New Throne Room!

HDB has kindly selected our area for the Home Improvement Programme.

Initially, TheHusband and I were not at all keen on getting new toilets as our almost-12yo toilets were still in pretty decent condition. So, we said Yes to a new door and a new gate but declined to change our toilets. A month before our block was due for the renovation works, they did a watertest for all the units which said No to the toilet upgrading. One of our bathrooms failed. So, since we were going to do one, we might as well upgrade the other.

And that's how we end up with this story for today.

My 'ol common bathroom. In perfect working condition and it had that mini floor trap. But this bathroom was sacrificed because "since we are going to put up with dust from the hacking of one toilet, might as well do the other one."

This is a story for all those who are going to go through this. On the day before the works started, I googled for experiences of people who had gone through this but did not find much info. Hopefully, for anyone who's going through this, this info would be helpful.

We were assured that if you do the toilet upgrading, it will take 10 working days (Sundays & public holidays not included). You should be present on Days 1, 9 & 10. On other days, you can just get anybody to housesit. If you are working, it will be good to take Days 11 and 12 off too so that you can give your house a complete scrub down.


This is a step-by-step guide on what to do and how to survive the upgrading process.

PRIOR to the works:

1. Find alternative homes for your pets, children and any sick or elderly persons for about 3 weeks. (You wouldn't want them to come back immediately on Day 11 what with the dust still floating about.)
(Thank you, Mak & Abah, for taking us in for 2 weeks!)

2. Get your new bathroom fittings. You are getting a new bathroom. Don't be so kiam siap, try to save money and reuse your old, mouldy, rusty fittings in a new bathroom. If money is really tight, the grab bars (up to 8 per bathroom, if I'm not mistaken) can be used to hold your shampoo bottles, towels etc. But you can get pretty cheap and nice stuff from Ikea. We got ourselves stuff from the Grundtal range - nice, stainless steel stuff.

3. This is the most important. Get many many big black trash bags (unused, of course) and wrap up all your belongings in them. Every single thing. Your kitchen? Don't even think of cooking in the 10 days. The toilet in your kitchen will be spewing dust on every horizontal and vertical space in your kitchen and beyond. (Beyond = Living room, corridor etc)

Pack your cutlery, your plates, your kettle, your rice cooker, your recipe books etc. Pack pack pack them all in those black trash bags. Pile them up neatly in one corner. Cover your fridge (unless you want a cloud of dust to descend into your fridge each time you open it). Cover your oven, toaster, washing machine, stove, microwave oven. Cover your bed, your TV, your computer table, your dining table. Cover everything.

On Day 9 of the renovation works, I realised that the paint shop near my house sells huge 9 feet x 13 feet plastic sheet for only $1.50. I wish I knew about this. It would make the post-renovation clean-up work so much more manageable.

Choose a room which will be your sanctuary during those 10 harrowing days. Pack up everything and only have the necessities out.

Your home will look like a cross between a war-torn area and an Ebola zone. That sanctuary for you to retreat to is absolutely essential. Otherwise, you will get so depressed by 3pm of Day 1 that you might need to check into the Institute of Mental Health.

4. If there's any 'special order' that you want, go to the office prior to the renovation and tell them what you want. I wish I had asked them to rearrange the placement of the wall tiles. I will regret this decision for the rest of my bathroom's life.

They also said that the bathroom doors are fixed to open on the left side. We wanted the hinges to be on the right side and TheHusband had to speak to the contractors and be very firm about it before they relented. And that's another thing. If you want any 'special orders', make sure the one who does the talking is the one who is more firm. Me? I can't do it. I can only talk to students and parents. Talking to contractors require a special skillset which I do not possess.


OUR STORY: We were both reluctant (read: lazy) to do much before the renovation. We covered some stuff in the kitchen and that was it. We were also under some false illusion that the dust level will be tolerable.

 Day 1 is the most horrifying day. At 8am, the supervisor and his team came, explained to me what would happen and then, very quickly, they put up their own plastic sheets. I was naive enough to think those sheets were enough. They stuck the sheets (which had been used many times in previous homes and therefore already had a thick layer of dust) to the ceiling using rolled up masking tape. The sheets would provide some kind of barrier between the rest of the house and the path that the workers would take to the bathrooms.

They lay out these vinyl sheets on the floor and protect your doors first. See the toilet there? That's my bathroom which had a little leak when they did a watertest but no leaks during regular use.

The plastic sheets around the bed. Covered the wall fans with huge plastic bags.

By 10am, full blown hacking of the old toilets had started. Oh boy. I stepped out of my sanctuary into a cloud of dusty gloom and doom.

Goodbye toilet - the one with the mini floor trap and tiles I like, even if they look dated.

By 12 noon, I was miserable. I thought those plastic sheets which gave the whole house an enhanced gloom factor was going to stay up for the entire 10 days of renovations.

Kitchen - everything was pushed to one side and they put up these plastic sheets which might have helped a teeny weeny bit in reducing the amount of dust on the surfaces.

By 3pm, I thought I was losing my sanity.

Huuuaaaarrrrggghhhh!! My good common bathroom that had no problems...

By 6pm - the scheduled end time - the work was still not done!

7.30pm. Finally, they were done. They said the bathrooms in my house were made of batu - stone - and were particularly difficult to hack. One of the workers said that was the first time they had to stay that lack for the hacking process. Errrrrr... Then what? Make my bathroom out of paper and plastic? But I do sympathise with the workers. I hope they are given overtime pay.

