I blogged six months ago about gradually changing our furniture.:)
Now, just explaining things a bit again; we didn’t have much of a budget to work with when we were planning for our first home, especially after taking into account that most of my personal savings had been exhausted from the Ph.D program. It was thus a huge blessing that the family (also a Christian couple) we were buying our home from had kept very good care of the unit.
We spent just over $7K in renovations: just polishing of the floor places, installation of the door and window grills, repainting, replacement of bathrooms and kitchen fixtures and lighting. I didn’t do any hacking of walls and the like, and the one ‘indulgence’ we had was the choice of colors, which Ling has blogged about here then. Our renovations were, in short, quite minimalist.
Now as for furnishing we scoured the newspapers every weekend looking for bargains, eventually hitting a Macpherson warehouse, Beng Tuan, where we bought at least three quarters of furniture in the house: all the stuff in the bedroom, the living room and kitchen. The only room that wasn’t decked out with Beng Tuan furniture was the work room (with the exception of the green chairs), which we filled out with IKEA furniture.
Now fast forward to 2.5 years. Most of what we got at the warehouse has turned out pretty alright… all except for the cheapo fabric sofa which isn’t really comfortable. So, starting this month we’re keeping an eye out for a replacement sofa set. Pretty low key requirements: they just have to fit into our living room space, have a foot rest, and definitely no fabric sofas this time.:)
Did you folks take a look at the good deals Seahorse had last mth? It was surely a gd buy. Not sure if the sales is still on though.
Hey CY!
Last year, we had to change our old sofa urgently because of a pest infestation problem. We didn’t want to spend too much on a new set (as we were afraid we’d have to ditch it again if the prob recurred), so we just nipped down to ikea and got a set from there (One 3 seater, one arm chair) for a little over 1k (ours is fabric and they have a variety of sofa and fabric styles to choose from- they have leather ones too). We are surprisingly very satisfied with our new sofa- it is actually pretty comfy and well made and hardy, considering Ikea is better known for its knock down furniture. Go check it out- you may get a good bargain there :)
strange, we on the other hand are holding back getting stuff from ikea as we found that their quality had slackened quite a bit. 1 study table we purchased from Ikea caved in at the middle in less than 3 months..? 1 chair cracked at the side and mind you, it looked the sturdy type…our old Ikea furniture is still lasting more than 5 years on but can’t say the same about the new ones…:(
eh, we threw out quite a few of our furniture purchased from Star furniture…all used less than 2 years.
Hmm; our Ikea furniture has been a mixed bag. The plywood shelves indeed do sag a bit, but for the price range it’s hard to complain. And the shelves were exactly the color we wanted.:)
Our Ikea tables in the Study have turned out magnificently well though.