With the sales of the flat almost settled, it was a huge load off our mind, and we can now redirect our attention and focus fully on the renovation. Armed with a initial quotation for a basic design which our ID had proposed for a re-sale 3 room flat like our's, we started negotiation to renovate and design our dream home. Actually, as the initial quotation covers many required renovation items such as demolition, painting, electrical work, we ended up mostly just adding items onto the already imposing list. After confirming the customized furniture, features and material we wanted, our ID gave us an idea of how he'll be planning the renovation.
Although his plan did seemed a little unorthodox and different from what we expected, his experience really shined through and everything went better then expected. The first phase will be choosing the tiles we want, and even if we had agreed that we should not choose too many type of tiles and keep things simple, we ended up choosing more then 8 types of different tiles for our home. The experience was mind-boggling, with countless tiles of different material, texture, size, design and color, some tiles are suitable for living room, some for kitchen, some for bathroom, some can only be used as wall tiles, and some are know as decor or feature tiles. The most challenging element of choosing the tiles is that the chosen tiles must not only be suitable for their function and location, but their color and texture must also have some synergy in terms of the overall design of our home, so that our flat will not look like a patchwork quilt. We were thoroughly confused about halfway through, and proceed to smile and nod as our ID and the very competent tiles salesperson took out different colors and textures of the series of tiles we had chosen and were proposing and counter-proposing different layout and pairing of the tiles. It is at times like these that we felt we had made the correct decision when we chose to use an interior designer.
All we need to do next was to complete the sales and officially take over the keys of the flat at the Completion appointment A.K.A Second appointment. We did had a short bout of panic attack during our second appointment as we had arrived and registered for the appointment too early, so when our number came up the representative from the law firm had not arrived and we could not start the completion process. It was also at that point of time that it dawned on us that as both the real estate agent and the seller will not be at the appointment, but had instead appointed a representative from a law firm. We did not realize that we do not have the contact of this representative, and were quite worried when we did not see anyone 15 mins past our appointed time. It turns out that the person had went straight to the HDB officer and passed the keys over already, so when our number was called again we were able to complete the handover successfully.
We had now managed to lease our flat from HDB for the next 70 years.