And I was depressed. The house was in a dusty mess. The kitchen had unforgivable dust everywhere. All I wanted to do was stay at my mother's house for the entire duration. But TheHusband was working so I had to be there on weekdays.

Day 2 was a Saturday. TheHusband had the Housesitter duties for that day. There was more drilling and dust but nowhere near as bad as Day 1.

The works for each block were done in stages. For my 4-storey block, my flat, the flat beside mine,  the flat below mine and its immediate neighbour started first. The following day, the next four units started theirs. So, for the first 4 days, hacking was going on all the time and there was a free flow of dust.

The dust was depressing. I decided to clean the kitchen as best as I could on Sunday. TheHusband said that it would be a futile process but I insisted. So I wiped what I could, covered up the stove and various other appliances in the kitchen, washed the plates that were not covered and when they were dry, packed them all in plastic bags. After all the reno works were over, I was so glad I did this. It made the post-reno clean-up a lot easier.

Days 3 - 6 were mostly cement work, waiting for it to dry, more cement work, applying some waterproof material and more cement work.

Our previous toilet had a shower kerb. To send the waste water from one side to the other side, we had a mini floor trap. Water from that mini floor trap was sent to the main sewage pipe via a pipe that was placed beneath the tiles. Now they told us that they could not make the mini floor trap as that is not what they are supposed to do. We can still have our shower kerb but we will have a hole in the shower kerb and water will flow from the wet area through the supposed dry area and then into the main floor trap. NOT what we want but that was the way HDB decreed things to be.

Later on, somewhere around Day 7 when all the cement work was done and tiling work had started, a neighbour said, if we had put our foot down, we could get our mini floor trap. WHAT???

(insert choice expletives)

In the meantime, one pleasant outcome of this was the kampong spirit it caused among the neighbours. We were mostly milling about along the corridor and we often pop into each other's flats to check on the progress of the work. Most of us do not exchange more than a hello but during this period, we become best buddies and chit chatted along the corridor. I could also count on my neighbours to take care of Ihsan while I used the replacement toilets at the void deck.

So it was Day 7, another Saturday, therefore TheHusband's turn to housesit. It was the day of the tiling and we had already regretted not visiting the office earlier so that we could rearrange the placement of the wall tiles. There were three different tiles used for the walls: light cream tiles, yellow-ish tiles and small narrow tiles often used as dividers. We wanted the top half of the walls to be light cream, bottom half yellow and the divider tiles separating the two. But, we did not visit the office. So, we have to contend with HDB's artistic, stylish designs for the rest of our toilets' lives. Hopefully we will outlive the toilets.

Shower kerb - for some reason, the tiler decided that he would put the hole for the shower kerb in the middle of the shower kerb. (insert choice expletives) TheHusband was monumentally upset and as the tiler could not understand a single word he said, he got our neighbour to do the translating. The tiler insisted that that was what he would do and so TheHusband called the supervisor. Supervisor came, spoke to the tiler and tiler had to redo half of the floor tiles.

Also, prepare your own tiles that match the kitchen tilesthat shall be placed at the entrance of the toilet. Otherwise, you will have a sudden explosion of yellow tiles in a sea of grey tiles.

See that sudden appearance of yellow, and not even nice yellow. A dirty yellow. Sob.

Day 9 - Husband had taken the day off so that he could tell the workers exactly where to place the bathroom accessories. This was also a day to find out all that you are upset with and for them to fix whatever you find troubling. So after the entire day was over, TheHusband thoroughly inspected both bathrooms so as to spot all issues that could be rectified the following day.

Day 10 - Handover day. At least 4 different workers came to fix the issues we had. By 5.45pm, all was done and I signed the various documents to signify that everything was over and I would no loner have these workers coming in and out of t he house.

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Post-Renovation Clean Up is a mighty headache. 3 to 4 rounds of sweeping, vacuuming and mopping cleared up the dust in the living room and bedrooms. But my kitchen tiles are an absolute nightmare. The tiles we chose some 12 years ago have very rough surface with so many grooves and tiny crevices. The dust that gets trapped in there simply does not want to come out. I swept the floor, vacuumed at maximum suction power, went down on my knees to wipe every stubborn tile. But the dusty feel is just too strong. I think I have to wash the kitchen. But the cleaning that I did had caused a sprain in my back. (Tip: If you had not exercised for a year, do some stretching and warming up before embarking on the cleaning project. Seriously.) So until my back is okay, the kitchen will remain depressingly dusty.

In the days to come, I have to open up every cabinet and wipe the dust off everything. Dust entered through the tiny sliver of a gap between the doors and settled on the shelves inside. (cry cry cry)
So, please please please get that big plastic sheet from the paint shop and cover everything.

Post-renovation clean up is still ongoing, especially in the kitchen. There is really no shortcut to the cleanup process but if you had put in a lot of effort prior to the works AND if you do not have tiles with rough surfaces, your clean-up process will be that much easier.

The End.

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Final Verdict (after using the toilet for a week or so) - (will be updated periodically)

1. 5 days after the works were completed, we had to get the workers to redo the grouting in the bathrooms. Just 5 days later, the grouting had turned greyish. The grouting was not flush with the tiles so dirt collected in the crevices. It was annoying having to spray all the dirt into the floor trap after every use of the toilet.

2. Never, never have a shower kerb if you are not getting a mini floor trap. Due to the absence of an underground path for water to travel, I could never have a completely dry half in the bathroom. It is a major annoyance.