After carefully analyzing increased costs, we are writing to inform you of a necessary forthcoming price increase.
Grooming Pit Stop will be increasing prices, effective 1 January 2024. Click on the links below for the updated price list.
Please be assured that Grooming Pit Stop has made every effort to keep this increase to a minimum and will continue to honor current price structures up to 31 December 2023.
It’s the time of the year again to book CNY 2024 grooming slots for your fur baby! So here’s what we’re going to do for the upcoming peak season for grooming.
The surcharge for CNY 2024 is as follows:
15 to 28 Jan – $10 surcharge per appointment
29 Jan to 8 Feb – $15 surcharge per appointment
Every Tues & Thurs, grooming will be done at our humble abode. Two-way transport available at an additional $25. Pickup will be around 11 am and drop off around 7 pm. Timing is based on estimation and subject to traffic conditions. For pickup before 11 am, depending on your location, ERP fees will be charged.
Our CNY Break will be from 9th to 18th Feb.
Services resume on 19th Feb.
Early this year, we adopted two kittens who needed a home. We’ve zero experienced in having cats and we needed to learn and get the necessities ready before their arrival. Everything happened fast and we welcomed them to our humble abode less than two weeks when we first met at the fosterer’s place.
We managed to get some temporary cat scratching pole as the ones we ordered online was still shipping over. Visited some pet stores to stock up on some kitten canned food as we were told getting wet food is better for cats. Choosing the right food can be challenging as we needed to be sure that they’re complete diet for them.
Let us introduce you to our new supawvisors in training! They’re domestic shorthair, we’re not very familiar with cat breeds, so let us know if we got it wrong. They’re both boys and we were told they’re siblings.
White Ginger is Coder.
Ginger is Chunker.
They’re around 7 months old as of this post.
Having them in our pawmily brings lots of chaos, mess, happiness, frustration, and sometimes panic. No, we’re not complaining but more happy that we could give them a home. They made the home livelier since we have two seniors at home who aren’t as active as before.
It’s a whole lot of learning as we embark on the journey as cat pawrents. We’ll update more if we ever remember to.
We’ve been busy trying to settle our new schedules, including daycare and pawcation. Yes, we’ve been busy being the Fun Nanny to the fur kids since early this year and we’re still trying to manage our appointments. It’s not easy to be honest as we’ve decided to slowly transition to being Fun Nanny. We’re still doing grooming till our body says no to physical work.
We’ve been doing grooming for the past 8 years. As most pawrents have noticed we’re slowing down recently as we’ve been listening to our body. Some days we needed a break as grooming sometimes takes a toll on our bodies. We needed the recharge to be physically ready for the next couple of days of grooming appointments. As our fellow groomers always remind one another, please take a break!
As we fall into our new routine, hopefully soon, we’ll update more on our adventures on our social media as well as our website. So stay tuned for more updates! *hopefully*
2022 flew past just like that and it’s the time of the year again to give thanks to our lovely GPS Pawmily. Thank you for being there for us and being understanding as we changed and transition our business direction.
It’s a roller coaster ride indefinitely. We know that we’re unable to do grooming as a long-term career as we get older, so we decided it’s about time to introduce our new service and transition into doggy daycare. It was a difficult decision considering grooming has always been our main service since we started Grooming Pit Stop. Fret not, we’ll still be taking in grooming appointments, but scaling down a little.
As we exit 2022 with a big bang, we’ll be looking forward to a awesome 2023 with GPS Pawmily.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
We woke up in shock on a Thursday morning. Received a Whatsapp messaged from a friend informing us that she was heading to A&E and asked us to help look after her fur kids. We head over as soon as we could after feeding our supawvisors their breakfast.
Once we arrived, we managed to check in on the fur kids, who seemed to be all calm. The cats were fed and we topped up the rabbits’ hay. Then we “kidnapped” Kelly, the shetland. For the other fur kids, we managed to settle with the other fur nannies to help feed and look after them while our friend recovers. It was a hectic scary morning before all of us calm down and had everything settled.
We had Kelly for about a week, and despite us planning to head down to the nearest park during her stay, the God of Rain decided that we should stay indoors. It rained almost every day, thundery showers to be exact. And so we stayed indoors most of the time. We only headed out during drizzle rain when we walked the void deck using the sheltered walkway.
Although we didn’t do much during her emergency pawcation cos the sky forbid us to head out, I’m pretty sure Kelly enjoyed herself. And thankfully, nothing major happened to our dear friend, and may she recovers even better. Health is wealth.
