We are big fans of DIY installation for our home furniture, as well as getting almost everything from Taobao. Hence, it was no surprise that we decided to get a DIY insect net from Taobao!
For reference, we bought our insect nets & magnetic frames from this Taobao shop.
The Installation
Installation was a breeze and Tofu G actually had a lot of fun doing it!
The Result
While there were some initial concerns about how the insect net would affect the aesthetic of our house, the result turned out much better than we expected.
If you’re looking from afar, you can’t really tell that there’s a net in front of the window. You’ll have to go a little closer to observe before you can see the tiny criss-cross pattern of the net.
How to use the insect net
If you need to open & close the windows, all you’ll have to do is find the corner of the frame:
Pull the net up from the magnetic strip via the corner, then close it back on the magnetic strip again, and you’re done!
The Effectiveness
We’ve seen significantly fewer creepy crawlies around the house, with the exception of the occasional lizards and mini spiders.
We also had one episode of bees SWARMING around our flat for unknown reasons. Thankfully the insect nets did an amazing job of keeping them out!
We had unfortunately not installed them in our master bedroom toilet so we had some bees to fight that day. However, it would certainly have been a lot worse if we had not installed the nets.
The Price (& how much we potentially saved!)
This was the total amount of insect net that we bought and used for installation around our 4-room resale HDB flat:
- Living room: 3.3m * 1.2m
- Kitchen: 2.1m * 1.3m
- Study: 2.1m * 1.2m
- Master: 2.4m * 1.3m
- 2 Toilets: 2 x (1.2m * 0.6m)
In total, we spent just ¥622, or S$116 installing 190.84 sqft worth of insect net from Taobao. That works out to about S$0.61/sqft.
Singapore rates for installing insect nets vary, but a quick search will throw up results that the cheapest quotation ranges from S$8-10/sqft, inclusive of installation (subject to a minimum sqft).
Assuming we had gone with the cheapest quotation of $8/sqft, we would have paid at least S$1,526.72, excluding potential wastage.
That being said, we did have to deal with wastage and leftovers for self-installation of the insect nets – but overall we still potentially saved S$1,410.72!
Considering that the self-installation was pretty easy and didn’t take up a lot of time, we’d say that buying insect nets off Taobao and installing them yourself is a real money-saving hack.
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