Visited a friend who had recently gotten his own place and decided to offer my expertise to assist him in his home layout.
I was actually very happy that he was able to host me at his new place because my weekends have been extremely unfruitful for the past few months (except last week when I accompanied Yen to the tile shop), so I was really looking forward to just catching up with him.
His place is located around the Bouna Vista area, so I decided to get us some Bubble Tea from KOI Signature at Star Vista before heading over, each cup ended up costing me about $10 because I had gotten the booze option. He told me to help him surprise him, so I had actually ordered a cup of Matcha with Baileys for myself and a cup of Rum and Raisin Earl Grey for him, because oddly enough, the caffeine in Matcha doesn't really affect my sleep, but when I actually went to his place, instead of just passing him the Earl Grey drink, I offered him the option to choose and he chose the Matcha one, so I felt like I got fucked now because we met at 3pm and if I drink any tea or coffee after 1pm, I would usually end up staying awake until 3am.
So anyways, his place was originally in a bit of a mess, the renovation phase is technically done, all he needed to do was get a professional cleaning team in come in and clean up the place as well as clear some of his rubbish and the house will be completed, the only problem was the plethora of furniture he had gotten from another friend.
He had willingly accepted taken a bunch of display cabinets, dining table and chairs without really planning how they would all be able to fit into the space, so it looked a bit daunting at first when I entered the home, the sofa was just plopped right in the middle of the living room, there was a random high table right behind the sofa, his display cabinets were placed against the wall because that was the only area that had any space.
I had been playing around with the layout the day before, so I already had some ideas in my mind of where I wanted to place everything.
We did some catching up for a while at the start, and then I shared my ideas with him, before that, I didn't have the measurements of his furniture, so my initial space planning layout was based on assumption, turns out a lot of his items were slightly bigger than what I had thought.
Initially, I had thought I would only be sharing my ideas with him and he will only start shifting the furniture once his place had been properly cleaned up, but then I was really curious how everything would actually look once they were positioned according to my layout, so I asked him if he would like to shift his furniture around to see how it would look and if the layout would make sense, he agreed to it.
It was very exciting and extremely gratifying when the space started opening up as we shifted the furniture to the planned out location and you could just see the flow of the house started making more sense, I managed to carve out an office space, a dining space and a living space all within the confines of a 2 Room HDB Living Room with just the furniture pieces he had, and after we had shifted everything and all the items were in their rightful place according to my proposal, I just sat on the sofa and started to really appreciate the space for what it was. It really reminded of my Visual Merchandising days at the furniture store, the pushing of the large furniture, the creation of new spaces by using existing cabinets to segregate the room, it made me miss that old job of mine for a bit because it is honestly so much easier than what I have to deal with at work right now.
Needless to say, I was very happy with the layout and if this had been my own place, I would be very satisfied with it. Other Interior Designers / Stylist may have been able to come up with a better layout, but I was personally very glad with the one I had come up with, so was my friend, which was most important because it is his place. He will be living alone, so what I had planned suited his needs and it would have suited mine as well.
After all the shifting, I had originally wanted us to get dinner together at Holland Village, figured we could walk over, but then he suggested we could just order Grabfood in because he had done that the day before when another friend of his had visited to assist with some other stuff, the only difference is now, we had a proper functioning dining space in his home, so that's what we did.
I was at his place for a good 5 hours, which was a lot longer than I thought I would have stayed, but again, it beats being at home and doing fuck all the entire day. We eventually left together at about 8pm, walked over to Bouna Vista MRT and man was I glad we didn't walk to Holland Village because just that shorter walk to Bouna Vista already made me feel extremely sticky.
Being at his new home just makes me also want to quickly get my own place soon, and I had been swaying back and forth between getting a Tengah SBF and a Clementi BTO. Right now in this present moment, getting the BTO makes more sense, it will give me more time to save up and also still allow me to do some travelling since the flat will only be ready in 2029.... if I am lucky enough to ballot for it that is. The Tengah SBF is tempting, but I really do not have much money on hand to pay for the renovation works if I do get the flat, or at least I won't have enough to do it the way I want it done, I will have to wipe out pretty much my entire savings and settle for a compromised design instead.
It was very exciting though, to have been able to play around with the space. I can't wait to be invited back to help with the Interior Styling aspect of it when the rest of his stuff finally arrives from his current family home. Doing all these as a favor for a friend just feels a lot more fun than doing it professionally.
