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Entryway: Blending Retro Glass Bricks with Modern Contemporary Design
HomeDive into the $45K reno of our ocean-inspired 4-Room resale flat
housethingsgoing
A frog and a duck living in a 4rm resale flat
Dive into the $45K reno of our ocean-inspired 4-Room resale flat
1249
- Minimalist
- HDB (Resale)
- ~900 sqft
- 3 br
- Couple Living
Welcome to our 4-room resale flat located in Bukit Batok! After several BTO fails, we bought this house in 2023 when it had just newly MOP-ed as we were looking to live in this specific area to be close to our families. The main inspiration for our house is the ocean - not the breezy Bali coastal vibe, but the slightly more melancholy, deeper hues of the rocky Pacific Ocean coastline we've seen in our travels. 
One of the places that inspired our home is Jialulan, located along the East Coast of Taiwan near Taitung City. We've tried to adapt the colours and elements from the ocean into our home as much as we could, opting for blues, greys and white as our base colour theme, and choosing rock and stone related textures. We did, however, increase the proportion of white in our home to make the place feel brighter and larger - the house is already small, so we didn't want to make it feel even smaller with only dark colours. Fun fact: While the wood-themed/Muji/Scandi vibes is all the rage in Singapore these days, we made an active effort to stay away from wood furniture and laminates to align to the theme we had in mind. It wasn't easy but we're glad we made it work (somehow). 
Here's our floorpan! Our home is a 4-room flat that's about 90sqm big. We opted not to hack down any of the rooms or change the layout of the house to save costs and also allow us the flexibility of having an extra bedroom for any future kids/pets/guests. One thing that we really like about our layout is the fact that our household shelter opens into the kitchen - it's flushed to the side of the house and makes the living/dining area look more spacious. 
The previous owner of the house had three boisterous children, so the house had gone through its fair share of wear and tear with peeling paint and damaged vinyl flooring. There were also the classic kids' scribbles on the wall as well as sparkly stickers stuck onto random surfaces, which we keep discovering even weeks after our handover. As you can probably tell from this photo, the house was really brightly coloured - we're talking about lavender and blue walls, golden light fixures... and so on. We opted to give the whole house an overhaul, ripping out the existing flooring, kitchen cabinets and repainting everything to give the place a cohesive style and colour palette. We also added lighting points to brighten up the house and electrical points for our new appliances (the previous owner was only using the original set of HDB-provided points). That said, we did retain a few features in the house, like the aircons and fans - more on those later on in this post! We had initially budgeted $40,000 for the renovation and stuck to this quite closely, until we discovered multiple issues with the house that we weren't aware of during the purchase process. With these add-ons, our final Reno bill came up to $45,000, not including our fixtures, furniture and appliances. Our entryway was deliberately kept simple - we opted for no built in carpentry to maintain the spaciousness of the layout. We also retained the original HDB door and gate to save on cost (even though we know, sadly, that the colours do not align with the style of our house). A future home improvement project for us, maybe? We have THAT shoe rack that every BTO has at our doorway - we love how space saving and functional it is, even though it's not the most aesthetic. And of course, on top of the shoe rack sits our account's mascot, Freddy the Frog! Freddy is actually a decorative garden frog from Taobao. We bought him as a joke, found him very adorable and have since placed him at our main door where he welcomes guests and deters burglars (just kidding about the burglars part!) We also love money... hence the MONEY MONEY MONEY doormat :) On the other side of the entryway is a fluted glass panel divider that separates the entryway from our living room. Our main door directly faces our neighbours and a common area so we wanted a divider for some extra privacy (as well as fengshui purposes!) We opted for fluted glass instead of carpentry as carpentry seemed bulky and we wanted to have to light penetrate through our divider as well. Also, the texture and light reflections of fluted glass kind of reminds us of waves, in line with our ocean theme. Our entryway furniture is (embarrassingly, after all this time) still a work in progress - cobbled together from various IKEA items we've reused from our old homes as well as our wedding display. It's VERY practical and super low-cost but definitely not the most aesthetic - hoping to change this up in the future when our wallets have recovered from the devastation of doing a renovation and wedding in the same year. :) 
Here's how the fluted glass panel looks from the side - with our sofa hidden just behind it! The panel's width was very deliberately chosen so it would cover our sofa exactly without being too long and taking too much space. 
