HomeOur 3 must-have investment items for convenience (+ tips!)
_firstoctober
Our Mediterranean home with a touch of Harry Potter⚡
Our 3 must-have investment items for convenience (+ tips!)
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- Modern Organic
- HDB (BTO)
- ~1,200 sqft
- 3 br
- Couple Living
Hello from @_firstoctober! During our renovation journey, we were conscious of our budget, but also chose to prioritise some items that would significantly improve our daily life. We’re here to share more about these investment items! 
As someone who finds herself frequently searching for keys before leaving home, and also absent mindedly leaving keys hanging on the main door after returning home, I knew that my new home would need a digital lock. Being able to leave home without worrying about keys or carrying them has been such a convenience. Although digital locks can be pricey, it was definitely worth it for us. The three things we looked out for in our digital lock were: 1) The ability for both the main door and gate locks to be synced, so both locks open when you unlock just the gate. 2) The ability to generate an OTP, in case we needed someone to access our home when we are not around. 3) A lock that does not have a lever/ handle, so we can just push the door open with our shoulders. This is helpful for when our hands are occupied from carrying groceries or other items. Tip: Install your digital lock before you do your post-reno cleaning, because the installation process actually generates quite a lot of debris to clean up! 
When planning for our renovation and furnishing our new home, we found it very helpful to take into consideration our daily habits and incorporate designs and appliances that would make life easier for us. For example, upon reaching home, the first thing I would usually do is to take a shower, so having a good heater with 0 waiting time was important. After doing tons of research, and reading lots of horror stories about heaters breaking down after just a few years of use, we purchased our heater, and we’re glad that it has been worth the price so far! It is more costly than other brands, but it really lives up to its claim of needing very minimal waiting time. Also, it has more than sufficient capacity for 2 people. There was once when our heater’s switch came loose so we couldn’t turn on the heater, but it still had sufficient warm water stored to last us for 2 days of (quick) showers, while we waited for our switch to be fixed! After a long day at work, sometimes all you want to do after reaching home is to take a hot shower and climb into bed, and this heater definitely helps to enable that. 
Lastly, the investment that paid off the most is definitely our robot vacuum. We find that we need to vacuum/ mop the house ideally twice a week to clean all the dust (and hair!), so having a robot vacuum has saved us countless hours and effort in keeping our floors clean. We still need to occasionally deep clean corners that the robot can’t reach, but at least the routine cleaning is mostly taken care of. Robot vacuums are constantly being improved and new models are launched frequently, so we would definitely invest in one that is even more efficient in cleaning, and able to reach deeper corners. Tip: If you have a carpet at home like us, be sure to look out for models where the mop pads can be lifted high enough to avoid your carpet getting wet. The mop pads on our robot vacuum can be lifted by 8mm which works well in keeping our medium pile carpet dry. Thanks for staying till the end of this post - follow us on @_firstoctober on Instagram for more home content!
