DAY 3

Most of the rubble was removed today so we were able to walk around a little. The electrical cables and switches were left in tact for the time being, making it possible to visit the flat at night after sunset. We still haven't gotten the approval to take down the wall between the study and the balcony. It's a small wall with a big window opening. Not sure why it's taking so long to get the approval. The contractor says it may take a few days to a month to get it! We'll just have to be patient and wait. 

The workers clearing out the rubble in the day.

Same view that night.

Removing the rubble with a wheelbarrow.

The other daughter stayed in the car to sleep. This one is more adventurous and follows me around more.

The wall on the left between the study and the balcony awaiting approval to be taken down. 

DAY 2

It looked like a war zone today... I thought they were going to save the floor but it looks like they decided to hack the entire floor. I guess it's easier to hack everything than to try to match up with the old flooring. The house was full of rubble. My sympathies to our neighbours for having to put up with the drilling and hacking for those three days. I dragged my pajama-clothed daughters to the house but didn't stay long for fear of having them breathe in the fine cement dust. The kitchen walls had been taken out. All the wall tiles in the kitchen and balcony were removed. The built-in cabinets in the study and kitchen were all removed. It was quite a sight.

One daughter was awed, the other, disinterested.

We could not walk around the house, so we just stood at the entrance corner and shot pix.

Kitchen walls facing the living and house entrance where demolished, rubbish chute also removed.

The debris in the kitchen.

Another panoramic view of the war zone.

DAY 1

What lies behind the door?
We opened the door with trepidation, not knowing what to expect after the first day of hacking.

We popped by the apt at the end of the first day of renovations to see what was happening. I had come by earlier in the morning to drop the greeting cards under our neighbours' doors - the ones provided by the HDB to help new owners to break the ice with their neighbours - introducing ourselves and informing them of the impending renovations. We've not met any of them. Their doors are closed all the time, all three of them, and I had to slot the cards under their doors. HDB provided three cards so I gave one to our neighbours directly opposite us, to the right of us and below us. I wanted to give inform the neighbour diagonally across from us too but had no more cards to give so I left them out.

The HDB-provided cards which we dropped under the neighbours' doors. I thought the cards are a very good idea. It allows you to pen a message too! Well done HDB!

The flooring is supposed to be saved, so that we lay our tiles over it to save some costs. I guess that's why only certain portions were hacked. HDB only gives us three days to do the hacking, from 9am-5pm so all major noise producing works have to be finished within the three days, which isn't a lot of time if you have quite a few walls to hack!

The balcony wall tiles were stripped, as well as the floor. Balcony glass door was also removed.

The cooker hood and kitchen sink were dumped there.

Another view of the living room with kitchen entrance on the left.

The study.

The master bedroom. 

Another view from the master bedroom. On the left is the bathroom and on the right is the living.

The bathroom in the master.

The kitchen.

 A last look before leaving.

The Handover

Like little kids receiving a puppy for the first time, we dashed to the house after the handover at HDB was done and dusted. We met the sellers and paid them some cash to cover the property tax for the rest of the year and they handed over a bag of the keys to all the doors in the house, each one nicely labelled. The handover was done in front of the HDB officer, our lawyer, the sellers and their agent. 
It was over within 10 minutes. We could not have asked for better sellers. The couple, who are about the same age as us, are very nice and we chatted and got along well with them on the few occasions that we met. We were grateful at how organised they were in labelling all the keys and giving it to us in a nice bag. All this was unexpected.

The bag of keys. We probably can't even find all of ours when we have to do the same in the near future.

What we saw when we opened the door to our new home shocked us. The place was spick and span! We had expected cobwebs, cockroaches, lots of dust and bits and pieces strewn here and there, but none of that was to be found. Amazing! Totally unexpected! We were bowled over! And grateful...
I emailed them later that night to thank them. So nice of them. We let them keep one key to the letterbox so that they could drop by anytime to pick up their mail. They will hold on to it for  few months and finally drop the key in the letterbox to return it. 
It was a nice feeling, seeing our new place at another stage of our lives. Its walls and halls have seen so much history and we were about to create our own. We are the third owners of the place and were excited to start the renovations to see it shape up to become our new abode. None of this could have happened without HIS grace.

