Private Quarter in the ‘Big House’

This is the 3rd part of the hallway just outside the guest rooms that takes you to our private quarters. Sorry the picture isn't clear. That brilliant Equatorial sun just shines through and tends to bleach out pictures.

This hall is like the energizer bunny, it just keeps going and going and going! Its around 3’ x 40’! This section has a door on the left, a door on the right and a door at the end. (And a random full length mirror attached directly across from the MST Bedroom.) 

At the end is what used to be the laundry room. (We are relocating it to the garage.) My husband, Daryl wants it as his home office. He loves all the windows.

These windows just have screens and burglar bars on them. Though I do like the style they used. I’ve seen them look like shells, spider webs and all kinds of designs so I like it when they add to the windows instead of distract from them.

This room has been open to the elements for years. He plans to glass in the lower half and leave the upper half open so he can catch a breeze. Later on he wants to put in a screen door in front of this gate so he won’t feel so locked in and can enjoy stepping outside easily.

I claimed the bedroom on the end (door on the right) as my sewing/ project/ office space. Since the color was a pastel shade, I decided to just keep it his color for now and just have the cupboard doors painted bright white to match the ceiling.

Look at those closets!! I will be so organized! The one beside it doesn’t have shelves and will be plenty big enough for me to stand the rolls of fabric I shipped in there. (Thanks to my family who so generously gave them to me.)

I grew up with my mom running a sewing business out of our home. My dad built her a hefty table out of  2 x 8’s and a full sheet of plywood. She then padded it and covered it with a thick canvas type fabric that you could jab big dressmaking T-pins through to pull seams so curtains could be stretched and steam ironed flat.

By doing this she had a huge work surface to cut and put together whatever she was making and a HUGE ironing table instead of an ironing board. (Lots of years and memories were spent in that little shop. She still has it and uses it today, 35+ years later. Yeah, go Mom ; D)

Similar to this, but padded and covered in canvas

AND I’M FINALLY GETTING ONE OF MY OWN!!!! Can you tell I’m a little excited about it?

I will be making all the curtains, bed covers, pillow covers, etc. for the guest house so I wanted my own space where I didn’t have to pick up everything I was working on whenever I needed to cook a meal or when company was coming. (Did I just hear an, ‘Amen’?) I will also be storing, working on packaging and marketing objects for the gift shop.

I made a game for my kids, family and friends called ‘Kenya Safari’. It was such a hit I wound up selling quite a number in Nairobi. I thought I would adapt it to Uganda, leaving half of it Kenya and changing half to Uganda and calling it ‘African Safari’ or ‘East Africa Adventures’.  I have a few other ‘cottage industry’ type things like this I’d like to do, too. But those will just have to wait until after the Guest House is up and running.

The last rooms in our area are the master bedroom and our own master bath. I showed you the purple master bedroom in my first post, but I'll show it to you again so you get the full effect.

Those random looking cords hanging from the ceiling held the frame for the mosquito net. We took those down when we painted and plan on doing something a bit more decorative. (Any suggestions or better yet pictures???)

What I didn’t show you yet is the interesting master ‘bathroom’.  You walk from the MST bedroom into this room where the hot water heater is mounted way up on the wall next to a short little linen cupboard under a small window. 

Then you walk into the actual bathroom area.

This isn’t bad, the fixtures are actually quite nice and of good quality, but it doesn’t really work for my husband. The bathtub is very narrow and when you stand up in it for a shower (a BIG step up), my husband's head touches the shower head. Since he takes a shower every day something's got to change.

After the kitchen, this will probably be the next biggest project.

We plan on taking out the tub and sink and putting in a nice sized shower that’s probably 3.5’ x 4’. (Don't worry, there's another bathtub in the house so children can still bathe. ; D)

Where the foot of the tub was, is where we will have the hot water heater moved to with a linen cabinet in front of it to try to camouflage it. Next we’ll have the doorway from the MST bed to the bathroom moved over 2 or 3 feet. By changing the location of the door into these rooms we will gain 6 feet of space!!

