It’s hard to believe. Even when my wife and I have been staying in our new home for a month, we’re still coming to grips with the fact that we have a place to call home. We are most thankful to have a roof over our heads. We got our house through a resale HDB scheme. To put it simply, its a scheme where we buy over a house from a previous owner. Consider us the most luckiest couple to get a house which was kept in very good condition.
Upon returning from New Zealand, my wife and I weren’t really looking for a home yet. The thought of getting a home is the least of our priorities as we actually waited for our HDB Sales of Balance scheme results to be out. So there came day in the first quarter of 2017, my wife scrolled through her Facebook and saw her friend had put up an advertisement to sell her house.
I scrolled through the pictures and my first instinct was to view the house and immediately offer to purchase the house. Its a high floor, awesome view, 4-room flat. Mind you, my wife and I rushed to the house to seal the deal as fast as possible. If you were to see the pictures of the previous design, you might also be tempted to purchase the house. Luckily I still have the pictures for your viewing.
So as I’ve said it, we dealt with the seller straight. We agreed that we won’t engage an agent. The fees are atrociously high for something that we can do ourselves. So we saved a good $4K – 5K in agent fees alone. It took some time to learn how to purchase a house on our own. There are online materials for any average Singaporean to learn how to purchase their own house. Your best bet is to learn from HDB itself. I will try my best to explain how to do this in my future posts.
We received the keys from HDB in September. It was a really short wait. Being a minimalist, I love clean and simple looks. I wasn’t a fan of the dark industrial theme. So my wife and I took matters in our hands and engaged a interior designer. I already knew what to do with the house. So i laid out my plans with the interior designer on my needs and wants.
To summarize, our renovation cost only SGD15K. We did
- Vinyl Flooring
- Carpentry ( Feature Wall, extra Cabinets in Kitchen, Wardrobe, Study Table)
- Full repaint
- Additional electrical makeovers ( Electrical Points etc)
We didn’t touch the toilets. They were amazing as it were.
The killer were the furniture and electronics. I did not keep track of how much we spent but it was probably in the 15-20k range. Thanks to ikea and other miscellaneous items.
We are 95% ready with the house. We are still waiting for our prints to arrive so that we can hang them up in our viewing gallery in our house.
I have sent out invites to closest friends and colleagues for our open house on 11 February.
I will further expand this post with additional content on how to purchase a resale HDB flat without an agent and timeline of our renovation works in the future. Till then, here are some of the before and after pictures of our home.
Before
After
anuartahir - a visual entropy 