Our long awaited renders! (which people are most excited about other than the actual house) Let us walk you through our 2D home! But before that, here is our original floor plan (in case you missed our previous post!). 
It may seem like our new layout involves “only” hacking our kitchen/dining wall but I assure you that countless days and nights were spent finding this most optimal one for us. 
Coming into our foyer, we’ve done up additional carpentry to cover the original DB box and better utilise the space inside it. At the same time, we extended the cabinets to have our main storage space for shoes (yes we are both caterpillars haha!) This was actually an idea given by one of the IDs which we did not go with eventually. Most ideas by IDs involved covering up the bomb shelter door and having the cabinets on that same side. However due to the limited space we have, it was not very feasible for us. We also included a top and bottom niche for a display area and for our home slippers respectively. One of our favourite aesthetics in this area has to be the curved tiles which visually separates our living & dining area! If it somehow looks familiar, we will have to give 100% credit to @jjhomestories for this amazing inspiration! For this to happen, we also extended our kitchen tiles to the dry pantry area. 
Our living room orientation ended up remaining the same after we decided on not hacking BR3. Some decisions which remained included having a partition behind the sofa area to cover up recess area and not having any false ceiling! However, we also decided not to build a niche (which is the current trend) for flexibility to change up the space in the future. We had gotten a ladder shelf instead which is not in the render. Can’t wait to put that up! 
As for our kitchen, after hacking the existing wall to make it open-concept, it resulted in many combinations in which we could orient our space for dining and a dry pantry. Our final layout follows the “kitchen triangle rule” which is a design concept that connects the 3 main work areas - sink, stove and fridge - to improve efficiency and workflow. Once we found the correct way to have this triangle in place, it made other decisions a lot easier. One thing that we decided against early on was an island. We preferred a larger dry pantry and our current layout will give us 5.5ft of that! The column of full height cabinets for our pull-out oven and rice cooker was a late addition. We debated on extending our kitchen cabinets to make it L-shaped but decided against it as it meant making our dining area a lot squeezier. Ultimately, this meant it had to be kept within the 10-ft of wet kitchen cabinets and eat into some of our existing counter top space. Our kitchen will also include 2 partition works which may not be immediately obvious. One of which is to have a partition behind our kitchen cabinets to make kitchen backing even. The other being boxing up the window panel behind the fridge so that it does not “stick out” from our service yard and we can maintain our dry pantry length! 
The other favourite part of the house has to be our master bathroom! The actual tile colour looks even better than the render and achieved the actual hotel vibe that we wanted! We had decided on a full-height wall together with the niche for our shower bottles. The more conventional choices included a full-height glass wall or a half-height tiled and glass separation. This would then typically involve some partition works to build a niche at the shower head area. However, we decided against glass surfaces in the toilet after seeing so many homeowners struggling with keeping it sparkly and clean. Having the full-height wall meant we could also put the niche together instead of having a separate partition behind the shower head. Our render actually shows an extended kerb which is meant to prevent water from flowing out to our dry area. However, when the tiler came down on-site, he explained that having a drop-down shower floor was possible since we are doing up our tiles for the toilet. How happy we were to hear that! The only trade-off would be a slightly higher kerb at the bathroom entrance (something that we could accept better aesthetically). Lastly, we also opted for acrylic light panels instead of the usual BTO mesh for easier maintenance, better aesthetics and extra lighting for our bathrooms. Pardon the lack of common bathroom render as we plan to keep it simple. 
And finally, our master bedroom! One of R’s priority is to have enough wardrobe space. A L-shaped wardrobe was the most optimum, instead of U-shaped to keep our bedroom more open. We thus also naturally opted for a storage bed. Some things that we decided against include hacking BR2’s wall to create more storage cabinets or a walk-in wardrobe. We wanted to keep that room fully usable for our kids in the future. We also did not opt for a headboard and in-built vanity table so that our bedroom layout can be kept more flexible. However, this also meant that we needed to find a vanity table that was of the right size to fit in. Let’s hope we got the right one! 
Our ID had gone through 4-5 versions of renders for us and we’re really thankful for that as the norm for IDs is to do only 2-3 versions FOC. This certainly helped us visualise the space and colour better. We’re really happy with this final version and can’t wait to show the actual house soon!
6 days ago