We haven’t been updating our adventures here on our website. We were swamped by both grooming and daycare, occasional pawcation, appointments. And we just had a short break in July going on a cruise. It was a nice break and we came back refreshed.
Now we’re back and yes, we had a little shuffle and we’re moving towards a new strategic direction. Everything is in a mess so bear with us as we transit towards the new direction.
We’ll be missing again for another long break. We’ve got our own place and we’re moving! So with all the moving and minor touch up at our new humble abode, we won’t be taking in much appointments. Hopefully we get everything done asap so we can get back to work as soon as we can.
Till then, do check on our website or social media for more updates.
After our Andis 5-speed clipper retired during our CNY busy period, we started to research various brands of clippers. We do know of groomers, especially in the western countries have been raving about this brand called Heiniger. It’s relatively still new in Singapore and not many local reviews yet. So we can only base on reviews from groomers from the west.
Like Andis, it does come with a few cordless models and a corded one. With all the options available, we couldn’t decide which to get and decided to head down to the store to better understand the products.
We bought ours at Kwong Chow Kee, located in Chinatown’s Fook Hai Building. After checking the availability with the shop, we decided to head our way down during one of our off days.
When we were there, we got the lady to introduce us to Heiniger and we get to hold it to see which model is comfortable for us. The corded clipper, Saphir Cord, speed is much better than the cordless clipper, Saphir Basic.
There are 3 cordless models, Saphir Basic, Saphir Style, and Opal. Both Saphir Basic and Saphir Style is only one speed, while Opal is two speed. We ended up getting Saphir Basic as firstly, it’s within our budget. Secondly, we love its plain-looking. Thirdly, the weight is just right. There’s an option to purchase an additional cord that connects to the clipper to use a corded clipper. It is good for mobile groomers who might forget to charge the battery or experience low battery while on the go. But we didn’t purchase it as we would like to see how long the battery can last us on a single charge.
The entire set that we bought comes with:
Clipper
Lithium-Ion battery
Heiniger #10 blade
Charger
Care Kit
Finally got to use it after the first full charge. We were impressed at how well the pre-shave was. Despite being one speed, we would say the first pre-shave was amazingly near clean and even. We were further impressed and amazed after the final shave.
Weight-wise, it’s slightly heavier than our old Andis 5-speed. But definitely lighter than Andis 2-speed. It’s not taxing on our wrist when we use it from appointment to appointment. The only downside is there’s no indicator when the battery gets low. We were told it will get slower before it totally stops. Maybe it’s us, we couldn’t tell if it’s getting slower. We had to use our shears twice to finish the grooming session when the battery died on us. We are still learning how to notice when the battery needs to be charged.
It’s our very first cordless and we’re impressed at how we managed to shave at an angle we couldn’t do with a corded clipper. Best of all, no more tripping over the wire! Yes, sometimes we do trip over the wire and it gets annoying. Now that we’re using a cordless clipper, such a thing is of the past.
After a few days of using Heiniger, we’ve realised that we missed out a lot! In our opinion, Heiniger seems to work much better for us.
We’ve been using Andis for years, ever since we started as a student and an apprentice. From Andis 2 speed to 5 speed, the cords have been giving us issues. Though we love how light Andis 5 speed was nothing can be compared to a cordless one.
In terms of weight for cordless clippers that we’ve tried, Andis cordless clipper is heavier for us. The detachable battery itself weighs a lot, especially when in use, it’s very taxing on our wrist which made it difficult to manoeuvre during grooming. Whereas the Heiniger, we’ve tried all cordless series at the store before purchase, they’re much lighter compared to Andis cordless clippers. It’s easier to manoeuvre and less stress on the wrist.
Shaving-wise, Heiniger gives a much cleaner cut on pre-shave and is much quieter. The blades don’t get hot fast compared to when we were using Andis where we had to take a break to let the blades cool down before we continue.
It’s the best buy ever in our grooming career. We didn’t regret switching over to Heiniger. Totally recommend this to fellow groomers out there who are looking to purchase a new clipper.
We head off to pick Katsu up in the morning, together with our supawvisors as we had plans to bring the fur kids out to our friend’s place. His place has a nice garden for the fur kids to run and explore. We jokingly said it’s like having a personal dog park.
After getting all the details and instructions from Katsu’s pawrent, we’re off for some fun! The car ride with Katsu was different. Although her dad has been calling her a monster, she was relatively well behaved during the journey. She would sit quietly till we arrived at our destination.
