housethingsgoing
A frog and a duck living in a 4rm resale flat
Where we sacrificed beauty for practicality in our 4RM resale flat
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Welcome to the post where we expose all the not-so-nice parts of our house! Okay, maybe ugly might be an overstatement but these are the areas where we chose to forgo the aesthetics for functionality. We love beautiful things, but at the end of the day, we must confess that we are… lazy people who value our convenience and are very afraid of additional hassle with regards to home-related things. So here goes! 
1. Our very exposed router It’s ironic that we went to great pains to conceal our wires and sockets at our TV console area but…. Our (ugly) router remains exposed for the world to see. As you can tell, the router is the super basic one given by the telco company - are there even aesthetic routers in the market? We’ve heard of homeowners hiding their routers inside carpentry, but unfortunately, we couldn’t find a TV console we liked that allowed us to conceal the router while still having enough ventilation slots for strong Wi-Fi. (That said, we’re pretty sure are such tv consoles in the market - they were probably customized or too expensive for us T.T) BUT this is not an un-fixable problem! We’ve been looking at router boxes on Taobao - will update again if we find out that helps conceal our router :) 
2. Our overhead dish rack Fun fact about our kitchen - the top cabinets are not aligned :) which defies all the laws of aesthetics and probably makes Frog’s OCD very uncomfortable. This was actually a deliberate decision - our ID did recommend for us to raise the dish rack so that everything would be aligned. But after doing the measurements we realised that raising the dish rack meant that Duck wouldn’t be able to reach the top shelf of the dish rack if we raised it - and that kind of sucks because she’s the person who does the dishes when our dishwasher is taking a break. Funnily enough though, the gap between the dishrack and the other cabinet beside it was JUUUUSTTT nice for us to fit in a socket so we believe it was all fated ;) 
3. Our exposed pipes Concealing the service yard pipes is getting popular these days - we’ve been envious of the homes where they have these super cool carpentry that covers the pipes and also becomes a storage cabinet for brooms AND also a charging station for vacuum cleaners and stuff but…. … our service yard has no windows LOL. The whole space is exposed to the elements so we realised it wouldn’t be a practical idea to do up carpentry. We also considered how it might be difficult to change our washer/dryer if they ever break down (touch wood!) or have to fix our pipes (we pray very hard that this will never happen!!). So yes, our service yard remains in its wild and original unaltered state - not the most beautiful, but it’s been very functional so far. (Ps. We charge our vacuum cleaner in the bomb shelter LOL) 
4. The window grilles YES they make our house look like a jail - but aren’t we all prisoners to our mortgages? (*laughs in debt*) Jokes aside, we struggled for quite a while about whether we wanted to keep the window grilles when we moved in. They were left behind from the original owners and to be honest, were in pretty good condition as well. We ( I mean Duck) even tried to remove the grilles from one of the rooms just to see how that looked. It looked excellent but we highly encourage everyone to either get a powerful electric screwdriver or a professional to do it so you don’t suffer the consequences of injury and bloodshed like we did :’) Removing them was a hassle and we had no idea what to do with the removed grilles (or maybe we were just lazy to find out how to get rid of them oops) We don’t have kids or pets now, but we don’t rule those out as a possibility in the future so… we’re keeping the grilles first :) And in the meantime, we’re coping with the jail-style views by unlocking them and shifting them around so they are semi-hidden by our curtains LOL. I guess at the end of the day, the TLDR is that homes are not 100% aesthetic - it’s okay to have parts of your house that don’t look great but it’s NOT okay to have a home that doesn’t work for you :) After all, homes are expensive these days, so we gotta make them worth every cent of our money!
13 September
