It’ll be four months come April of our moving into The Minton. And oddly, there’s still a general feeling that we’re living in a reasonably new apartment unit. I reckon a good part of this is because our Minton home is dressed in happier and chirpily bright tones and colors – compared to our previous Rivervale home that looked old the day we moved in, and positively decrepit when we moved out of!
Still, as with apartment units of this day and age, maintenance issues have been very gradually seeping in. We were initially planning to do a mini-renovation project last year, but that kept getting shelved. Towards the end of last year though, we decided to slowly start replacing and refurbishing various parts of the house through directly engaging individual contractors.
The just over 6 year old Panasonic 46″ Plasma TV in the master room visual image had been degrading for almost a year now. And specifically the appearance of increasingly numerous vertical colored lines that cut across the screen. It started with just one or two vertical red lines – but by year’s end, there were about 34 of those buggers – or thereabouts according to Hannah’s daily count. Time to replace the TV then. Plasma TVs are a rarity these days, and their closest equivalents are OLED TVs – but I couldn’t find one that would fit into our master room’s feature wall. Bummer. We eventually settled for a fairly pricey Sony KD-49X9000E – one of the manufacturer’s top-line non-OLED models. Even notwithstanding that and that its display can’t replicate the very deep blacks that OLEDs and Plasmas can, this new Sony TV produces colors that are ‘good enough’, and comes with all the bells and whistles of a modern Smart/Android-enabled/Internet TV.
The grouting in the toilets, living/dining rooms and kitchen also needed to be refurbished – and it would had been a major undertaking to re-grout these areas. For instance, the furniture in the living and dining rooms will need to be moved, let alone the amount of dust that’ll be kicked up if we fully re-grouted those areas. The grouts in our Minton apartment are wide – that’s not an exaggeration – and when the grouting is not done properly during the unit development phase, will visibly degrade and decolor over time. On the other hand, that we have wide grouts also mean we’re unlikely ever to encounter issues like this when we get severe weather differences. Still, the master toilet needed urgent grout refurbishment as it’d degraded fastest there, so that got fixed first before Christmas. We’ll be looking into slowly working through the rest of the house over the rest of the year.
The first switch to fail was the heater switch in the master room. Guess it’s a matter of time for these mechanical panels. That got fixed by a handyman.
And finally, the LED downlights. We’ve had issues with the initial batch of downlights from the get-go. 2 years ago, I blogged that 7 of the 18 3-in-1’s we first installed have failed. By last month, 13 of 18 were at various stages of failure – including even the replacement units. All of them suffered from the same fault: one or more of the three colors no longer worked. I was determined to get this fixed once and for all, so went about finding alternative LED downlights to replace the remaining 15 in the house – and absolutely no more 3-in-1’s again. The Philips-branded LEDs are well-regarded, and to my pleasant surprise: the model that could fit into our existing ceiling cut-out was attractively priced at SGD15.90/unit.
There was an island-wide shortage of these specific warm-white colored units though, with the local distributor remarking that new stocks are likely only going to be arriving in April. I got lucky, finding a Lazada reseller that still had just enough stock left, albeit at a slightly higher unit price than the recommended retail price.
All good now though: our engaged handyman has replaced all the downlights with these new ones: and we finally have a home now that’s free of downlight failures!
Hi Cy, I chanced on your blog while researching on invisible grille. How’s the condition of the grille installed by Legate after 4 years?
Hi Victor. Thanks for visiting our blog. The grills were installed in April 2014, so it’s been 4.5 years .The grills do seem to have some mild corrosion/dirt accumulated at the cross and T-joints, but the grill wires themselves still are OK. The wires have also lost a bit of their tension – this is as expected over time, and Legate did tell us it will happen over time. The wires are effective as a barrier – just not as taut as they were on day 1. I think it’s possible to get Legate to come by to tighten them again, so we’ll look into it maybe a year from now.