After living in Hong Kong for several years and obtaining permanent residence, last year, my husband and I got into a car on the eve of our wedding and bought the house we wanted.
The down payment for buying a house was supported by family members of both parties, and it also used up part of our savings. My parents-in-law were worried that we had just bought a house and were preparing to get married, so they wanted to support us with another renovation payment.
But we really don’t want (and we’re embarrassed) to ask our elders to pay for it again, so we took advantage of the remaining funds on hand. After excluding the necessary expenses for daily life and marriage, we still have about 200,000 Hong Kong dollars left to spend on decoration. So, we decided to use these 200,000 yuan to build an ideal small home within a limited budget.
During the process of buying a house, my husband and I would often imagine what our home would look like :
I hope that the home has warm colors and wooden floors throughout; a shower room with enough space and a large shower head to wash away the fatigue of the day before going to bed.
He hopes that there will be a big TV in the living room, which would not be too fun to play games with the PS5; there should be a large refrigerator in the kitchen, which can be filled with all kinds of delicious food sent by his mother-in-law, and a dishwasher, so that after eating, his hands will be free from having to wash the dishes...
However, the ideal is very full, and the reality is very skinny - the decoration cost in Hong Kong is too expensive. Find a professional design company to do it. The decoration alone can easily start at 500,000.. But when we add both soft and hard furnishings, we only have 200,000 yuan on hand.
01
Learn from experience
When we were thinking hard about how to decorate our house, a friend and his wife who bought in the same area as us moved into a new house.
A couple of friends got on the bus earlier than we did. When we were preparing to buy a house, we learned a lot of experience from them.
Our two families are in similar situations. Both of them had to spend a limited budget on decoration after buying a house; and the hostess of their family loves life very much and has great taste, so we went to help them on the day they moved. took the opportunity to get some decoration advice from them .
When a friend's house was renovated, she did not find a design company. The hostess designed it herself and communicated with the decoration master.
Because the house already had basic decoration when they bought it, they did not redo the whole house with hard decoration. They just painted the walls, laid the floor, knocked up the bathroom and remodeled . The rest of the focus was on the soft decoration .
A friend showed us the original photos of the house. Although the overall layout has not changed, it is completely different from the one after they renovated it.
They also recommended the decoration master to us, saying that the master has a good temper and we can negotiate more with him - Before decorating, you should contact the master to come to see the house and explain to him clearly what needs to be renovated and how you want to install it.
The master will quote according to the demand, and for each of his quotations, you can try (reasonable) bargaining. If the master has a good temper and is easy to talk to, he can naturally save another sum of money on decoration costs.
02
"What do you want?"
The experience of our friends has given us a lot of inspiration. Buying a house in Hong Kong is basically a house with basic decoration. If the house itself has no flaws and there are no big problems with the spacing, actually does not need to spend a lot of energy on the hardware..
However, my husband and I each wanted too many things. With a limited budget, we just like when we bought a house, sat down and carefully sorted out the main and secondary contradictions in the decoration:
First of all, repainting the walls and laying the floors was a must.. When we bought this house, the walls were already cracked; and the dark wooden floors installed by the previous owner made the already small house even more cramped.
My husband and I agreed that the previous floor should be demolished and re-paved with light-colored wooden floor . Firstly, to expand the visual effect of the house . Secondly, to leave space for the soft furnishings.
Secondly, kitchen and bathroom should be redone as much as possible. We like to have home-cooked meals. If we don't have all the equipment in the kitchen, it will affect the mood and quality of cooking.
And restrooms are prone to hygienic problems , so showers, toilets, sinks, etc. that are frequently used daily must be replaced with new ones.
After getting the quotation from the decorator, we decided to renovate the kitchen in addition to the ceiling, walls and floor , including cabinets and stove, etc. In addition to the bathroom, in addition to the ceiling and walls, the floor, bathroom cabinets, bathroom screens, etc. were also renovated.
Once again, major electrical appliances cannot save money, especially those involving electrical safety and warranty, such as water purifiers, TVs, refrigerators, gas stoves, dishwashers; other home appliances and furniture IKEA + Taobao , save money as much as possible while ensuring quality.
Finally, furniture, home appliances, and decorations do not seek to be delivered in one go. Items that do not affect your stay, such as decorative paintings, vacuum cleaners, , etc., can be purchased slowly when your hands are looser.