HipVanUnverifiedMia L-Shaped Sofa Bed with Storage - GraniteS$799.00This is our living room! As with most of our house, we opted to have no built ins so our living room is composed entirely of loose furniture. We decided flush the recessed wall behind our sofa to make it even so that there wouldn't be an awkward 5mm gap behind half of our sofa. This was also motivated by the fact that the gap was going to be too difficult to clean we didn't want it to turn into a home for dust and dead insects (*screams internally*) We also did some painstaking calculations for our TV area to make sure that all our wires are hidden without having to go through the usual (more expensive) way of building a false wall to conceal our wires. Our TV wire is behind the TV, and our router, humidifier and other charger wires are hidden inside our console from Taobao. Our dining area is located diagonally across from our living room. We didn't do much to this area, apart from adding a lamp over the dining table. Our dining table is a sintered stone extendable table - it fits up to 8 if we extend the table and pull it away from the wall. We got this specifically from Taobao as we couldn't find any plain sintered stone tables that matched this aesthetic in Singapore (somehow everyone's sintered stone is marble patterned?) 
Next up, our dry pantry and peninsula! Duck is an avid coffee drinker so it's always been a dream to have a breakfast bar area in the house to make coffee, sip tea and catch up on the latest gossip (or read work emails, which is what happens more these days HAHA). Fun fact: we actually self-designed this whole pantry area ourselves because none of our IDs could provide us with a good enough idea that met all our needs. We created a model in Sketchup and had them render it and build accordingly. We're generally not fans of open shelving because of the cleaning, but we deliberately left an open shelf at the dry pantry where we keep our vitamins in plain sight so we can't forget to take them. Is this a sign of ageing? And in case you were wondering where the coffee machine for Duck is... we haven't bought it yet :) One other thing that stands out about our dry pantry/kitchen is also the bifold doors and windows - this was also something we came up with and requested for our IDs to execute. This house was originally designed to have an open concept kitchen, which is lovely because we get a really good breeze coming in from the service yard at the back. However, we do quite a bit of cooking, so we wanted to find a way to close off the kitchen (but also not close off our breeze and ventilation), hence these bifold doors and windows! We also deliberately kept the window unframed on the right so it meets the door seamlessly and allows us to use the peninsula fully as a working surface for groceries/cooking when the window is open. Here's our tiny kitchen! We have the household shelter door on the right, and then our fridge-stove-dishwasher and sink all packed into one line. It may seem like a lot, but this was the best layout we could think of without having to move the fridge out into the dining area. It also helped that we have a slimline dishwasher - this layout would not be possible with a normal-sized one. The other half of the kitchen is our peninsula and additional cabinets. We didn't intend to change the kitchen tiles during our renovation as they looked alright, but over the course of reno and the last year living here, they slowly started to wear down so... we resorted to using a mat on the floor instead. It's not the best, but the mat is a lot easier to clean than the tiles. Opposite our stove is our appliances counter - we have a cooking robot (like a Thermomix-kind of thing), an air fryer and a small oven. Our rice cooker is hidden in one of the cabinets as we don't use it very frequently. The oven is on a pull out tray that we can extend when using it so the hot air can dissipate and not get trapped inside the carpentry. If you were wondering, did we buy our oven because it was the only blue oven available? Yes. :) 
And at the very end of the kitchen, we have the service yard! We retained the original HDB BTO service yard folding door (which we have started to realise was a bad idea and probably one of our reno regrets). We didn't do much with our service yard - just plopped in our washer and dryer, as well as a laundry basket and a trolley full of cleaning supplies. Surprise! Our service yard is the only yard in our whole stack (we checked haha) that doesn't have windows! The previous owner kept it open and we decided to do the same after feeling the super strong breeze that comes in from this direction. We don't have pets and/or children right now, so this is not a safety hazard to us (but a bird came in once and chilled beside our washing machine for a while - house guest?) Moving on to our bathrooms, where we've maintained the ocean theme despite not having any blue elements in any of them. This is our common bathroom - the tiles were chosen for their wavy, grainy 'sand on the beach' feeling. We also got a sintered stone vanity with rock-inspired textures We also have a niche wall that divides our sink area from the shower area. Here's what the two areas look like with the dividing wall in the middle. The wall has a lower niche on the shower side for soap bottles, and a higher niche on the sink side for toothbrushes/skincare. We chose this wall idea instead of a glass panel to avoid having a tiny, hard to clean gap between the vanity cabinet and the shower screen. Our toilet bowl is located right beside the shower area - there's no shower screen here, just a kerb on the floor to prevent water from spilling out. We've also got a covered toilet roll holder to safeguard our toilet rolls in case anyone showers violently and gets water everywhere :) 
