housethingsgoing
A frog and a duck living in a 4rm resale flat
How we planned our layouts - read this if you’re a new homeowner!
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Like every new homeowner, we deliberated long and hard over our ideal layout when we first started planning for renovation. We’re fortunate to have found a resale flat that has the bomb shelter entrance in the kitchen so we have a relatively open and spacious L-shaped living/dining area! This opened lots of room for possibilities… and also dilemmas 😅 so here’s some of the layouts we experimented with and our reasons for choosing the final layout we had 
Before we thought about furniture and carpentry, here are some of our non-negotiable changes we made for the area- 1. Flushing the recessed wall : we have a super narrow recessed area (just 1-2 inches in depth) so it couldn’t be repurposed into shelves and just looked really annoying - hence the decision to add plasterboard to make the wall flushed. 2. Building a divider between the main door and actual living room : partially for fengshui, most for privacy and also to demarcate the entryway space 3. Removing the previous owner’s kitchen countertop : they had a bar counter that we didn’t really like so we hacked that to open up the original big kitchen entrance 
This was the first layout we considered - we wanted to be able to watch TV from the dining area so the TV was meant to face everyone 🥹 We also created a dry pantry area to replace the small bar counter so we could keep the kitchen entrance wide while increasing storage area for our food and other random stuff. This idea was quickly discarded because: 🫠 we realised it might not be a good idea to wall mount our TV on plasterboard (structurally dangerous OR we would have to pay to reinforce the board) 🫠 we also realised it would cap our sofa size unless we wanted a protruding sofa - that meant a 2.5 seater at the most and we were having trouble finding a nice sofa that size 
The next layout was actually inspired by some home listings we saw online of other flats with the same layout - the TV console would be centred so literally everyone would get a good view of the TV and we would have this island counter thingy with the dining table extending out from it. We envisioned having plugs built into the island so we could have table-height plugs to charge our laptops when we worked at the dining table or for steamboat dinners 😍 This was also discarded because 😳 wall mounting tv on a plasterboard false wall problem would still exist 😳 we could get an L sofa for more seating but the placement would look rather weird 😳 person sitting at the pink seat of the dining area would be forever trapped in their seat 🤣 
As you can tell, the ideas are getting more wild 🤣 In this version, we swapped the TV and sofa so we could mount the TV on a proper wall. we also shifted our entryway divider backwards to make space for some kind of storage - cos where would we keep our extra tissue paper and socks?!? 🤣 And instead of the island counter thingy, we would build this dry pantry cabinet thingy instead beside the door so we could conveniently put our things there and also keep the entrance to the kitchen big and wide. We kept the TV idea but got rid of the dry pantry beside the door thing because we realised nobody drinks coffee standing beside the main door (unless you have a home cafe with lots of customers coming in) And we also concluded that the dry pantry (with its coffee machine and food items) should probably be near the kitchen for greater synergy 🤨 So that leads us to… 
Our final (and current) layout! We kept the TV, sofa and entryway cabinet ideas from the previous version, but moved the dry pantry beside the kitchen! We also extended it to become an L shape so we could have more countertop space. To keep the kitchen entrance airy, we only built top cabinets along the wall - the protruding area of the pantry has a glass bifold window on top so we can do an open or closed kitchen AND also keep the airy, open look with the glass panels letting light through . 
And this is how our house looks (on a good day - we are definitely not so neat and clean most of the time 😛) It took us a while to get to this final layout (and surprisingly none of the IDs we met for intial chats suggested this layout to us 🫠) So if you’re a new homeowner planning your space - here are some of our little tips: 🏠 don’t just think about how things will look - also think about how people will move and stand around (e.g you’re more likely to hover in front of your coffee machine/record player/wine counter so it doesn’t make sense to place those along a corridor or space where people have to keep squeezing past you to get out) 🏠 design your house for YOU first!! - you might want to add in features for your guests or family members who will visit or hang out, but think about how often this happens! Eg if you host a group of 10 people once every few months, then it might not make sense for you to compromise on space for what you love (display, gadgets, armchairs,etc) to fit in a 10 seater dining table or giant couch. 🏠 mockup mockup mockup! Some things look good in your head but when you put down the actual measurements and mock it up, they don’t really make sense (eg like squeezing a full sofa along our tiny wall)
10 days ago
