Week 1 - Moving in and tidying up

It is almost a week since we moved into our new home. We are still in the midst of slowly transferring our stuff from our old place to the new; but we intend to take our time on this.

There are a few things I hope to share with new home owners who are like us. Some may be relevant; some may be not but I hope it helps.

1. If you are doing timber or parquet flooring, the varnish of the flooring is toxic. Hence, if possible, allow ample time to air your room allowing the varnish to dry and odor to evaporate before sleeping in the room. It takes about a week of continuous airing before the stench is acceptable.

2. When choosing tiles (especially fancy ones), try to choose homogenous tiles whenever possible. This is so that when chipping happens, they won't look 'off' compared to the original color of the tiles comparing to ceramic tiles.

3. When customizing your kitchen's fridge compartment, it is also advisable to predetermine the size of the fridge you want to buy. If you have a few choices in mind, use the one with the biggest dimensions and work with that. This will ensure that you have ample room left when putting the purchased fridge in.

4. In choosing lighting, there are numerous choices suitable for different taste and budget. The one thing I feel that is universal is to ask the question 'How bright I would like my home to be when all lights are on?'. This will help you determine the total brightness in your home (e.g. Living room) and you can work on the moods from there. I guess the simplest solution to brightening up the place is using 'cove lighting'; and it works brilliantly (choose the mood that you like). Next up will be to select lighting that will create different levels of brightness or moods. There are a lot of choices from here on, i.e. downlights (LED, T5, halogen, etc), spotlights (LED, bulb, etc), feature lighting (bulb or tube based, etc). It is ideal to be able to create a number of levels of brightness in your home, either with dimmer functions or various lighting switches controlling lights from various points. Share what you have in mind with your contractor or designer and get them to do up the lighting to your needs.

...to be continued