Hougang Avenue 4

This was our first time doing a reno and we were looking to do up our master bedroom. We talked with a few IDs and chose Minyi from Fineline Design in the end because Minyi was most forthcoming and enthusiastic to talk to us about our project. Overall, the result was good, and we were satisfied with the outcome. We appreciate Minyi's work in helping us achieve our desired room to return to everyday. Workmanship is also overall quite good. However, we would like to review some of the not-so-good points during the design and reno process. 1) we engaged Minyi in Sep 2020 without a hard deadline to finish the project. However, we definitely did not expect it to drag beyond 4 to 5 months as we only had to reno one room (the project was finally done in early Feb 2021). The main issue was that the 3D drawings were done by a separate, dedicated team and not by Minyi. And every iteration takes 2 weeks to be done because there was always a 'queue' to get our drawings done. After waiting 2 weeks for the drawing, and if there is anything we wanted to amend, we would need to wait another 2 weeks for the drawing to be amended. Just by going through 4 or 5 iterations of 3D drawings alone, we have already spent 2 to 3 months. If you are a beginner in the area of ID and reno, and depend highly on 3D drawings to give you a feel of your desired design, this lead time for multiple iterations is definitely something you need to take into consideration. In the end, we had to push through to finalize the designs with Minyi so that she could help to quickly schedule the works, and we eventually managed to complete the reno before CNY in early Feb 2021. 2) As beginners to the ID and reno scene, we wanted to engage an ID who could propose and demonstrate designs based on the rough ideas that we give. However, we often find Minyi asking us to give specific design ideas instead. And partially because of the issue with 3D drawing, we couldn't get much inspirations / illustration from Minyi. 3) Again, as beginners to the reno scene, we started asking for quotations early on and focused more on which ID seemed to fit our design ideas best. We didn't pay much attention to the quoted prices. Anyway, the designs at this stage were still very preliminary and were bound to have many changes. Because we had already engaged Fineline Design with contract, when designs were finalized and we could finally talk prices more realistically, we did not have any bargaining power anymore. In the end, Minyi did help us secure some goodwill discounts. But we felt like Minyi/Fineline could have done more to give us better prices even though we had already signed the contract. This is after scrutinizing the unit prices and comparing against guideline prices on websites like qanvast. If you are looking to reno and are already asking for quotations, even though your design ideas are still very rough and preliminary, you might want to scrutinize the costing early on. To reiterate, by no means are we saying we had a bad reno experience with Minyi/Fineline. We are just highlighting a few problems that we encountered, for sharing with all beginners to the reno scene. Overall, Minyi did help us in achieving our desired bedroom design, and accommodating our requests. Albeit with some rough moments here and there when it came to talking about prices and work schedule.