At the very early stages of planning for our house (layout, carpentry, electrical works and all), we had taken a lot of references from various home accounts to ensure that we would have as few ‘reno regrets’ as possible.
After all, we had spent quite a fair bit of money on our house and had no plans to move out anytime soon, so we wanted to make sure everything worked and fit our lifestyles as much as possible.
That said, it doesn’t mean that you can spare little thought to how your renovation works out just because you don’t think you’ll stay in your new / current place forever! What we’ve found is that you do end up living with a lot of inconveniences and money spent for no good reason, so the best option is still to reference what other homeowners wished they had done differently.
It’s only been 3 months since we moved into our house so we feel that it’s too early to say what really counts as a ‘regret’ at the moment. However, there are certainly things in our house that look like they make no sense, but when you think deeper about it it somehow still make sense! It’s a bit baffling but let us share what we mean:
Night curtains in Main Bedroom
We initially installed these thinking that it’ll be helpful when we need to sleep in, but as it turns out we have a habit of waking up early and don’t really take naps in the day.
Actually we have no idea why we didn’t think about this earlier because this waking up habit is not new to us, but what’s done is already done so we’ll just keep it for the rare few times we sleep in and take naps.
What some other home accounts have shared with us is that they have nearby construction or carparks and the lights are pretty glaring at night. To be fair, our bedroom faces the carpark too but perhaps the lights are not too strong or our level is not too low, so we haven’t faced any issues so far.
Smart lights
We were very excited that we got all our smart lights from Taobao for 1/3 the price we would have paid in Singapore, but out of habit we just turn the lights on and off with switches… turns out habits are really very difficult to break!
However, the smart lights haven’t been totally useless so far. We do utilise the smart properties of the lights to set up different ambiences in the rooms.
Recently, we’ve also started switching the lights off with our mobile phone app more frequently because we read in bed and then get too lazy to get up and switch off the lights when we want to sleep, so I guess that works out!
P.S. If you’re planning to install smart lights too but don’t want to break the bank, you can check out the smart lights we bought from Taobao to make it happen at just one-third of the price!
Steigen
We feel that this item is debatable: yes, it is good for drying laundry indoors during the rainy season, but there is limited capacity for all of our clothes.
We’ve been told it’s perhaps because we wash too many clothes at one shot and should wash more frequently with smaller loads, or we should look at getting those multi-use hangers, but truth be told I would say it’s more of an issue of the width? It seems that the clothes don’t get enough space to air dry and we have to depend a lot on using the solar or wind function on the Steigen to make sure our clothes are fully dry.
LED light strips for platform area and niche
We added these for no reason other than the ✨ aesthetic ✨ but we can use one hand to count the number of times we have switched the light strips on.
We know it’s nice and a lot of homeowners do it but do we really need these installed if we don’t even bother to turn them on? It didn’t cost us an astronomical sum to install this, but it is still a cost we would rather do without.
If you have installed any of these, do share in the comments section if these items make sense in your home, and why — we are keen to know if anyone else feels the same as us!
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