8 Lessons I've Learnt

It's funny...at the end of the day, it winds up being pretty true that the home comes down to a certain style and preference for certain materials. Even perhaps preference for certain colours. If you mix those three things, colour, style and material, I think you'd have figured out most people's apartments.

For example, apartment 1 that I went to was grey, white and muted pastel colours. The style was high fashion hong kong and the materials were glass and mirrored surfaces, dark wood and fabric (think plush embroidered carpeting, fabric driven walls, perforated roller blinds). It was a knock-out.

Apartment 2 was also high on style but much more sombre. Grey, white and this time, black. Style was neat but linear not wholly minimalist. The materials were stright haired medium carpeting, marble, white wood and darkwood.

Apartment 3 was beech, white and cream. Style was Scandinavian modern (think Danish vintage and PS Cafe), materials were fabric, wood, white wrought iron and a spot of vermillion red antique.

Bad apartments, is when one of several things happen. You know, any colour scheme will work. But when the colour scheme is applied without balance, or when it just gets brightly OTT, then it starts to go very wrong. The second part is style, what goes wrong is there isn't a definable style, there is no defined look, it's just a higgly piggly of "things we like (but unfortunately we don't have similar or good tastes)" and this is often connected to the third part, that is, no thought to materials at all.

Apartment 4 was pink, purple and black. You can see where I'm going with this... The style was unindentifyable and the materials were too jumbled, wood, tile, fabric, leather and in contrasting colours.

If you are your own ID, don't forget that you need to colour coordinate. And you need to stick with dominant materials. One huge tip- if you are going for a more upmarket look, take your furniture a size up. This is a gutsy thing to do, because apartments are so small, people wind up downsizing everything so that it will fit. As long as you are sure it will fit, take your homewares (bedside lamps, standing lamps, ottomans) and large-item furniture (dining table, sofa, bed) up a notch in size. The homewares must fit around the large-item furniture, but taking the large item furniture up a size, allows the homewares to be more striking and bold in colour and material. The reverse just doesn't work!

There are some things I wish people had told me before I started on the whole process. I've summarised them into 8 lessons I've learnt.

1. Lock up your bathrooms when the contractors are working, force them to get water (for cement) and use only the helpers bathroom at the back. This is to prevent having to clean up disgusting bathrooms and debris from what used to be perfectly good washrooms.

The addedum to that is, make workers clear up debris as they go along. If not, they will pile up rubbish heaps that will over the weeks, stain your tiles.

2. While aesthetics is important, there's a lot that ID work can do. Concentrate the contractor work on things that will increase the inherant utility of the property. For example, I wished I'd gone with my gut and enlarged the kitchen sink. That would have made it so much easier to use. I also wish I'd given more thought to a fully built-in shoe cabinet.

3. Don't pay the last 50% until AFTER the final delivery of goods, whether this be wallpaper or especially contracting work. You may need leverage to get the work remedied or defaults fixed.

4. Upsize the main furniture where you can (sofa, dining table, bed), this allows for more striking homeware and generally, a more striking house. In homewares, go for bold but classic designs and colours.

5. Nippon paints really are the almost exact colour in the paint charts. Get a full paint chart fan, rather then use the abbrieviated paint booklets. Stick to palettes that go well with white and dark brown (cream, tan, pale blue, pale green, pale yellow) since those two colours are the 'backdrop' colours of most modern apartments. Don't go to an extreme colour unless you are dead sure you will like it. You can live with discreet colours but will grow to hate a strong colour that you weren't truly in love with. If you think you've made a mistake, always trust your instinct and change the paint colour even halfway through (or after!) the paint job.

6. Shop, shop, shop. There are cheaper alternatives for everything. Create templates and send them to different banks, carpenters, upholsterers etc. Then you can sit back while everyone bids on roughly the same job specs.

The most important thing here, which I wish I had followed better, is that you can knock off a LOT from contractor's quotes by doing the sub-contracting work yourself. The actual construction/demolishing you should leave to the contractor and believe it or not, quotes for that are pretty cheap $200-800 for hacking, laying, building etc. What is expensive, is things that they turn around to farm out, like decking, solid surfaces, window treatments, capentry and cabinetry. By finding the firms that do decking, solid surface etc, you knock off the $1000 surcharge that contractors add on to these items as gravy for themselves. There are so many firms that do "parts" of the renovation process. I have a lot of contacts now and I wish I had got them all in to do their (cheaper) bit.

7. Remember Style/Colour/Material/Budget. Everything you look at should be weighed against a matrix of these factors. And every item should be balanced relative to each other, again against the same matrix.

If the house is a joint project, don't compromise. By which I mean, don't pick one thing you like, one thing he likes, one thing she likes- the house will look awful. See everything together and decide on things together and most importantly, how they do or don't fit in with everything else you've decided on. And if something is really important to you, whether this be a renovation, furniture or colour item, stand firm. After all, living together is about learning to like each other's likes.

8. Customisation can actually save you a lot of money. Look for companies in Indonesia who make custom furniture and some smaller furniture stores here who do quality work. This can take down the price of large-items like beds, from the regular $1500 to $300 in price.