The empty hall looked even bigger.

The door to the balcony.

The balcony.

The study. All built in cabinets and fixtures can be left behind but the HDB rules deem that the seller must remove everything else.

Meg's room.

Emma's room.

The master bedroom.

Master bedroom bathroom on the left.

The kitchen.

Check back in a few months to see its transformation!

Taking Stock

After the initial excitement of having bought a flat petered down a little, the reality set in. The reality that the number of zeros in our bank account would diminish, the reality that all this money could have taken us further in our retirement years or even partially paid for our daughters' education should they want to go overseas to study...the list goes on. 

Why then did we decide to do this? 

We needed a change. We needed to start afresh, away from the mess we'd lived with for so many years. In two weekends, we cleared about ten years of junk. We were finally able to see more of our yellow coloured cement floor, we wiped a lot of dust off many surfaces, and the best of all, we finally managed to have a meal at our dining table after more than 10 years. It's always been at the coffee table, bent over in front of the TV. The mess was the main reason for the change, along with the fact that in time we would need another room for Emma, and we wanted to be closer to their school and our office. 
We love our place in Sengkang, and importantly, our neighbours whom we've gotten to know over the years. The few whom we talk to have been here for as long as we have and we haven't told them that we're moving yet. They will be quite surprised. Our neighbour Alice will surely miss Emma's daily call outside her gate as we walk past their door to our apt. It's a routine that both her family and ours have grown accustomed to. Both parties will feel something is amiss once we move. 
But all things must change, inevitably. I hope and pray that we will get along with our new neighbours and experience positive vibes with them. 
Our past few weekends have been spent visiting furniture and home appliance retailers. We've looked at dozens of dining tables, sofas, sinks, taps, etc. Our experience this time is quite different from 17 years ago when we went through the same motions setting up our first home. We were much younger then, with a limited budget, but very thrilled at buying our first home together and it was great fun furnishing it. I remember we engaged a contractor and I saw the renovation works through. Our home was simply furnished. 
This time, however, we've engaged an Interior Designer (ID) who is my old Archi school friend. I can't find it within myself to coordinate the entire reno works and we wanted a well designed, magazine worthy type of interior decor. I have some ideas in parts but can't manage to piece them all together to make it work seamlessly. It's the same with MJ. So we decided to bite the bullet and find an ID. 
I have two colleagues who recently bought new apartments as well. One of them bought and renovated a five-room flat in Bishan. He engaged an ID as well and his bill came up to about $120k without the appliances. The other colleague wanted to engage an ID but the quotes he got were out of his budget. He too bought an executive apartment like ours. In fact, we are neighbors. We live just opposite each other, in neighbouring blocks but he is on the far end of his "L" shaped block so we can't see each other from our respective units. A relief for him I'm sure! He bought his apartment about 6 months before I did. I never fathomed that I would end up buying my place right next to his! The IDs quoted him between $120k - $150k for his place which has the same floor area as ours: 146 sqm (about 1570 sqft). That provided a good 'guesstimate' for us. I'm sure our final bill will be in that region and more in fact, once we factor in the new fridge, sofa, cooker, table, etc etc etc.
So while our spending power has improved since our younger days, we are also wary about spending too much because we are tapping into our lifetime's savings. This money was meant to be for our kids' education in case they chose to go overseas to study. Now there is no choice, it's a local education for them. 
Also, the media business is deteriorating, especially the print media. So our job isn't that secure. The future isn't crystal clear to us, except for the surety that print is dying. In addition to our woes, a new CEO was recently appointed by the powers that be to run the company and this chap has a reputation for cost cutting, including and especially staff costs. So our future is dismal indeed and the fact that we've just taken a rather large bank loan is indeed worrying. Our target is to pay off the loan as quickly as possible, as soon as the initial two years are up which then frees us from having to pay a significant penalty for paying down the loan. 
All these thoughts have been swirling within my head and I'm sure a few new grey hairs have sprouted. We believe in buying things that will last, which almost always means they're more expensive than the usual, cheaper options. Just today, we went to have a look at a sofa that MJ read about. One that supports the neck, is comfortable and not too hideous looking. There are few in the market that fit this bill. To support the neck, the backrest has to be high enough to reach the neck and such designs are mostly ugly and a magnet only to middle-aged folks who have physical ailments - wait, that's us! The nicely designed ones cost a bomb. The reason we are gravitating towards the recliner type of sofa, is that we fit the "old men (and women) who have physical ailments" profile. This we can't help but we can determine if we buy an ugly or a "not-so-ugly" one. 

