We moved in to our own place here at Casa Riana about four years ago. Back then we had to take out a few loans, personal and housing just to get our dream home. Well, not exactly dream, dream home but a home to call our own nevertheless. After that we can't afford any major renovation save for the grill and some basic wiring let alone a proper kitchen cabinet or worktop. It was only last month that we could afford a proper kitchen cabinet after my wife got her bonus.
I thought finding a contractor to build a simple kitchen cabinet was easy. I did save a few numbers that were passed around by friends a long time ago. When the time come when we finally need a contractor, almost all of them are either busy or unavailable. I didn't know that renovation contractors are so in demand right now. They were all bumiputra contractors though, I haven't tried the others yet. Our initial plan was to buy a simple budget cabinet from IKEA and find a contractor to fix it at home. Of course IKEA does has their own contractors but the fees were a little steep. I thought we could save a few hundred ringgit with an outside contractor.
In the end we did manage to find a contractor who's available and willing to meet our budget. At first we only wanted to expand our kitchen a little bit, demolish the divider in the middle of our kitchen and move the sink back. That alone will cost us 6,000 ringgit. After much deliberation though, my wife decided to go all the way and build a kitchen cabinet as well with the total cost of RM10,000. Yeah her bonus was that much. We thought buying a cabinet from IKEA and asking our contractor to install it is a bit cumbersome. Besides, there's no guarantee they will follow the right instruction or just simply fix it the easiest way they can.
So the contractor came to have a look and we agreed on the design and price. A few days later he came with his workers and measured stuff in our kitchen. The next day he started with the demolition job and the plumbing job which lasted for about a week. During that time the entire house was filled with dust but we had no choice but to deal with it and live our lives as usual. The gap between the plumbing works and the actual installation of our kitchen cabinet was quite long though. We waited for like 3 weeks before our contractor came up with the cabinet and worktop sample. The final installation didn't start until 5 days later. Overall, our kitchen renovation took around 2 months, about a month longer than we expected.
Quality-wise we were quite satisfied with our kitchen contractor. We got everything that we were promised of except for punctuality of course. We got one L-shaped kitchen cabinet with a huge double sink and another independent wall cabinet. To make up for the delay, our contractor offered to paint our kitchen walls for free. A nice gesture I must say.
If you'd like to do any renovation work for your home, kitchen, living room or whatever you can contact DJ Epul (Saiful Nizam) at 012 9194226. I don't know whether he's really a DJ before but he does renovation works now.
