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housethingsgoing
A frog and a duck living in a 4rm resale flat
We didn't budget for any of these items T.T
7202
- Minimalist
- HDB (Resale)
- ~1,000 sqft
- 3 br
- Couple Living
One of the reasons why we bought our house was that the house was still in relatively 'original' condition without major built-ins and modifications, so we thought that would help to keep our reno costs in check. Unfortunately, our budget was given a reality check multiple times throughout the reno process with all these costs that kept popping up like mushrooms. We wish we could eat them like delicious mushrooms, but unfortunately, they were a hard pill to swallow :( 
We knew the original vinyl flooring of the house we bought wasn't the best - we could feel the vinyl popping up under our feet even when we were viewing the house. We already knew we wanted to re-do the flooring so we didn't think much of it. We assumed that the previous owner hadn't used the best vinyl and that the wear and tear of the past 5 years had caused it to start coming apart. That was until... our contractors peeled off the vinyl during the reno process and told us that the floor below hadn't been cement screeded, which meant that new vinyl would eventually pop upwards too because THE FLOOR WAS NOT EVEN. 
And... that's the story of how we paid another $1000+ to cement screed the floor beneath to make it even. Moral of the story: if you're buying a resale flat, CHECK WHETHER THE OWNER SCREEDED THE FLOOR! But our floor is all nice and flat now - and no vinyl planks have popped after 1.5 years of living here so i guess it's all good for now :) Onward to the next unexpected expense! 
So... if you are the homeowner of a new BTO, or if you're buying a not-too-old resale flat, you'd probably noticed that the HDB provided bathroom doors sometimes resemble bedroom doors. They come with proper doorframes and handles, unlike the uh... flimsy plastic folding doors of the 1980s and 1990s. Our toilet door doesn't come with the original door frame because of a long and painful story. Instead, we have a slide and swing door that was supposed to be mounted to the original door frame, but this clearly didn't happen. 
Toilet door frames were not something we thought about much (who thinks about toilet door frames on a regular basis right?!), until... WE REALISED OUR DOOR FRAMES WERE ROTTEN. (See the... unpleasant state of our door in the picture above) This happened when our ID noticed that the door frames looked a little off, so we gave the bottom of the frames a solid kick (with our shoes on) and WE KICKED A HOLE IN OUR DOORFRAME. (I assure everyone that we're normal people and not like The Hulk) To be honest, we never even considered this as a potential issue when viewing the house so this was 100% unexpected. Even our ID didn't expect it. We called our fathers (both Frog's father and Duck's father) to come to the house and THEY WERE SHOCKED TOO. So apparently the previous owner didn't have a shower kerb so all the water in his toilet was been sloshing against the metal frames for 5 years... resulting in the corrosion of the door frames. Our ID said that we could tear down the existing door frames (for a fee) and then put back new frames (which also have to be paid for) - the total cost came up to close to $2,000 WHICH WAS SHOCKING AGAIN. We could of course retain the original frames but who wants to live with rotten frames in the house... So after much panicking over this issue, we got help from a fellow homeowner on IG, who suggested that we remove the frames but mount our new door against the wall instead. This was what we went with, and we ended up paying another $1K-ish to remove the frames and "make good" the walls around it so we could mount our new doors. Note: this solution only works if you're using slide and swing doors that come with their own frame - if you're using a normal door/glass door then you'll have to replace the frames :') We don't have a moral of the story for this because we only realised the damage when we kicked the door, which we do not recommend doing at any house viewings. But i guess you can kick your door after you buy the house - although it would be too late to haggle down the price by then. 
The final spend is a little more insignificant, but still painful :') This is what our bedroom looks like now, with the aircon perpendicular to the door. And yes, before anyone asks... our wardrobe is doing fine despite having the cold air blow at it (we made sure to have the aircon on dry mode and also to air the room regularly) 
But what nobody knows is that... we paid $300 to shift the aircon LOL. The original aircon was here (see the pic!) and by here, I mean yes, half of it was over the door. Awkward position aside, the aircon also ate into our planned wardrobe space, which meant that we would have to cut our wardobe size in order to accomodate the aircon And obviously Frog would be the one who would have his wardrobe space cut right :) So after lots of talking about it, we decided to cough up the money and have the aircon shifted. We didn't position it further down the wall, directly opposite the bed, because we have long-term plans to get a projector and watch movies against that wall LOL. 
Sooooo.... after paying for all of the items stated above, we were close to losing our minds LOL. And when we also saw that our service yard wall was COMPLETELY by the previous owner's wallpapering attempts, we died internally lol. Our ID estimated that it could cost another few hundreds of dollars to replaster the whole wall. That was when Duck decided that we would say NO to more add-on costs and decided to PLASTER THE WALL HERSELF (after watching a couple of YouTube videos). Frog was uhm... politely encouraged to join in the plastering so between the two of us, we spent $10 on materials and about 8 hours converting this mess of a wall to... 
... THIS WALL. It looks perfectly restored in photos but nah, it's not really that even in real life (you can still see a few cracks and lumps here and there because we are YouTube trained wall-plasters) but it's not something we notice on a day to day basis. So i guess the moral of the story is... yes, there will be unexpected costs and no, you won't always notice them at your house viewing(s) if you're getting a resale flat. (Or maybe just don't be like us and buy a house after the first viewing)
6 June