Nice but expensive. When can something nice ever be cheap?

They like this part best about 'trying out' new furniture.

This table at Castlery was very popular. Two people bought it while we were there looking. Of course we did not get it in the end.

Measuring The Apartment

The front door.

We went to the apartment this morning as our IDs AH and H had to take measurements of the spaces and have a look at the physical apartment to get a better idea of the real thing before starting their design proper. We made an appointment with the owners when we met them at the HDB for our first appointment about 11 days ago. We are very fortunate that the owners are nice people and easy to get along with. The couple are similar in age to the both of us. They have two kids and are moving to a private condominium. What struck us about this family is that they are thrifty. We can tell by the basic, no frills decor in their home. It's clean but the fittings and fixtures have seen better days. They've lived there for about 15 years, also quite similar to the time we've lived at our home. Their furnishings are simple and their home is not cluttered. I had hoped that we would find an apartment like this, so that it wouldn't mean us having to be wasteful in tearing down nice and swanky furnishing and fixtures if the apt had been in a 'move-in' condition.

So we met AH and H at the void deck of the block at 10am. They were early and we were on time. All four of us were colour coordinated in black tshirts and dark bottoms (they were in blue jeans). We'd popped by the petrol kiosk to get some curry puff and cakes for the owners cos we felt bad to disturb on them on a Saturday morning. 

When we arrived at the door, the owners greeted us. They had two relatives from Malaysia visiting, which made us even more conscious of our intrusion. But they were welcoming and said "this is your house now" to which I replied "not yet!" So MJ chatted with them while AH, H and I took measurements and photos. 

I was glad for the opportunity to see the place again for a better impression of it. I shot photos of each room as well, but forgot to capture the kitchen bathroom. The next time we will see the apt again is when it officially becomes ours, when the keys are handed over by the end of July. 
We could have gotten the keys sooner, but the owners wanted more time to move out so we stuck to 8 weeks after the first appointment. The sale could've been completed as early as 6 weeks but it was their prerogative to choose a later date. 
AH and H were done after about 45 minutes. During this time, MJ chatted with the owners and asked questions about the house and other stuff.
After the session, the four of us adjourned to have coffee at Nex mall nearby to discuss our design requirements in greater detail. It was a fruitful session that took about an hour and our next meeting is in about 2 weeks' time when they will have the 3D drawings ready for us. Am quite excited about that! Once the design is approved, they will call for a tender and appoint a contractor soon after. The renovation is estimated to start in mid-August and complete by end October or mid-November. So realistically, we can look forward to a end-November, early December move. Our lives are going to change rather significantly after that! Here are some "before" photos. We will shoot the "after" transformations in a few months' time! Note that the spaces look bigger than they really are because I used a super wide lens to capture them.

From right to left: the main door, the kitchen entrance and the master bedroom door. 

The living room. Entrance to the kitchen is on the right. 

Another view of the living room diagonally across from the entrance where I shot the picture above.

The kitchen is quite small and narrow. It can't accommodate an island.

One of my two IDs taking a pix of the kitchen bathroom.

We need to cover up the dustbin! We've grown accustomed to not having a chute inside the house. All the post 1998 HDB flats have common chutes next to the lift landing.

The balcony. The study with the door is on the right. We will break down the study wall and use the balcony space to form a bigger study.

The study. The balcony is in the background.

Bedroom 3 which will be Meg's room.

Bedroom 2 will be Em's room.

Bedroom 1: The master bedroom. 

The master bedroom bathroom.

The view from the master bedroom. All the bedrooms share the same view. This unblocked view was one of the reasons we bought the apartment.

Our view from the living room. We don't get a clear unblocked view and the road is just at the foot of the block. But the left and right protruding sections block the East and West sun from us.