We were planning on putting in another closet anyway, but by doing this it will allow us to put in a long double dresser (or our old mismatched dressers for now) underneath the window in the MST bedroom. And on the other side of the doors where the water heater was, we’ll be able to put in these lovely marble topped Martha Stewart sink units we bought on clearance and shipped in our container!  (Yes, we remembered to bring the faucets.)

And there you have it!

As always, we value your feedback! Thanks for stopping by.

Gift Shop, Computer Bar and Guest Rooms in 'The Big House'

I’ve already shown you the entry hall, dining room, living room and kitchen on my first post, called ‘Making a Ugandan School Into a Home’ so I won’t show these again until there has been a change of some sort.

This room is the first one on your right as you step in the door and on the way to the dining room. I’m not sure what this little room was originally, maybe a home office, but the school used it as part of their library.

I plan to make it into a little gift shop for our guests because the nearest place with nice souvenirs is hours away in Jinja.

Locally we have awesome Ugandan coffee that you can drive to the factory to get. It’s prepackaged, but I’d like to sell it in a cute bag. 

Or we were recently talking with the acting President of LivingStone International University about packaging it with their logo.

We also have a Sewing Ministry and would like to give them a place to sell their items. We’ll see how it goes, but I think it would be a huge help to our guests not to have to run around looking or haggling for gifts/souvenirs, though some get into that as part of the African experience. Not everyone does.

When my parents came to visit us when we lived in Kenya, my mom would loudly say, "Get back!” when sellers crowded around her. (Haha, poor Mom.)

The gift shop would also give an outlet for people in the area to sell or make things. I’ve gotten tons of ideas from Pinterest ; D labeled as Kiosk… if you want to take a look there.

This hallway takes you away from the public areas of the house we will be sharing, to the two other guest rooms #5 & #6, (I know lame names, those are just the ‘working titles’ for now) and then our private quarters.

This hallway is about 5 feet wide and 13 feet long. 

I’m thinking of putting in a long computer bar here with some cool old hardwood pieces of wood we’ve recently found and told we could use. 

Something like this:

At the end of that hallway/ computer area you can catch a glimpse of a couple of doors. The one on the left is the door to the one car garage where we plan on putting the laundry area since the other was a bit cramped and in our ‘private quarters’. This will make it handier and roomier to everyone doing laundry.  

Turning the corner, you pass a half bath and the door/gate to the outside on your left. In an earlier post, “Compound and Guest House” I talked about how we want to put in a parking area in the lower yard and put in steps to walk up the 5’ difference in height. We’d carry the walkway up to this door.

Just past this are the guest rooms on your right. As you can see from this picture of Guest room #5, the bathrooms are just across the hallway.

I say bathrooms because here in Uganda and in a lot of places outside of America, the toilet is in a separate room from the bathtub/shower. This will make it convenient for guests who have to share this space.

This is the final Guest Room, #6

These rooms are bigger than the ones in the guest house, so will probably be ‘family rooms’, meaning they have a full bed and bunk beds or 2 full beds. The closets in these rooms are huge! Seems a waste, but can’t figure out what else to do with them.

We’ll probably store our seldom used stuff like Christmas tree and decorations, camping gear or suitcases in the upper cabinets and just keep them locked up. There’s plenty of space in the double closets for guests.

As you can see, there are lots of colors all over the house which I think overshadow some of the finer architecture in this old house like the soaring ceilings, cool windows and all those solid wooden doors we think are mahogany.

Our thought is to neutralize everything to an off-white (called soft white here) and bright white on ceiling and built-ins and to let the architecture, and furnishings speak for themselves. That felt like I was on an episode of “This Old House’ LOL

Can’t wait to see how everything comes together once the container we shipped gets here! We’ve heard it made it to Mombasa and didn’t fall into the ocean.

This is our 4^th time to ship in a container and was thinking that sometimes the 'odds are not in our favor.'

But thank the Good Lord, it made it to Kenya. Let’s see how getting from Mombasa to Mbale goes.

