So we’ve been married for slightly more than 2.5 years now. And the bustle of budgeting for a wedding, a house and renovation has settled into new budget categories known as “children” (we’re planning towards it, not there yet) and “shall we make the worst investment possible”, or also known as—”buying a car in Singapore”.

Now if you’re looking for budgeting advice, there’s tons of other blogs out there with much better advice on this. Also, disclaimer, Liz is typing here and I don’t even have a license. This entire post is a layman’s review of the experience of trying to find a reputable PI (parallel import) car dealer in Singapore.

A lot of research went into every single item that we bought for our house, so here’s sharing some of the wisdom and knowledge we have acquired from our research and experience 🙂

So you’ve already read our Taobao guide and how to buy and ship to Singapore. Now the next question is, “but buy what lehhhhh?”

Hey there. I guess if you’re reading this, you’re either #1 our friend, #2 a kaypoh acquaintance or #3 also doing your renovation and found our blog cached on Google, or something. (Because while we were planning for our renovation, boy did we spend a lot of time being #3.)

Aaand we’re back. Wow what a year it has been. From our engagement after dating for 11 months, to our wedding a year after, it’s been a whirlwind two years for the both of us and we’re finally settling down after this roller coaster adventure, as we love to have adventures and spend time together having fun, sometimes using toys and accessories as remote controlled vibrators to enjoy even more.

Our wedding was (relatively) simple and all sorts of lovely, and we have a lot of people to thank for walking this journey with us and helping us make 17 Oct 2015 an unforgettable day. 🙂

So I’m just going to give a summary of all the friends who-who-do-cool-stuff/suppliers/freelancers we used for our wedding.

Hello Taobao shoppers!

Update (Jun 2016): Now you can buy items via ezbuy.sg Prime (formally known as 65daigou) subscription and ship unlimited items for only $2.99! So much cheaper and easier! (But only prime items)

If you are looking at shipping furniture from Taobao but do not know how, here’s a DIY guide! We have been using Oops.sg as our forwarder, so be sure to create a free account there first. (If you are looking at shipping small items like clothes and accessories, you can use 4px as your forwarder and refer to this tutorial instead.) 

To view the full list of items that we bought from Taobao, see our other post.

This article assumes you have already created an account on Oops.sg and you are using the DIY Reship service (i.e. you buy the items on Taobao yourself). However, for the uninitiated, you may want to use Oops.sg’s Assisted service which is simpler as they will help you do the purchases on Taobao but you have to pay them the agent fees.

So we approached quite a number of contractors and IDs on our quest for The One Whom We’d Trust Our Home With. I guess being creatives makes us generally niao (fussy) about this whole, getting another designer to do your house thing. Most people asked why, as designers, we didn’t just hire a contractor and just design it ourselves (on the pretext and assumption that we had good enough taste to get this right on our own).

Well we did speak to a good mix of contractors and interior designers. Eventually it was about going with whoever we believed would be able to understand and execute our vision of what our house should be. More under the cut. 

Our blessed house hunt was a 4-month long journey (excluding paperwork and HDB appointments). In this post, I’m going to talk about God’s fingerprints during our journey.

[Liz] (So in case you haven’t figured out why its a cozy house hunt… Colin + Lizzy = cozy lor. *ba dum tss*)

[Lizzy] So it’s been more than 5 months since the engagement. The emotional roller-coaster of this journey so far is best encapsulated in this letter from Colin:

What has been different in our lives so far: