Cosy, tranquil and cottage home in a 2BR Dual-key Apt in the East
393
Virtual House Tour
- Free Style
- Condo
- ~700 sqft
- 2 br
- Couple Living with Kids
Welcome to this 75sqm space we called Home in this season of our lives! 🏡 We are a family of 3, 👴🏻 J + 👵🏻 G + Little ☁️, residing in a 2-Bedroom Dual-key Apartment in Paya Lebar. Our journey of building a home over the years has refined our values and perspectives of what ‘Home’ means to us. My husband and I bought this freehold apartment in 2016 and we rented it out before we moved in when we got married in 2019. We used to dream of purchasing a new flat, renovating our first home from scratch, growing our family in a forever home. However, our unconventional home-building journey has taught us that what truly makes a space a ‘Home’ is the shared presence and memories, the versatility of our space to grow with our changing needs, and the gathered collection of things that holds meaning to us. 
With this perspective, we kept the original apartment layout and built-ins, moved in without any renovations and pieced our little home together bit by bit with loose furniture, necessary appliances and the things we love! ✨ While we saved a lot from not doing any renovations, the cost incurred from painting, furniture, lighting, appliances, household items and decorations added up to ~$7000. We also kept our cost low by seeking out secondhand pieces and some DIYs - 👵🏻 G loves vintage knick knacks and the idea of turning trash to treasure! 💎 A dual-key apartment allows for a family to live in one room and rent out the other, or two families to live in separate rooms in the same apartment. Hence the interesting floor plan of our home. When you enter our home, the small foyer/entryway leads to two doors that will open up to two rooms - one, our bedroom; and the other, our living space. Come along with us as we walk you through how we style our space with loose furniture and decor items into a home that we love - simple, cosy, tranquil and cottage-style! 🍃 
This is our bedroom door. When you open the main door, you can see a glimpse of our bedroom. To maintain privacy, we created a simple privacy screen with a curtain rod, extra curtain fabric and a handmade katazome textile (👴🏻 J made this from a workshop we attended in Chiangmai). 
📷 A still of our cosy bedroom the day we moved in. — Oh, we have a little kitchenette (refer to floor plan) in our bedroom that many of our guests find interesting. It was a little eyesore for a while because we don’t use it but now that our Little ☁️ is here, we turned it into a bottle washing and sterilisation area, which is really useful and life-saving for night feeds. 
Our teakwood bed frame, dresser and bedside table set from Wihardja is the one furniture we splurged on. We love that we can customise the dresser and bedside table to fit the dimensions of our small space. We chose a walnut tone, in contrast to most of our lighter wood tone furniture in the living space, as we want our bedroom to be have a more moody and restful ambience. Put together a little corner on the dressing table ✨ Bits and pieces of decor items that make our bedroom cosy ✨ P.S. Our bedroom has gone through major changes since Little ☁️ is here and we miss this view (so thankful for photos to look back on) - sharing the reality of our bedroom changes as our family grows in a future post! 
👵🏻 G’s side of the bedroom that she loves to place some flowers at.. 🌼 a little reminder of joy when she wakes up in the morning and before she goes to bed at night. Of other things she loves too: thrifted vintage lamp with a DIY lampshade, framed magazine cutout, essential oil diffuser, medicated oil and hand cream. Standing at our foyer/entryway, this is the other door leading to the next room, which we designed as our dining area, living room, workspace.. and now, Little ☁️’s reading and play space. The two doors with cottage-style curtains lead to our small kitchen and guest toilet. 
📷 Stills of our living room the day we moved in. — Having lived in this space for 5 years, our home has gone through many changes and growth with our life seasons. And that’s what we love about our loose furniture, we can change things up anytime we want to according to our needs (and mood 🫢). Looking back at these photos made us teary.. so much of our home has changed since and we look forward to share these changes with you in our upcoming posts! 🥹 Once you enter the living space, you will be greeted by our little dining space that can comfortably fit 4 persons. This is one of our favourite area as having meals together as much as possible is a culture we want to build in our home. When we have our family and friends over, our extendable bi-fold table will be opened up and placed in the middle of our living room. Our living room where we enjoy watching anime/ghibli movies and series together, and where family and friends huddle around to chill. We didn’t have a theme in mind when we designed our space but somehow we gravitate to wood and neutral colours for the bigger furniture items, which made the living room looks warm and cosy. A view at night - a warm lamp makes such a big change in ambience 🌙 A feature in our living room - IKEA billy bookcases! 📚 As we didn’t do any renovations and we have a vision of ceiling-to-floor shelves… we decided to go with this affordable and versatile option. We love how the level of the shelves can be shifted easily and we have since changed up how it looks for the n-th time 🫢 Open shelves have so much styling possibilities! ✨ This corner of the living room is 👵🏻 G’s floral studio space (where flower magic happens at @spaceforbeginnings) 🌾 We used to have two tables in this ‘study area’ when we first moved in because we thought every home needs a ‘study area’ but we sold them a year later because it was taking up too much space, and at the same time, G started her floral business full-time so space became a little tight. The thing we learnt about having a small home - we have to be more intentional in what we bring into our home and things that are no longer serving their purpose have to go (to olio/carousell)! 
Our family and friends often say that our home is a museum! 🖼️ We love styling our home with art pieces that hold meaning to us and bring back a little something from our travels. Every corner, has a little something - a little thoughtfulness, a little happiness, a little inspiration. 👴🏻👵🏻 This DIY “Let’s grow old together” bunting was repurposed from our wedding decor to our home. — This is a walk down memory lane in our home over the past 5 years that we have been living here. We hope the tour of our home left you with a sense of warmth and calm.. 🍃 We have since made changes to our home as our family grew in 2023.. we can’t wait to share more about each area of our home in future posts! Follow along our growing home here and on IG at @hepromisedheraforest 💌 Feel free to ask us any questions about our little home and home journey!
- 24 July
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