Our Home in Kovan

I mulled over this before the installation.  Came the time to install, we just went along with what our carpenter suggested. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! After a month in the kitchen, I have hit it at no less than five times and from all sides.  I should now be able to answer this with some authority: how should the hood be positioned?  Here's the definitive guide. It's all about the height. First, there is a constraint you have to work with: the maximum distance between hob and hood. For my Fujioh hood, the separation distance should be within 800mm. Second, determine the height of the hob.  It should be around 800mm to 900mm, depending on your height and what you are comfortable with. The height of floor to hob in my case is 900mm and hob to hood is another 750mm making it a total height of 1650mm or 1.65m.  I am 1.75m tall and the hood is just at my eye level. I had a chance to take measurement in my rental apartment, my mom's and my two in-laws': aver...

Taking a break from work at home, I decided to do a modification and see what the results will be like. Selecting The Best Wifi Channel Looking at the scan result yesterday, the best channels to use were 3 and 6.  First I tried 6, but saw that there was another strong signal in the path, so I switched to 3.  Verified that I was the only one on 3, I re-run the test. The Setup Here's the layout of my unit. Area of just 80sqm or 600 sqft It should be so simple, so perfect for just one Wifi router to work and yet... Real World Wifi Testing For this round, I decided to test sitting in various room in the most likely position.  The rooms are small anyway and I am no more than 8ft from the router or access points. Also to note that it was late in the morning, there should be less traffic.  There were also just 20 (it was 27 yesterday) other wifi signals around.  We should expect better performance, 'cleaner' results. Living Room -- Wifi Router ...

My current living room and three bedrooms occupy a rectangular area of 10x8m (32x26ft).  The 2-year old Aztech router I brought over has served a bigger area before, so I DID NOT expect to face a networking problem.  Why is the reception so bad here? Invasion of Wifi Routers! When the technician from SingTel came to re-install the PON, MIO box and modem, I asked him to conduct a test and here's why: There were 27 (!!) Wifi networks around me, some with very strong signals!  All the wifi channels were filled! Walking around the apartment with the wifi analyser app on my phone, I could see that once I enter into any one of the room and shut the door, the signals dropped off tremendously. Powerline Technology Is The Way To Go... or Not? I almost regretted not putting in Ethernet cables when we re-wire the house.  But then, to put in a patch panel, ethernet switch, LAN cables... put me off.   Another alternative was to put in a more powerful wif...

Pozzi  K321 from Tiong Yeong $65 Grohe Bauedge from Hoe Kee $114 Grohe, at almost twice the price is better built and felt more substantial to the touch.  But I am doing this comparison not so much to compare the brands but to show you the design.  We somehow picked both with flat top due to their slim look.  I found out it may not be ideal because water tend to settle on them, espeically  so on the Pozzi, leaving obvious stains.

Before After the kitchen, this toilet was the next in line that made us spent many agonising  hours.   Ignoring the pipes, the space was limited and I wanted so much to have a proper shower area with shower screen and a wash basin area for our items. Special thanks to ifp !   ifp  is a fellow Renotalk member who has the similar layout and showed us what they had done.  On the 3D drawing, it looked cramped.  But, seeing that it was possible, on 3D drawing, we went ahead to execute it.   Previous shower area was divided into two.   Wide on each side was 750mm, which was good enough. We put in a 4inch ledge so that all the bottles and tubes can go onto it.  This was something we did before in our previous house and we loved it.  Never thought that it would create some problems here. First was quite major.  As I had written before, the ledge took up space  for the wash basin area.  ...

Before After Straightened the curve wall - now can mount a shower set. What was good: 1. Straightening the curve wall.  Hehe...this was probably because the tiler was too lazy to cut the tiles to fit.  It turned out well.  Now we have a usable wall to mount the shower set. 2. Rain shower.  It might looked like an overkill, but having the water drops from the top reduces some splashing that might otherwise make this small toilet more messy. What was not good: 1. Wall tiles were too big.  Small toilet should use small tiles. 2. Floor tiles were too big.  Or maybe ALL toilet floors should use smaller tiles.  Especially critical in order to properly direct water flow to the drainage opening: smaller tiles make it easier to make gradient changes. 3. Tile colours were wrong.  I would have preferred a lighter wall and darker floor. 4.  The drainage opening should be located at a corner away from the entrance. ...

A week after moving in, we were sleeping on the floor in the master bedroom and sharing the common toilet... all the other rooms were filled with boxes from floor to ceiling. The first carpentry work to be completed was going to be the kitchen.  This was the area we spent the most time in design and configuration and would most likely be the room that would cost the most in fixtures and appliances. Kitchen - as seen for the first time The complete teardown After the first day of installation Second and final day of installation for carpentry Then came the quartz top The other side... big cabinets. It took a week to get all these up and it was already weekend, waiting for the backsplash next week and all will be done.