The Minton: Ideas and Renovation – 27

Here’s the last of our finalized renders; the shoe cabinet that’s going into the yard balcony. We didn’t request for much amendments to the original design, apart from asking for more internal shelving in the cabinet itself, and also reducing the number of backpack/haversack shelves from five to four. That was after I measured the typical height of my haversack and realized that the first version of the cabinet’s haversack height wouldn’t fit what use!

Most of our large furniture shopping’s already done, though we’re still missing a few pieces and a bunch of other accessory items that we’ll pick up slowly once we get a better sense of the actual furniture dimensions, color and the like. Certainly for the new TV, soundbars, dishwasher, and laundry machine. Of the remaining large furniture items, we’re still waiting to see if the dining part of our living hall will be sufficiently wide to hold a buffet table. Both our designer and Ling like  the idea, but not me though largely on account of my thinking it’s odd that we spent all this money fabricating a craft brick wall only to have a good part of it hidden by the buffet table. And not to mention whether the dining area will have sufficient room for easy access once the dining table and chairs go in!

Still, we checked out Francfranc – the from Japan lifestyle and furniture store – in Vivocity over the weekend. The chain is moving out of Singapore and have been having its closing-down sale. The store has just started that sale a week ago, but by the time we went by over the weekend, a good number of their large furniture items had been (nearly) sold out seemingly. Even some of the nicer accessories only had display pieces left – including a suitable wooden high-chair we’d like for the dry kitchen; we needed two – they only had one left, and that one had visible scratches on the seat already, and a wall-clock which likewise, only had the display piece left.

We did find suitable bathroom shelving at Sim Siang Choon though, the very well-known and popular chain of bathroom/kitchen appliance store. We toyed with different options, including floor racks for toiletries and hung-over shower stall door types – and eventually settled for three corner glass shelves. They look like the below, except that we opted for frosted tempered glass, and with matt-colored guard rails:

Suitable towel bars were a lot more difficult to find. While there is one built-in towel bar mounted on each of the shower stall doors, we’ll be needing more than that with the number of persons in the family, but the we don’t have a lot of working space given the orientation of the toilet doors. Ling doesn’t like towel rings since there’s less surface area for the towels to air. Looks like we’ll have to settle for Ikea styled behind-door clothes hooks.

And as for kitchen dish drainers – ugh. The side of the wall where we’ll be mounting these up measures just 60cm across – quite narrowish, with most of the systems we’re eyeing from Sim Siang Choon measuring wider than that. Doesn’t help too that our Corningware dishes are large and will need some clearance from wall to rack too. While we did pick up a couple of wall-mounted dish drainers from Ikea, Ling’s having second thoughts whether these are robust enough to be our primary dish racks.

It’ll be the start of the third week of our Renovation this week, with lighting and fan fixtures to begin today. Ling will be around to check things out – updates to come soon.:)