Spring Is Here!

The day finally arrived when we have our home back to its clean and comfy condition.

After tolerating with the mess, the dust and disarray since last Tuesday, and after toiling with Wifey and Sonny for the rest of the week, we can finally rest and call it our home, sweet home again.

We had our home floor renovated.

It sounds simple but renovating an already lived-in home is a total nightmare. We did the flooring of the entire house except the ceramic tiled kitchen and our two bathrooms. The entire laminate flooring we had installed since the first day we moved in about sixteen years ago had seen its days way and was ready to be replaced.

We replaced it with the same type of flooring, not ceramic tiles or marble slabs but with a Belgium made laminate flooring called Balterio. This new type of laminate technology may be known in Europe but is very new in this part of the world. The contractor told us that we are the first home to install it in Singapore! We feel special nonetheless, however true that claim may be.


The whole house was "ransacked." Contents from furniture and our wardrobes had to be taken out for the contractors to shift them around. They pried open one end of the room and laid new flooring and then moved the furniture to the other end of the completed area to start prying open the old flooring to lay new ones.

It was repeated from one room to another, starting with our living room, then the bedrooms where they spent a longer time "maneuvering" around the built-in wardrobes. But the worst was the store room.

We knew we had lots of stuff in there but never thought it could fill up two rooms' floorspace!

We are Malays but felt we were so much more busier than the Chinese folks who are currently spring cleaning their homes for the coming Lunar New Year of the rabbit. The whole house churned out more "dust bunnies" than we could ever imagined!

We ended up spring cleaning even harder and throwing out more junk than we even remembered we had. Important stuff way back then but mostly for charity and the dumpster today.

We have been more than happy with our old laminate flooring. It was easy to maintain, not slippery, not cold to the touch as we can lay on it comfortably unlike laying on ceramic tiles where you can feel the coldness all the way in your bones.

Scratch, stain and high impact resistant. It was water resistant too but we pushed our luck too many times and had to deal with the consequence when we accidentally left our living room windows wide open at night before we went to sleep.

The rain at night blew into our living room and made puddles of water on the floor to slowly absorb in between the planks and damaged it. Rough ridges popped along the edges of the high compressed planks. The first incident was forgiving but by the third time, we learnt our lesson and had to pay for it... literally.

We love the feel of this type of flooring, so people may say we have not learnt our lesson still because we chose to install the same type of flooring again... yet, we have no regrets at all. We are ecstatically happy instead. We brought the resort living into our home now.

After almost a week of dust, a couple of days of putting back where everything was, throwing out the stuff we do not need anymore and six thousand dollars later, we have our home again. Phew!

We made it. The long weekend is coming... we will get to enjoy the two days public holiday and the weekend back to back!