Our Renovation Journey

During the millennia Y2K, we gotten our current house, registered our marriage, renovated the house and moved in. It is 2016 now, means it is coming to 16 years since Y2K, time flies! Things are starting to fall apart or have already fallen apart, and since we do not intend to shift house (no money, ha!), we decided to renovate our house. We took the opportunity to do a major revamp of our bedrooms and kitchen, aiming at building more storage space as more things built up since a family of 2 in Y2K is now a family of 4.

Hence, I started to look for an interior designer (ID) company after the Chinese New Year public holiday. I visited renotalk forum and installed Qanvast, a mobile app, on my phone. From there, I shortlisted 3 companies - FC, IS and SF. The selection was mainly based on the reviews found on these 2 platforms. I emailed them to inform that we intend to renovate our house and that we have to continue staying in the house while the renovation takes place as we do not have a place to move in temporary. Among the 3 companies, FC and IS responded to my email. Since we did not hear from SF, we assumed that this company was not interested to do our business.

I also asked friends for recommendation and gotten 3 referrals (Comp A, B and C). Comp A asked me to list out my requirements, and I did, which I sent to all 5 companies - FC, IS and the 3 referrals. Comp A looked promising at first as the ID was pretty responsive but I did not hear from her further, perhaps she was overwhelmed by our idea of continuing to stay in our existing house while the renovation takes place. Comp B did not respond to me after receiving my requirements. Comp C, FC and IS remained in the selection process.

Among the 3 remaining companies, only IS came up to our house to understand our requirements. For FC, we met up a senior ID at her office twice but never once did she offer to come up to our house. For Comp C, the ID tried to understand our requirements mainly through whatsapp; we did not meet up at all. IS came up with a quotation that best meets our requirements, not surprising, isn't it? Afterall, it's the only company that bothered to come to our house to understand our requirements. Price wise, IS may not offer the cheapest quote among the many ID companies out there but it was considered a lot affordable as compared to FC. FC's quote was equally costly as IS but it did not include many storage options that I requested for because the ID kept suggesting to us to buy off the shelves, which we have to factor in another substantial amount, and this made the quote not as attractive. Besides the costing, I also felt that the ID did not grasp our main concern, which is to have more storage space. Comp C did not give us an itemised quotation, so it was not easy to look into the details and evaluate accordingly.

Stay tuned to find out which ID won us over...