Before & After: Our Living Room During Different Eras Of Our Lives
1440
- Scandinavian
- Others
- ~1,000 sqft
- 3 br
- Couple Living
Hey everyone, we’re back again for season 7!🥹🫶🏻 In this post, we’ll be going into details on how we changed our living room at different eras of our lives. We’ve done a before and after in our previous living room post but we did not share full details. Today’s post will be a spill-it-all with never before seen photos of our living room during our almost nine years of living here. 
A before of our living room. We don’t have a before photo during reno or building phase as we got the place after everything was fully done. 
An after of our living room. This is how it looks like currently. We did not do up any false ceiling because we were broke back then. But so glad we didn’t because we love how high the original ceiling is! Also, not sure if it’s just us or it looks bigger fully furnished compared to when it was empty and bare. Oh we’ve come such a long way! Let’s start our eras tour (TayTay pun intended haha) to see how we made it into what it is today.✨ 
Collected our keys in November 2015. We got this last unit by luck as the previous couple did not go through with the purchase fully. The finished unit was repossessed by the developers and sold as a resale to us at the original build price of $521k. So even though it’s counted as a resale, we are the first people to live here. 
How our home looked like when we just collected the keys and used hand-me-down furnitures from our parents. During that era, I was still an undergrad in uni while the mister was in a low paying office job. We really YOLOed and got this house without much thought.😂🤣 Which was why we were broke after the purchase and couldn’t spend a lot on furniture.🥲 In our previous posts, we mentioned what our DBSS home came with so will not mention again. Good thing that the home was move-in ready and we just had to install lights. We got the cheapest lights we could find, got our electrician uncle to set them up, got the used furnitures and appliances, and we moved in. We made changes little by little and I would draw on the pictures to visualise better before committing. That’s what the lines are in 2 of the photos if you couldn’t tell hahaha. This was during the era when I started revamping the house. Started by sprucing up whatever we had with styling. But some things are really impossible to style, like this ugly sofa bed from Ikea. We love Ikea but not this sofa bed because of how uncomfortable it is. I guess it motivated us to work harder to get a new comfy sofa so that we could get rid of it lol. The husband went along with all the changes because happy wife happy life.😜👍🏻 Sold off the ugly sofa bed and got this awesomest super comfy sofa, also from ikea hahahahaha. Yes we love ikea! This was the first furniture we bought using the money we earned after starting our own business.🥹 It’s a sentimental and meaningful purchase for us. One tip we can give new homeowners is to really sit and test out different sofas that you find comfortable. Shopping online might be convenient but this is one thing that will affect your quality of life so sit on it (literally)! This is coming from us after having sat on a hard sofa bed that gave us back pain and neck aches for years.🫠 I think we got too excited about getting our sofa that we didn’t consider the theme or colour scheme that we wanted our home to have. Got the sofa in dark grey and regretted after about a year of getting it. We love how comfortable the sofa is so we didn’t want to sell it and get a new one, also because it doesn’t make sense financial wise. So we got sofa covers for the same sofa in a different colour. It’s one of the reasons we love Ikea, they give us the ability to change things easily so we don’t have to live with our bad decisions.😉 After that I became obsessed with changing everything around the house.😂 Probably might be due to us not having any say when we first got the place so when we could, I went crazy. Also, because adult money hahahaha. This was our “Era of Change”, where there was something changing around the house every few weeks.👁️👄👁️✨ Slowly changed things little by little. Tried to see if our friends could tell what changed around the house every time they came over hahaha. Sorry for the grainy photos. Could only find these from my ig highlights. This was during the era when filters first came out and every single ig story had one.🤣 Yeap, still in the ‘Era of Change’ for this wall, not done yet.🙂↔️ This painting is gorgeous but felt that the size was a wrong fit for the wall. Got on my nerves the more I looked at it and finally decided to get a new one. We shifted this to our entryway, see if you can spot it in our entryway post.🤭 
We’ve finally arrived at our current era.😌 Glad I made the call to get this painting. Love the colours, textures and the size! Now everything fit the theme that I was going for. Just look at those textures!🥹 Ok now time for the wall on the other side, our eras tour isn’t over yet hehe.😂 This was during start of covid phase which is in our “Era of Changes”. Got into plants because sis needed a new hobby and everyone was suddenly into plants at that time. Almost turned the house into a jungle. 🪴🪴🪴🪴🪴 Realised the dark furniture didn’t suit us and the lack of light didn’t suit my plants. And also the tv was too low. Painted the tv console and shelves white and the entire house instantly felt bigger! Also mounted the tv onto the wall because we were very sure we would not change the layout of the living room anymore. Shifted the plants out to the balcony and got better at styling (more shopping yayyy). Things were great for a while until… the tv console and baskets started to annoy me.🫠 Threw out the tv console (because it’s super old and I couldn’t wait for someone to buy it on carousell) to make room for a new tv console. Got it from… ikea!😆 
I’m so thankful that past us didn’t commit to a L-shaped sofa (which was what we wanted originally) because it wouldn’t have given us the flexibility to change things around as frequently as we did. And I would have had to live with the frustration of living with a layout that I didn’t love. We got the 3-seater sofa with the separate ottoman. Placed the ottoman here to open up the space from the living room to the balcony. It became a favourite spot for our cats. Here’s Cai Png demanding for attention. Had this chair in our spare room and found ourselves not utilising it as much as we would want to. So we shifted it here and placed the footstool in the spare room instead. Was finally happy with how everything came together and the change era came to an end. We are now at our current era which is our ‘Cat Pawrents/Homebodies Era’. I hope our journey has inspired you to build your home at your own pace, in your own time and means.❤️ 
A wide angle view of our entire living space. We’ll be doing more in depth before and afters of other areas of our home in the coming weeks so stay tuned! We’ve come to the end of our Eras Tour!🥳 Thanks for reading to the end.🫶🏻 Bonus pic for scrolling to the end is a Halloween shoot of fur babies because it’s October!👻👻
- 6 October
Report Post