The Minton: Ideas and Renovation – 13 – Everything Electrical (I)

Bit of a funny experience to relate here that happened about 5 weeks ago during our key collection event. I arrived early at The Minton ahead of my scheduled appointment – I was the first resident to receive keys for that day – so was walking around the Grand Clubhouse, when a middle-aged woman approached briskly. The woman spoke in the mainland China accent, and my loose translation from Mandarin:

Woman: “Hey you. Are you a resident or are you renting here?”

Me: “Er I’m a resident.”

Woman: “Do you know we are getting Mitsubishi air-cons? I thought we were supposed to get Daikin air-cons!”

Me: “Er I dunno.”

Woman (looking annoyed): “Weren’t you there at their Minton showroom? They said it will be Daikin air-cons!”

Me: “Er really? I can’t remember…” (trying to find some excuse to run from this conversation now)

Woman (looking really annoyed now at me): “How come you don’t know? We were supposed to get Daikin air-cons!”

Me (thinking is there a !@#!@#! difference): “It was so long ago – I really can’t remember, auntie.”

The lady probably concluding by now that I was of no help whatsoever to her cause, huff and puffed away – much to my relief!

Ok; there probably is a difference between Daikin and Mitsubishi air-cons, but frankly, for me, really, I wouldn’t know – and in this case, some ignorance is bliss.

As renovation projects go, many new home owners will typically advise against letting your designer accompany you when you go about hunting for electrical and sanitary fixtures and furniture at shops, despite the obvious advantage of having your designer provide advice for you on the spot whether your preferred fixtures will work well against your current home design intentions. To be fair, I trust our designer, and he showed no inclination to accompany us on such shopping trips anyway, apart from suggesting to us several shops that we can check out. We’re already aware of the go-to stretch for lighting fixtures at Balestier, but our designer also added a few other places for us to consider: including Taylor B for furniture that’s different from the usual Courts or Star Living variety, the Amasco fan showroom, and also the very well-known Tai Yong Electric at Jalan Besar.

We made a pre-pre-final inspection check of our Minton unit on Saturday first, and apart from having an invisible grill contractor down for a second visit to finalize measurements, also witnessed workers doing a bit more rectification work – specifically buffing the long scratches off our guest bedroom toilet. That was a quick job – 10 minutes, all done. We also managed to corner the Bangladeshi defect team-lead, a stocky looking and jovial fellow, and nagged at him gently for the couple of remaining defects ahead of Tuesday’s unit handover.

Thereafter, it was off to Taylor B, a furniture warehouse situated all the way downtown for a quick look at their sofas and dining room sets. We didn’t find anything suitable for the latter that was within our budget or something that could fit into a typical condo apartment – a lot of their stuff seems more suited for very large landed properties – but we did find a suitable sofa that was just the right color, fabric material, and within our projected expenditure for this item. If we can’t find anything more suitable in a week, we might just go with that then.

The next day was spent electrical fixture hunting. We’re having a whole bunch of LED downlights installed in our unit, so started with a shop at Ang Mo Kio which manufactures and distributes its own LED downlights, then drove down to Lighting.com.sg – they sell Philips LED downlights which were too pricey for us, but we liked their Amasco fans – then finally to a Eunos warehouse that was offering LED lights at pretty low prices. After a day of hunting, we settled on going with the latter, picking up 30 LED downlights. Each are 12W, about 6 inches across, square with glass edges, and each having a separate driver unit (this makes the LED unit thinner, which in principle allows for our false ceiling to be less deep). The warehouse offered both single-color temperature ($28 each), and 3-in-1 types ($38 each) which toggles between warm white, cool white (our preferred for most of the house), and daylight white.

Here’s our projected LED distribution throughout our apartment:

So basically:

• 18 3-in-1 type
• 6 warm white type
• 6 daylight white

And the LEDs look like these:

The decision to go with this supplier was a little mixed though. The prices were very good for its specification, shape and feature set – but there was also some online chatter about the after sales support service. Still, we figured that the risk of a couple failing is acceptable against the pretty low price of the LED lights – and these are end-user replaceable anyway. Still, some caveats for persons who’re reading this entry wanting to give this warehouse a try too.

Fan hunting to follow next.:)