Home Tour

We have lived in our new place for one month now, although it hardly feels like it. I was a little surprised by how long it took us to get settled when I always feel like we left most of our stuff in Texas. The number of moving boxes suggested otherwise! It's finally all coming together. So, here's a tour...

 Our Floor Plan - with a slightly different entry

After living in a penthouse, we now reside on the second floor. While I will always love the view we had at River Place, the advantage of this change in altitude is that our home feels much cooler throughout the day. I rarely turn on the aircon units during the day and at night only Megan and Elizabeth's room needs it. The master bedroom and Emily's room both have ceiling fans and they do a fine job of keeping us comfortable.

When you enter through our main door, there's a small area that is enclosed but still slightly open to the outdoors. The shoe closet in the entry isn't sufficient for a family of 5 so we had to add shelving to accommodate our footwear. I guess we have taken to the Asian way of removing our shoes outside our home because we never thought of placing our shoes in our bedroom closets instead.

Welcome to Our Asian Home

Inside Front Door -- the side of the entry is open-air

Next to our shoe rack, we have sliding glass doors that lead into our living/dining room area. The kitchen is directly behind the dining room and one main hall on the opposite side of the dining room leads to 4 bedrooms and 3 full baths.

Living Room - looking in from the entry hall

Living/Dining with kitchen in the back. A glass panel can close off the kitchen.

Hall Bath

We changed in our bedroom arrangements at our new home. For the first time, Megan and Elizabeth are sharing a room and Emily's bed has been upgraded from toddler to queen-size! A 3-year doesn't exactly need such a big bed but her room is the guest suite with the attached bath so our visitors will sleep there.

 Emily's Room with a BIG Girl Bed

Megan and Elizabeth's Room

Megan and Elizabeth's Room

We made our fourth bedroom the playroom with a sofa, desk and the bulk of the toys. It is the final frontier of organization in the new house. When I could finally see the floor last week I thought that was great progress!

Playroom - see the little monkey driving the car? :)

The kitchen definitely has more counter space than our old place but still feels fairly small with two people in there. The "full-size" refrigerator that appeared so large at first sight really isn't any bigger than the old one, other than having a larger freezer. I have confirmed I will never purchase a side-by-side unit back home.

I took this picture of the kitchen the day we moved in. Those blue arrows under the sink were just protective plastic for the baseboard mistakingly never removed by the previous owner. 

Yes, I ripped it off within minutes. The dishwasher is just around the corner in the yard next to the washer/dryer but Joyce prefers to hand wash the dishes.

Like most houses in Singapore, the flooring is marble in all the baths and living areas while the bedrooms have wood floors. One irritating aspect to this place is that we have no cabinets in any of the bathrooms. Each bath has one small drawer, large enough for toothbrushes, and that is all. Where do they expect us to store everything? I opted to store towels and bath items in baskets under the counters. And as always, you will find no power outlets in the bathrooms either. They apparently like streamlined baths in this part of the world. While older condos sometimes lack a single bath tub, most new places have one in the master bath. Our tub is located right behind the shower, which is fine unless one child likes to shower and the other two like to take a bath. This equation results in a very wet parent!

One noticeable change from the old to new condo is the amount of natural light. All the baths have windows, the kitchen has a nice big window over the sink and one entire wall of the living area is a series of glass panels we can open, effectively making the balcony an extension of our living room. I love that feature.

Dining/Living Looking Towards Balcony

However, even with 2,200 square feet (that includes the balcony, maid area and storage closets), this condo definitely feels smaller when two children are awake for the bus at 6am and keep waking up the little one with their noise. And while it's more convenient for us to have our master bedroom on the same floor as the rest of the house, my days of sleeping in on the weekends are over because it's so easy for everyone to visit our room first thing in the morning.

Master Bedroom

Master Bath with the Shower/Tub Combo

We enjoy having so much vegetation outside our windows, although we quickly realized that can bring unwanted guests. Our first morning here we woke up to the call of a bird Brian affectionately named the "Jurassic Park bird." Its call is distinctive and obnoxiously loud. Thankfully it appears that the bird found a home further away because I can still hear it in the mornings in the distance, but it's not outside our window any more.

View from the Balcony

The Grounds

For only moving 10 minutes away, it still felt like a major move. We had to organize a new and slightly smaller living space and found we needed more storage for our belongings. After purchasing a new sofa, his and her dressers for the master and a chest and bookshelf for the girls' room, we're finally getting settled. Now I just want to find some pretty artwork in Hanoi to fill up the white walls and a few decorative pillows for the sofa. Any bets on how long it will take me to find something reasonably-priced here?

So far we are happy with our choice. I like that while we are still walking distance to the river, I can now walk to Orchard Road for shopping. It's a great location for us and I'm looking forward to discovering more places in our new neighborhood. We have already found a few gems and I can hardly wait to tell you about our unique post office!