housethingsgoing
A frog and a duck living in a 4rm resale flat
Lights... on a budget for our 4RM resale flat!
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If you’re looking for very beautiful, stylish designer lamps, then look away, because this post doesn’t have any of those :( Instead, what we have are the very functional and affordable lights we got for our house. Duck is a first time homeowner and lighting solutions planner who doesn’t know too much about creating ambience and mood… but if you’re looking to keep your home (and your heart) full of light, then read on! 
1. Track lights - RM 165 (bought from JB!) We have the most basic of basic track lights - because they are versatile and you can change up the lights whenever you want. We haven’t tried that before though, but that was what the guy at the store told us. We bought most of our lights from Tampoi in JB, and brought them back ourselves by car across the border. They were definitely cheaper than what we saw in local lighting stores - We also opted for normal tri colour bulbs which alternate between warm white, cool white and pure white. The store does carry a few other bulb options, including smart bulbs but we didn’t enquire about thsoe as we weren’t going for a smart home concept. 
2. Track lights - RM 179 (bought from JB!) We also have tracks for our kitchen, but instead of having the individual lights, we opted to get these ‘bar’ shaped lights which also fit exactly on the same tracks. We ended up liking them a lot better than our living room lights, because the light is more spread out, as compared to the spotlight style ones in our living room, which focus the light very specifically on one spot. The downside, you won’t get to change the colour tone of the bar lights, which means we ONLY have white light in our kitchen. There’s also no option to change out the bulbs to smart bulbs or anything else. This happens to work well for our kitchen as well, because stronger and even lighting here is definitely needed for more practical purposes - like uh… inspecting food to make sure that It’s edible and also handling dangerous tasks like cutting and slicing. We have LED strips with warm lights against our backsplash if we ever need a softer lighting effect. 
3. Our dining table light ($179 SGD, including shipping) We had a very very specific idea of what type of light we wanted for our dining area - something slim, black framed and very minimalistic - but somehow we could never find something we liked. The lights we saw in stores were either overly elaborated e.g. multiple dangling elements, fancy shapes/crystals or just not available in plain black. It took us quite a whilte to find this light from Lux Lumens, which we wre initially skeptical of because we (and everyone we knew) had never heard of them before. The price, while definitely way more expensive than the other lights in our house, was still reasonable and we took the plunge to make the order. Our light was shipped from Hong Kong, arrived promptly and was installed without any issues…. Except for one. Sharp-eyed guests would noticed that our dining light shines UPWARDS instead of downwards onto the dining table. The politically correct reason for this is that we wanted to create a softer lighting effect and reduce the glare on the food/dining table where we also often did our other work. The real reason? The light was installed wrongly and we were too lazy to go and buy a micro screwdriver to release the catch and turn the LED portion downwards. So yes that’s our little secret :) 
4. Wardrobe light ($25.90) We don’t have a built in wardrobe or a built in vanity so we never really got the opportunity to explore lighting solutions for these areas during our renovation process. We also retained the existing lights and fan with lights from the previous homeowner so we had to work with pretty much what was there… Until we realised it’s SUPER ANNOYING when one of us has to turn on the lights to use the vanity area late at night/early in the morning when the other person is sleeping. But at the same time, we also didn’t have any designed lighting points left to plan a proper light/lamp solution, which is why we ended up with this - a magnetic bar light from Shopee! We attached it to the top of the mirror on our wardrobe door so we (maybe just Duck) can use it when we need to get ready/do makeup. The light is also magnetically detachable from the holder so we can hold it and wave it around other parts of the wardrobe so we don’t have to look for our clothes/bags/accessories in the dark. Best part is, this is USB-C rechargable and DIMMABLE so you can adjust the brightness based on your purpose. Brighter lights for when Duck needs to check her make-up and dimmer lights if she’s just slapping moisturiser across her face. And that’s all we have for our (current) lights - to be honest, we’re still learning about lighting even after living here for more than a year, exploring things like ambient lighting and having different focal points, etc And while our basic affordable lights have been sufficient for our needs so far, we’re still looking out for new lamps to change the way our house looks and vibes with at different times of the day. So maybe our next post will be on actual designer lamps? Stay tuned!
14 September