Mia will be joining us for daycare, her mummy said she’ll drop her off at our friend’s place instead. She needed to collect her newly purchased bicycle located nearby and since it was on the way, Mia doesn’t need us to fetch her.
Having a decent size garden seems like a great idea where the fur kids get to run and explore. The best part of it is, that it’s private and solely for us. This means we don’t need to worry about unfamiliar dogs and a fight that might happen. Or at least if there were to be a dog fight, at least we do know how to handle the situation and be responsible for it. We’ve read too many stories online about irresponsible pawrents or guardians who don’t want to be responsible for injuries after a fight between the fur kids.
We let the fur kids run about with supervision and make sure they’re enjoying themselves and most importantly, they get along. With the hyper Katsu and Mia, we had to make sure they get a break and water parade in between their playtime. While they take a break, so do we.
It started to get cloudy and we had to get everyone back into the house. True enough, a thunderstorm arrived! Katsu panicked and started crawling up to whoever is willing to give her some comfort. We got to know that she’s scared of thunderstorms after we gave some updates to her daddy.
To be honest, she’s the first fur kid that we doggy sit that’s afraid of thunderstorms. We were a little unsure of what to do and weren’t sure if comforting her is the right way to do it. We’re pretty sure there are many trains of thought for this topic, we’ll definitely do our research about it to prepare us for a future similar situations.
Mia’s mummy picked her up at night after dinner while Katsu head home with us for the night. Guess the girls had a fun time the entire day as Katsu slept well and didn’t disturb us at all.
It was home sweet home for Katsu on the 6th of March. Waited for her daddy to be home before we head over to drop her off. Although it wasn’t our first time looking after Katsu for a day, we were a little reluctant to send her back. Guess fun times always have to come to an end. We’re pretty sure we’ll see Katsu often as the borders start to open up recently.
We’ve stopped taking in appointments around late November for CNY 2022. Most of our regulars had booked an appointment by then and our schedules were quite packed.
Our busy period started in early January after our short break in welcoming the year 2022. As usual, it started off slow with a few appointments to start the busy peak period. We didn’t take in any new customers for the month of January, by then our February slots are almost taken up as well. It was scary to us on how fast our following month’s appointments are filling up. We didn’t expect the overwhelming support given to us by our awesome pawrents.
This year’s peak period was a little different as we did continue with our weekly daycare fur kids. And thankfully we did as we’re able to schedule them in for their CNY grooming. With the daycare, it allows us to have a little breather from the traveling in between appointments. So it’s more of a pros and cons of continuing daycare during this period.
Our main shaver, not the tiny one for paw pads, decided to retire amid our busy period. It started to not work when we were grooming our last fur kid on the 17th January. Thinking maybe it’s the wiring issue, we decided to check it out after we end our last grooming session.
Once home, we decided to test it out again. To our horror, it started to smoke, then it died on us completely. Feeling anxious, we didn’t know what to do and was feeling frustrated as it happened at the wrong timing!
After calming down, we texted our fellow groomers to see who have a spare shaver to lend us till we get our replacement. We had to thank 7 Paws for helping us during this busy and difficult time. (If you prefer grooming salon instead of house-call, you may check them out)
We had to admit that we didn’t plan well for this year’s CNY appointments. We ended up having to travel from east to west and west to east. Travelling like this was time consuming to be honest. With such poor planning, we had to minimise our appointments.
Though Singapore is relatively small compared to our neighbouring countries, but travelling does takes up most of our time. Not to mention the occasional bad traffic. And with the ongoing construction work at SLE towards BKE from our place, the traffic was slow as drivers had to slowly merge from a 3 Lane traffic into 2 Lane.
With this year’s bad planning, we’ve learnt our lesson. We will be making some changes and improvements for the following year. And hopefully, the operation will go on smoothly.
We managed to survive another peak period. And we’re thankful for everyone’s support and patience during CNY. Weirdly, this year’s peak period just went by without us knowing. It feels like time does pass fast.
Despite the hectic schedule, we’ve enjoyed every session with each fur kid that we groomed. Their warm happy welcome keeps us motivated to keep going. Despite the tiredness, seeing them gives us that burst of energy to get them groomed before the festive season.
Though we’re not looking forward to the annual peak period, but we’ll definitely see everyone again. Do book early when our CNY 2023 slots are open to avoid disappointment.