03
No matter how thin the mosquito legs are, they are still meat
After figuring out what we wanted and getting the quote from the decorator, we made an appointment with the decorator in a restaurant and treated him to a drink. By the way, we went through every item on the quotation and negotiated the price.
There were projects that I really couldn’t bargain on, so I begged the master to give me some small things : installing curtains, assembling cabinets, renovating the balcony wooden floor...
During the decoration period, we were almost obsessed with haggling. I went to Mong Kok to buy ceramic tiles at a bargain price, I went to Taobao to buy furniture at a bargain price, and I also bought wooden floors throughout the house at a bargain price .
I still remember the day we bought the floor. We spent more than an hour "dealing" with the clerk at a store in New Town Plaza, Sha Tin. reduced the price of the packaged materials from more than 40,000 to 31,000. In the end, the clerk also gave us a bottle of floor cleaner .
When I gave the advance payment and walked out of the store, I just felt thirsty, helpless and funny - that period was probably the most stingy and fussy time in our lives.
Speaking of labor-packed materials, Hong Kong decoration masters often quote the price of "combined labor-packed materials". For example, when installing switches and sockets throughout the house, the master's quotation is usually the cost of materials + installation.
However, we compared the price of a certain brand of switch in Mong Kok and Taobao flagship store , and found that Taobao's price is only one-third of Hong Kong's . Even with the freight and the installation fee of the decorator, it is still cheaper than the "work and materials package", so we negotiated with the master that we buy the materials ourselves and he installs it. The same is true for other similar small projects.
"No matter how thin a mosquito's legs are, they are still meat." Together, these inconspicuous little places have saved us a lot of money. Although the process is very tedious, but with a limited budget, we can only plan carefully so that every money is spent where it should be spent..
04
Constantly stepping on pitfalls and getting up again
Despite planning and replanning, calculating and recalculating, during the decoration process, I still stepped on many pitfalls.
The shower head we liked was too expensive to buy in Hong Kong, so we switched to Taobao. The goods were almost arriving at the container warehouse, and I discovered that because the wall of our shower room was not removed, the original water outlet could not be installed with a shower head.
At this time, other renovations in the bathroom were almost completed. It was unrealistic and beyond the budget to tear down the wall and change the water outlet. I had no choice but to negotiate with the seller to return the product and replace it with another shower head without a top spray. I almost missed the renovation progress.
When I was renting a house, I encountered a burst pipe in the toilet. The water in the room was as high as the calf, soaking the floor, causing heavy losses. So during the renovation, I decided to install an explosion-proof water pipe and a fine copper angle valve in the toilet. If the water pipe breaks, it will automatically stop the water, minimizing the possibility of flooding in the home.
After everything was delivered, I realized that the toilet we bought was too big, and it almost blocked the water inlet. There was not enough space to install the fine copper angle valve, so we had to look for other angle valves with suitable sizes and good quality. Although it is only a small object, we put a lot of thought into it.
The size of the bathroom mirror was also wrong. After forced installation, the mirror light switch moved to the upper right...but the impact was not big, so I didn't redo it.
The same happened when installing the stove. The cabinets and range hood were installed. When I was choosing the stove, I learned that in Hong Kong, in order to ensure safety, the distance between the bottom surface of the range hood and the cooking stove must be at least 65 cm.
Our kitchen has a false ceiling, the floor height is already low, and the floor-to-ceiling cabinets are made relatively high , which almost cannot meet the safety distance between the range hood and the cooking stove. In the end, we had to choose the thinnest stove, and the corresponding price was a little more than we expected.
and so on, too numerous to mention. The budget is limited and there is no room for trial and error , so I always feel a little anxious every time I step into a trap. After the whole renovation, my husband had a lot of white hair on his head. He said that he was worried. All he dreamed about at night was the renovation, and he was too afraid of overturning.
Five months after the repossession, we finally moved into the new house. Once, I invited my husband’s Hong Kong colleagues to my home for dinner. The colleague asked, Doesn’t the renovation of your home cost at least 500,000 yuan? When he learned that the total cost of hard decoration + soft decoration was only 200,000, he expressed disbelief.
So we told him about the various bargaining processes during the decoration, the cars that were turned over and the pots that were repaired... Without family members around to help, decorated his first home by himself. Although the process was tiring, it was also a good memory.
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(The author of this article: I like sweet food but not spicy food)
