The Minton: Ideas and Renovation – 42 – Curtains and Blinds

We’ll be moving into our new Minton home this weekend, and that’s meant a lot of trips between our current and new homes transporting fragile equipment that we’re not trusting to the movers. These have included the many electronic appliances from the kitchen and kitchenware – and lots of other things that will not be easy fitting into the stack of rectangular boxes that we’ve been given – e.g. Hannah’s (many) toys. And anything else that can fit into the car each trip. Come to think of it – I don’t think our movers will have much to do during our Big Moving Day this weekend, besides carting along a few boxes of books, the fridge, the dryer, the TV, and a couple of other large pieces LOL.

Our new home has gone through several rounds of washing since the middle of last week too; including one general washing as included as part of our main renovation and another cleaning done by our own part-time helpers. As it turns out, these were both wasted as we discovered scratches on our parquet floors caused during the main renovation. That’s required urgent re-sanding/varnishing of our parquet floors one more time round just yesterday, and the dust and particles generated have coated the bedrooms and to a lesser degree the other parts of our apartment with a dirt layer. So, the general cleaners came in again this afternoon to do another round of washing, and our own cleaners will be returning also for another round. With hindsight, we should have expected that some damage to our wooden flooring would have occurred and required our designer to explicitly forecast it into his project schedule. Oh well – lesson learned, and ultimately a price to pay for a tight timeline for us to move-in.

The apartment does look quite nicely done up at this point, and the look and feel of our new home has changed significantly since the curtains and blinds went in this afternoon. To be fair, we didn’t look too far and wide for curtain contractors (we checked out perhaps just about 4 such contractors), before deciding on a Johore Bahru-based curtain specialist who’s also incidentally doing a number of other units at The Minton. Ling was in charge of choosing the types of curtains and blinds and the materials for each to her, but we did have a couple of commonly-agreed considerations guiding the decisions:

Our parents once remarked that curtains project a sense of ‘homeliness’ (whatever that means!) that is less evident in blinds. Might be traditional thinking at play.

We were watchful of shrinkage in curtains. Our Ikea curtains in our first/current home shrunk significantly over the years.

We were mindful of maintenance, taking into account that we’re staying in a relatively dusty environment.

Pictures of the three men who came by to work on the curtains:

We also made sure that our designer was looped in our discussions with the curtain specialist before main renovation began, since we did want colors and materials to mutually complement. Here’s the outcome of each room and its covers. As it turned out, our curtains specialist might have made a mistake in one of the materials used.

As it turned out, the job was not completed. We’d discovered that the roller blinds in the short side of the yard balcony would mean that the grill windows – that swing in – can no longer be opened. We’re laying this on the invisible grills fellow, as we did tell him that there’d be roller blinds at that spot. In any case, the grills contractor will be coming by soon to reverse the swing direction of those windows, and the roller blinds at the yard can go in thereafter.