After rejecting all proposals we were presented so far, we had now decided to go ahead with hiring ourselves as contractors. I had a few favourable conditions to hiring myself as a contractor, including the fact that the flat was between my work place and home, so I could drop by easily to take a look at work and progress.
So I knew the first step in the renovation chain of events was tiling, so I had to find a good tiler who was not out to skin me. Into the picture comes THREE E BUILDING CONSTRUCTION PTE. LTD. I found this guy on Carousell, mainly trying to push their German vinyl flooring, but also they did everything. I first made contact with one of the parners, Bryan, who in 2017 was a fresh grad at 25 years old.
I felt odd meeting him at first, as he seemed quite young compared with the stereotypical uncle out there. I arranged to meet him at one of his work sites in Woodlands, where he was doing both homogeneous tiles and vinyl, so I got to see both. I felt he was sincere and based on the flooring work he had completed, he was also competent. To further encourage me to hire him, he said 100% COD terms. No deposit! I was just there to hire them for tiling work, so the amount to pay was not too huge, but it is quite trusting on his part to expect his customer to do the work without a deposit. This may change in the future once they start to meet people without money.
But I was sold. His pricing was tile laying labour cost @ $3.80 per square foot, and with our estimated area of around 760 square feet, that came up to $2888. This amount would include skirting, all tile cutting, etc. Their BTO package price with screed was $6200 and $4500 without screed and with tiles costing at $3 per sq foot. These prices are nett, including haulage, etc. As a quick comparison, the earlier horses wanted starting from $8k, and when you include all the misc additional costs, the nett amount for SAME work would have been around $8.5k at the minimum.
So this was a no brainer, $2k+ in the pocket sounds good to me any day of the week. Hired.
Moving forward, we had earlier once visited the few Tile Show rooms on Balestier Road, near Ah Hood Road. The showroom with which the tiles we liked was Hup Kiong. If you have read from the beginning, you would know we were all for value for money. We were looking for wood inspired tiles that looked natural like wood, and Hup Kiong had some from Ceramica Magica, an Italian tile manufacturer that looked good, felt nice to walk on and costed $4.50 per sq ft. For the bed room, we took a shade darker and some Turkish tiles (which later from the packaging I found out was manufactured under an Italian company) at $3.90 per sq ft. Both tiles were of good quality and priced very competitive. The Ceramica Magica tiles were called Honey from the WoodTime collection and were planks of 90x15cm and the bedroom tiles were 60cmx15cm planks. We decided to have a clean flow, where the outside area tiles would join seamlessly with the bedroom tiles, but if you see carefully you would see the transition from longer planks to shorter planks and a variation in colour. The Turkish tiles we also bought from 2 different shades at 50/50 quantity each, to add more variation in tile colouration.
When it came to payment for the tiles, our contractor or tileman, Ron (partner of the guy I met at the showflat) was there. We were given a 10% discount of the full price (so paid a nett price of appx $4.35 per sq foot for the tiles). So important lesson here, if your contractor is good (like Ron), they will share their commission with you in terms of money saved on the cost of tiles. Also I would recommend going to smaller players, as mentioned, the giant Hafary does have lots to choose from, but do note that you are paying a premium for them to pay their IDs and for their huge business costs, so you are unlikely to get value for money.
*Three E Building faces the same competitive renovation landscape as any other business, it is just that they have streamlined their business and done away with all useless expenses and pass the savings to their customer. For your understanding, a few days ago I was pumping petrol in my bike at SPC and I saw a BMW 5 series pull up infront to pump. Out came out a young man, I guessed in early 30s and he wore a T-shirt with Nippon Paint written behind. The way I put the picture together is that this guy is an ID, and thanks to overcharging clients who were foolish on cost savings, he could afford a BMW. So if you ever wondered why money not enough, you might want to find out where the outflow is and if you paying more than you need to
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