We shifted to our new Minimalist home for more than 2 years back and would like to show you the design of it and what we enjoyed about living in it so far. As we really love our minimalist theme of our previous place so much that we decided to retained that design as much as possible. The main difference is that we have more stuff with two growing kids but they were constantly taught the value of appreciating experiences over having more toys / stuff. Ally is slowly getting accustomed to it but Ashton might still needs some time to grasp it.
Ally simply loves reading a lot and you will normally see her holding on to her books most of the time with an immense interest for Science and Nature. As for Ashton, he loves to use his soft toys to role-play with his sister, playing board games and solving jigsaw puzzle. He also shows interest for singing and dancing away and is simply our boy of leisure in the household. One of our favourite family activities within the house is that we love to watch nature documentaries by Sir David Attenborough like the Blue Planet and Planet Earth Series.
As for my favourite part of the house, I love to practice yoga in the living room facing the greenery which has a relaxing and calming effect to kick start the day on a positive note. I will enter into my wanderlust of creativity where I conduct my work and blogging away in my home office. Kate also loves the home office setup and the kitchen where she could whipped up some really good dishes for the whole family.
To reduce wastage and lessen the environmental impact of a typical renovation in mind, we actually shifted majority of the furniture and electrical appliances from our previous place as they were still in relatively good condition and we just simply love them. So there are a few parameters that we set for ourselves is that we try to retain the original shape, structure and layout of the new place as much as possible and minimize hacking of walls. The only hacking that was done were for the kitchen and toilet as the wall and floor tiles are pretty old with cracks. As it was during the pandemic period when we started the renovation, we gave some door gifts to our direct neighbours and families who stays directly above and below us for the inconvenience caused by our renovation and they really appreciate the kind gesture.
We overlayed the entire floor tiles with vinyl flooring like our previous home as it was easy to maintain, durable and water resistance. The sliding windows were refurbished by changing the knobs and the roller mechanism. Built in cabinets were kept minimal to encourage lesser stuff to store.
We managed to re-furbish Kate’s old piano (almost 40 years old and not been in used for quite awhile) at her parents place and move it over so that our kids could learn piano at home. It was also due to sentimental value when Kate was the one practicing on it more than 20 years back. According to the piano expert, he mentioned that a good piano can last very long if maintenance is done regularly and it had been working well for us so far.
For our living room, we bought a sofa as I realized that my parents and parents-in-laws cannot really sit on the tatami (floor) chair we had in our previous place. Most of our furniture are made of solid wood which may explain why they are still in relatively good shape. We also installed our ceiling fans and warm LED track lights to keep the relaxing and calming vibe throughout our house and keep it cool in our tropical climate in Singapore.
Below are some photos of our dining area and kitchen.
As for the master bedroom which is relatively big, we built in one large wardrobe and fit in one king size bed as our son still loves to sleep with us. The most amazing part of the master bedroom is not the sheer size of it but the availability of a small room within our bedroom which now houses our home office setup. Due to the pandemic, we realized how important it is to have a dedicated room for us to be able to focus when we work from home (WFH) . It was quite frustrating and chaotic to WFH when you have young kids or a lot of people at home. This is possibly one of the main reason why we decided to move on and make our current home pandemic ready.
Below are some of the photos of our bedroom, home office setup and toilet
We enjoy the serenity of the area which is a trade off with convenience as you cannot have best of both worlds. But its a good trade off for us personally as being near to amenities means more noise from human activities as Singapore gets denser and denser. This makes it a great sanctuary for people who needs space to rest within a tranquil environment after coming back from a long day at work. Waking up to unblocked lush greenery is simply energizing and also creates a calming effect which we never experienced in our lives before. We could see a rare sight of one of the few remaining durian trees in Singapore and spot some small animals like squirrels, roosters, kingfishers etc.
Having space and nature close to you is a luxury nowadays as Singapore continues to build more homes with a growing population. We do hope that Singapore could maintain a fine balance between economic growth and retaining the amount of natural green spaces we have.
Hope you enjoyed our new minimalist home tour!
The below photos were taken at different days or times of the year from our living room and we even spotted a supermoon last year.
