housethingsgoing
A frog and a duck living in a 4rm resale flat
What we would change about our kitchen after 1.5 years of cooking here
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Welcome to the kitchen version of our reno regrets! The kitchen is one of the most heavily used parts of our home - we do home cooked meals pretty often, and because we don’t have a service yard sink, we do a lot of random chores at our kitchen sink too (like refilling our slurpy dehumidifiers) 
First up, the stove! We have this three burner gas stove/hob which we thought was a great idea because Duck had one like this in her parents’ home growing up. But here’s the plot twist - a lot of people think our regret is not getting an induction hob - but it’s not! We still love our gas stove even though it is more difficult and complex to clean. Duck still loves the feeling of lighting up the stove and being able to watch the physical flames under her pots. The regret is… we should have just gotten a two hob stove 🤣 we realised we’ve never used all three hobs at the same time because that level of multi tasking is too difficult for Duck 😬. In retrospect, we should probably have just gotten a smaller stove with two burners (one big and one small) and created some extra countertop prep space :( will do that for our next home! 
Next up, our appliances area! We’d intentionally kept this area clean and empty but in retrospect…. Maybe we should have put some shelves on the walls for that extra storage space 🥲 was thinking it would be great for display or to store some commonly used food items like our random potatoes and onions (which are now hiding deep in our cupboards and tend to be forgotten oops). I also thought it would be cute to have a shelf to hold our kitchen timer, clock and maybe even speakers so we can have cooking music! A girl can dream indeed 🤣 So yes kitchen shelves are important! Even if they are open concept and will require more dusting 🙂 
We initially decided not to retile the kitchen floor because the original floor was in good condition (or so it seemed…) when we moved in but after Reno + lots of heavy moving furniture around… Our tiles are dying!!! 😭 They developed all these funky stains which somehow have never been able to be completely removed. We have tried various cleaning solutions, brushes, electric brushes and even manually scrubbing them with a toothbrush (this is an excellent workout if anyone needs to burn calories 😉) BUT the stains always come back 😭 So moral of the story is retile your kitchen floor and… we can’t trust HDB tiles anymore :( (Also if you’re wondering why the tiles are degrading but the grout lines look so white and clean, Duck manually regrouted the tiles after we moved in 🙂 also another good calorie burning workout that gave her back pain for days ) 
Last regret - HANDLES Our kitchen cabinets are your usual soft closing kind with the groove to hold on to when you want to open them. That sounds all good and minimalist and pretty… until you’re cooking halfway and your hands have the oily juices of a half marinated chicken on them and you need to grab sauces from your WHITE cabinet 🙂 Moments like this make Duck wish she had installed handles on the cabinets so they would be easier to open and she wouldn’t have to live in fear of permanently destroying her WHITE cabinets with soy sauce marks or kimchi fingerprints or whatever 🤣 (And yes we know you can add knobs to your cabinets anytime but you know… people get lazy… and the drilling sounds tiring… so…. 😛 ) But yes we recommend handles/knobs for any cabinets you’d want to open while cooking or if you have elderly folk and kids at home! The soft closing groove thingy does take a toll on the fingers - Duck is not old (yet) but sometimes she has tired fingers after pilates classes 🤣
15 November
