We previously shared our thought process behind choosing a Scandinavian interior design theme. While Scandi is a very generic theme, we definitely had to further customise our house according to our lifestyle preferences.
We had bought an old resale flat with the ‘older’ layout that was a bit tricky to work with:
The previous owners had done a very nifty job in changing the common & master bedroom toilets. However, other than that we realised there was a lot of work to be done. After much discussion with our IDs from Urban Home Design, this was the layout that we decided on:
If it looks confusing, not to fret! We’ll walk you through the most unconventional decisions we made to customise our house:
1. Hacked open 1 room for the home gym
While it’s not uncommon to convert a spare room into a home gym, we actually decided to hack away the wall separating it from the living room!
The original idea was actually to install transparent bi-fold doors separating the home gym from the living room. However, we were told that this would set us back at least $3-4k.
Directly opening up the space instead allowed us to watch TV and/or listen to music from the home gym without having to pay for (1) additional aircon unit and (2) additional TV & sound bars!
For reference, this is how our home gym faces the living room. The aircon unit (not shown in the photo) is installed right above the TV console.
2. Converted L-shaped living room into 2 separate rooms
If you look at our initial house layout, you’ll see that our living room is an L shape. The previous owner used a partition door to separate the corner of the ‘L’ to create an additional bedroom.
We still felt that it was weird to use that space as the main living room. Hence, we converted it into a chill area with their storage platform:
We kept the centre of the house as an elongated ‘open’ living room, as per what the previous owners did. It looks a little like the newer BTOs with their walkway, except wider!
3. Downsized study room to create space for kitchen & dining room
The original house layout saw the kitchen and the study room stuck together (which was kind of odd) and separated by just 1 wall.
We saw the potential to create space for a dining room while creating an open kitchen, especially as the current layout did not cater for a dining room.
Hence, we not only hacked away the kitchen wall and study room wall, but also BUILT back the wall for the study room!
4. Concealed storeroom & toilet doors to reduce visual clutter
The previous owner first made the unconventional choice of swapping the toilets, which resulted in the common toilet located at the entryway instead of the kitchen. The latter is the most common design as per most HDBs flats.
We found that quite ingenious and much more intuitive than HDB’s original layout, so we kept it as that.
However, we didn’t like that we could see so many doors (and a toilet door at that!) from the main entrance. Hence, upon discussion with their ID, we concealed all the doors with a feature wall.
Note: Feature walls are very expensive to build in Singapore due to the insane cost of carpentry work. We had to make a few other sacrifices here & there in order to get this done. You may want to discuss with your ID or contractor what other ideas they have to hide or blend in the doors!
We hope our sharing helps those who are stuck with odd house layouts or planning to renovate old resale flats with similar layout challenges!
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