Our master bathroom has a very different layout so we adopted a different tiling scheme for it! Our shower area has darker tiles while the dry area has lighter tiles - but both sets of tiles are from the same series so they have the same patterns (just in different tones). We have the same vanity for both bathrooms (but with different sinks, because we were feeling *experimental*). Also, spot our super awkward blue dustbin balanced in the corner of our vanity because a bathroom bin is one of those things everyone needs, but many people (including us, sigh) forget to include in our planning. We wanted to do a full length mirrored cabinet for the top vanity here, but couldn't block the bathroom window on the left (ventilation is super important in bathrooms #iykyk) so we opted for this single long shelf instead. It spans the whole wall and has the effect of making our bathroom look longer and wider than it actually is. The shelf is covered with the same laminate as our vanity for continuity purposes! Next up, the bedrooms! Our master bedroom has... no built ins as usual - which we thought was pretty rare since most of our friends have built in wardrobes. We were dead set on having a king-sized bed but also dead set on maximising storage space so we got a storage bed from Maxcoil. The bed is pretty high and doesn't have a central plank (the wonders of technology!) so we've managed to stuff three luggages, all of Frog's army stuff and a ton of winter clothes below our bed. Also yes, that's Pan Pan, Duck's 7 year old panda who owns the best place on the bed. Our wardrobe is from IKEA's PAX series - we got the super tall 240cm one so it still gives the illusion of height to enlarge the room even though it doesn't touch the ceiling. We also don't have bedside tables. Duck uses this rack from Ikea which is super slim (to allow the wardrobe doors to open) but very functional. Frog uses a stool as his bedside table because... he is a minimalist who has nothing to put on it except a pair of glasses. We do also have a habit of purchasing strange home deco items, like this Pepe the Frog tissue holder that sits beside our bed. Some of our guests find it quite horrifying, but we find it hilarious (and that's all that matters right?) 
XIAOMIUnverifiedMijia Garment SteamerS$145.90We have one room in our house which looks like this - it's our ironing centre and where we put our laundry, mahjong stuff, random things and also where our house guests sleep (on a foldable mattress we bring out - this ain't prison). People might say this room is a mess, but we like to think it's still searching for its direction in life. :) The last room in our house is the study! Well, technically it's the study, but it's also where we WFH, game, exercise and also measure our weight, so it's more of like a multi-functional room. We have two standing desks near the window where we work (Duck is on a 4 day WFH schedule) as well as loose cabinets where we display our collectibles. And if you were wondering why Duck has a chair and Frog doesn't, well that's marriage for you. :) Just kidding! Frog's still searching for the ideal ergonomic chair of his dreams so he's using a stool as an interim solution. 
And yes, the tissue box in this room is a whale. Come to think of it, we only have one normal looking tissue box in this house - time to replace it with something else! Our desks are actually white, but we all know how white and coffee do not go well together, so we got desk mats from Taobao to protect the table surfaces (hence the green and blue). Duck also has a growing collection of ocean-postcards on the wall on her side of the room :) The other side of the room holds our collectibles and two cupboards where we keep stationery, tech products and other miscellaneous things. Frog, in particular, has a splendid display of One Piece figurines (any One Piece fans here? Please DM us) - we got this revolving acrylic cabinet to store it. The cabinet is pretty cool - it has wheels so he can push it out to admire the figures from every angle :) And finally ending off this post with Duck's favourite display piece - this huge Spirited Away jigsaw puzzle she lugged home from Taiwan and took three days to assemble. Our cabinets have fold-away doors that allow us to display prints, records and other artwork, so this is a space we're hoping to continuously change up in future. We hope you enjoyed our house tour! Home styling is something that's really new to us and which we're still learning :) Our home may not be the biggest or the most aesthetic, but we're proud to say that it's very us :) (I mean, who has a Pepe rug in their living room right?) We had an ID during our renovation process, but 99% of the decisions were made by us (including the colour choices, materials and layout). We also sourced all our own furniture, fittings and accessories from Taobao and other stores. There was a lot of thought and energy (and blood, sweat and tears) put into creating every corner of our home - and we're looking forward to sharing our journey and experience with you in all our upcoming posts!
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jjhomestoriesamazing view 😍😍3 months ago
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