Architectural Competition.

While we fully trust Keith and his team to design and construct the perfect dream home for us, we thought that it will also be a good idea if we could get some renovation ideas from our friends, especially those who have also gone through their own house renovations. We are not only looking at ideas on how to renovate the house based on our desired theme, but also looking at small nuggets like innovative ways to hide cables, wiring and piping, selection of shower heads, taps, selection of air-conitioner brands, lighting, etc. Basically any tips that you guys / gals can share from the experience with your home renovation. Some of the ideas we have so far are below.

Living Room

Living Room

For the living room, the top half of the wall, currently in light orange, will be painted light blue, like the roofs you find in houses in Greece. The brick walls will be painted white and the internal side of the window grilles will be painted blue as well. The center light fitting will most probably be removed and replaced with a ceiling fan to allow for air circulation.

Fireplace

We really like the fireplace that the previous owner has built, however, we also wished to have a television placed in the living room. Thus we are looking at reducing the height of the fireplace, removing the current mounted art piece and replacing it with a LCD TV. The background color will like be painted blue to match with the overall theme of the house. 

Fireplace

Bathrooms

For the master bed room, we will remove the bathtub (not much use for a bathtub in Singapore anyway) and replaced with an enclosed shower with a rain-shower head. The overall layout we are looking is similarly to what is below, but maybe with a color combination that matches more with our theme

Contemporary Bathroom design New York Architect Axis Mundi
(Source: www.houzz.com)

Kitchen

We are looking at hacking down the wall between the kitchen and the small storeroom next to it to create a bigger space and create an open kitchen concept. The wall tiles and kitchen cabinets we looking at is something like below.

Traditional Kitchen design by New York General Contractor World Contracting LLC
(Source: www.houzz.com)

These are the  main ideas we have so far, if you have any ideas that you would like to contribute, do drop me a mail or leave a comment below.