Our House Renovation Progress Update #6 Premium Curtains Or Affordable Curtains? Any Difference?

Made in Canva.com

Before visiting a physical shop I totally don't have any idea how premium curtains can go. There is no price tag on their website until you DM them on their social media. When I Google curtains I notice eCommerce websites are selling from range MYR 28 (USD 7) to MYR 380 (USD 95), but I'm not sure what is the measurement as I don't have the interest to click in.

So last few weeks, @tifaong and I went to Nilai 3 (a.k.a the largest textile town in Malaysia) to visit this shop called MK Group Curtain. It has a huge signboard at the junction so you hardly will miss the junction. Later we found out that they not only have huge signboard they also have few warehouse size showrooms not one but 2. One labelled as the premium showroom and another one without a label so I guess that would be affordable showroom?

Source

It was a hot Saturday around 11 am ish... lots of people at there as well and we walked under the hot sun for a while from the car park to the showroom. We go to the affordable showroom first to have a quick price check, colours, design of the curtain. Nothing fancy, just normal curtain and blinds so we just went to the premium showroom. Two showroom were just side by side so we exit from one showroom and enter the premium showroom.

In the premium showroom, they have plenty of designs and it looks really good. We touched few curtains and all of them were very well sew and all of them were thick and blackout curtain. We tour the entire premium showroom one round before we check their price. Since they already mentioned premium showroom please do expect premium price as well. When we look at the price per meter we were shocked! MYR 80 (USD 20) per meter! Wow! We touched few more curtains then went back to the affordable showroom.

When we went back there, we look for a salesperson to give us some suggestions. So we sit down and he started to take some samples for us to choose colours and pattern of the curtain. We flip through few catalogues and we finally pick our colours and we gave him our house windows and doors measurements and he calculates the quotation for us. So, the final quotation including installation will be MYR 7000 (USD 1765)! Wow! Still expensive for us! Never thought curtain can be so expensive and this is not the premium curtain, this is just MYR 32 -35 per meter quality. We were like "Oh Ok, let's us think about it, do you have a business card so we can contact you when we confirm?" He hands us his business card and we both left the showroom.

Fast Forward...

Last Sunday, we met our curtain contractor (Nick) at our house to do an actual measurement. We get to know Nick from Recommend.my website after we left MK Curtain I send a quotation in recommend.my to do another round of price check. I got about 6 quotations from different contractors and only Nick decided to call me on next day. So we have some chat and he asked me some basic requirements such as measurements, type of railing, type of blinds, and so on. He then quickly work on the quotation based on the measurement and type of blinds and curtains. To my surprise, Nick's quotation is about MYR 4500 (USD 1135) only and that is about 55% price different! Without waiting for other contractors to call me we decided to want him and ask him to come over on Sunday and do a site visit. So, that's the story how we met him online.

We choose almost similar sheer design

Nick comes with his wife and both of them are the business partner to the curtain shop. They don't have a physical showroom but they do have few suppliers collaborate with them. After done with whole house measurement is time to choose colour and pattern again. He gave us MYR 48 per meter instead of MYR 38 per meter quality. He said according to my total measurement the price difference is about MYR 200 which we think we still afford an upgrade so we choose few colours from MYR 48 deck. He told us it takes about two to three weeks to complete so we shall wait for it in the meantime!

Again, can't wait to see the final outcome!

---

Note: All photos are taken from Pixabay.com unless stated otherwise