Renovation regrets: things we could have chosen for easier upkeeping!

287

Free Style
HDB (BTO)
~1,000 sqft
2 br
Couple Living

After living in our new home for a while, here's some of the renovation regrets we have. Hopefully this helps and you guys won't make the same mistakes as us!
- #recommendations
- #Renoregret
The first one is choosing the right laminate for kitchen. Because the kitchen is quite a high traffic area for us (we try to cook when we have time), water/food splashes are bound to happen. You can see in this picture - there are visible water marks/ stains on our cabinets, we should have invested in a higher quality laminate!
Here's a zoomed in picture - it is more obvious for dark-coloured laminates. Also because we went with shaker style cabinets, dust also tends to accumulate on the shaker frame. There's now anti-fingerprint laminate in the market, so we would highly recommend that you guys go for them! It will come at some additional cost, but honestly, we think it's worth it after realising how much time we can save from constantly wiping down our cabinets.
The second one is installing concrete sink support - this is more of a preventive measure to enhance durability. Other than providing more stable support (for loading pots/pans etc), having a concrete sink support helps to avoid water damage as the concrete will protect the laminate from any water contact.
We didn't really know about this during our renovation, and by the time we wanted to install it, it was too late because the carpentry frame is already fabricated. In this pic, you can see that the carpentry frame for the sink is fabricated along with the other parts of the kitchen cabinet. If you guys are intending to opt for a a concrete sink support, do tell your IDs/ contractors early so they can plan for it and adjust the carpentry measurements.
Very unfortunately, our kitchen tap started leaking before we even moved in :(
We weren't sure what happened, because it wasn't leaking when we were doing our reno checks and only found out some time after because we weren't staying in yet. By the time we opened out kitchen cabinets under the sink, there was water accumulation.
Even after cleaning up, you can see that the laminate has warped because of the water contact. Looking back, we really wished we did the concrete sink support to avoid this! Yes, this also requires top up, but it's kinda like buying insurance, since we all don't know when a leakage will happen!
The third one is having a tiled backsplash - we are 50-50 on this! We really like the farmhouse look by using white subway tiles for kitchen backsplash, but the downside is that it comes with grout lines and there are more things to clean.
Actually, it is not too difficult to clean and we can live with the tiled backsplash - the subway tiles that we chose are already quite big (we can imagine it would be worse for kitkat tiles). But maybe if we are given another chance to decide, we might go with the same material as our countertop for the backsplash area behind the stove, since that is more prone to oil and food splashes!