Home3 of our favourite kitchen/dry pantry reno decisions!
housethingsgoing
A frog and a duck living in a 4rm resale flat
3 of our favourite kitchen/dry pantry reno decisions!
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- Minimalist
- HDB (Resale)
- ~900 sqft
- 3 br
- Couple Living
What do aspiring home chefs put in their kitchen? We say aspiring because we don't proclaim to be very good cooks :) Duck is an wannabe home chef who learns how to cook from TikTok and Lemon8. Frog is an air fryer chef (aka a person who specialises in using the air fryer, and ONLY the air fryer) Our main goal is to cook edible meals without sending anyone to the hospital or burning the house down. But yes, context aside, here are some of the best decisions (we think) we made for our kitchen! 
1. Our sintered stone countertops! Cooking with sintered stone has been an absolute joy - no more rushing to clean up spills or looking for pot holders whenever we want to put down a hot pot/pot lid. Our countertops have been super easy to clean as well - they're still looking as good as new even after more than a year of regular cooking. Plus, not sure if it's just us but sintered stone feels much nicer to touch as compared to quartz or kompacplus. Legend has it that you'll sometimes find Duck lovingly stroking her sintered stone countertops when she has nothing better to do .... However, the downside of sintered stone is definitely the cost - it didn't come cheap :( But as a result of that, we discovered our second reno non-regret! 
2. Crystal glass backsplash! We would have sintered stone our entire backsplash if we could, but unfortunately we have a mortgage to pay... so we went for glass, the cheapest and possibly most no-frills option for the backsplash. While we may have been 'forced' into this decision out of our lack of wealth, the glass backsplash turned out to be a great decision! It's firstly really easy to clean - no grout or tile lines to scrub. We just give it a quick wipe down with a general kitchen cleaner whenever it gets dusty/greasy. However, our favourite thing about it is that.... IT IS A WHITEBOARD! If you've been one of those kids who always wanted to have a giant whiteboard growing up, this is going to be a dream come true for you :) Duck uses the whiteboard for a ton of functions. We have a glass backsplash at our dry pantry where we write down our Wi-Fi password to share with guests, create grocery lists and to-do lists... Duck also uses it to write complaints about her husband so he can see it LOL. Communication is key in a marriage, right? :P On the stove side, the backsplash has been super handy in writing down recipes (e.g. like this sauce recipe we recently used) so Duck can just focus on the cooking without constantly referring to her phone/iPad for the recipe. Plus, it's also easier to just look at the board and follow the ingredient proportions when the cooking gets messy and we have oily/sticky hands. 
3. Deep drawers! We have a few of these deep drawers - two at our dry pantry and one inside our kitchen. The drawers are also particularly wide (see the next picture!) at around 60-80cm, instead of the standard 40-50cm widths you might see in a lot of BTO kitchen packages. The deep drawer in our kitchen have been great for keeping random cooking tools (e.g. colanders, big mixing bowls) while the ones in our dry pantry are used for snacks! Fun fact: Duck has a strong belief that granola packets should be kept standing upright so she went to the supermarket and measured random granola packs to decide on the height of the drawer. As a result of this obsessive behaviour, we can now keep our packets standing upright! It's a small thing but it satisfies our OCD LOL. But if you're not too keen on bringing your measuring tape to the supermarket, you can use the length of an A4 paper as a reference for the height of your drawers! All our deep drawers can also fit A4 documents in portrait form - this was helpful because we used to store instruction manuals and warranty cards in the pantry drawers when we first moved in for ease of access (we've since shifted them into the bomb shelter after we learnt how to use our appliances and didn't need the manuals anymore LOL. 
Here's what the deep drawers look like from outside! We've two of them stacked up under our 88cm countertop. And... that's our three favourite reno decisions we've made for our kitchen and dry pantry! Hope this post will be useful if you're also in the process of designing your dream kitchen :)