Thanks for stopping by!

Haha...couldn't resist.

'You say, Goodbye and I say, Hello!'

Ok. I have to admit I’ve been putting this off for a couple of reasons: 

1) I think it’s going to be a lengthy post (I wound up breaking it up into 3 posts! See, I told you it would be long.) and 

2) hubby and I couldn't agree on exact changes to make. We’re getting closer, though.

Our sticking point is the verandah to what’s the actual front door, but not used as such. Since parking is on the side and the kitchen entry is right there, everyone just walks the few feet to that door instead of walking up the drive and around the corner from where they parked.

It’s more where the askaris (guard/yard man) hang out to grab a bit of shade, along with the guard dog. (Yes, we need both since the houses here are not wired with a security alarm system. And even if they were, don’t know if the intermittent electricity could sustain them.) 

This is Difasi, the day askari/gardener.  The dog's name is Kibu or Gift. We have three guards...We can't work them 24/7 you know! One is there during the day, Enoch is there during the weekend and moonlights at other teammates compounds during the week and Geoffrey, who is a student, works in the evenings.

I want to knock out that blue wall behind the askari (there we go with the knocking out walls business again) to enlarge the dining room. But he (husband that is, not askari) wants to keep it as a place to sip his tea, look at the birds, grab a bit of the outdoors, etc.

So, since this is my blog, I’ve decided to show it the way I’d like it.

Ok, now, I’ll give you the floor plan of the ‘Big House As Is' so you can understand the references I give.

This is the first impression you get of our compound.

Yikes!! Can’t wait to talk to the landlord about painting these walls! 
Probably a tan color to camouflage the rain streaks and to neutralize the diamonds and the brick pillars. The pillars aren’t so bad, but why not spiff them up, too?

And what color to paint the dingy grey metal gates, you ask?

Why brilliant turquoise of course! 

For three reasons: 

1) because it’s such a happy bright color that will make giving directions easy (just look for the turquoise gate, see?), 

2) it will match our daughter’s front door and make me think of her and 

3) I’m toying with the idea of calling the guest house ‘The Blue Turaco’ after the ‘Great Blue Turaco’ that lives in Uganda and other countries in East Africa.

Though, it looks like we may be stuck with, "Oh, you mean the 'Old Mission School" ', since that’s what everybody keeps calling it, LOL.

Even though the entrance into compound is not that great, the exiting is pretty to see.

But we don’t want people to be glad to be leaving, so we need to work on that!

I don’t think the landlord will mind the color I’ve chosen for the gate since this is the color he painted the entrance by the kitchen and is the color of the trim all over the outside of the house.

This is the true ‘entry door’ into the house. 

Don’t you just love these old wooden doors and screens? We need to have the door on the left shaved a bit so it will push all the way back against the wall to make the entrance seem more inviting and of course do something about the pitted cement, maybe tile?

I would love to do something like this over the two openings on either side of that brick column and the garage. Doesn’t that seem so much more inviting?

That's the end of this post. Like always, we’ll show you the changes and progress we make.

Thanks for stopping by.

Compound Layout and Guest Area Plans

Okay, I figured out a way to get what I wanted from technology. 

Just in case you were wondering how I did it, this is how. Since I couldn't upload excel documents (I know, frustrating!) I took a picture of it with my IPhone then sent it to myself as a private message on FaceBook. Then I saved the picture to my computer's files where I was able to upload to this post. Whew! Yes, a convoluted way to get the pictures, but I won!!

Ok, enough bragging, here's the layout of the compound:

Currently, because the yard slopes downward and has a 5' drop everyone parks their vehicles between the two houses on the one flat surface that's easy to get to. 

The 5' foot drop is shown on the layout by the green line that goes from the Rubbish Pit (where we'll have to burn our trash, no trash collection here) to the cemented half(ish) basketball court. 

The three green blotches are representative of trees. The two on the left are mango trees at the bottom of the sloped area. The mango tree in the middle is twisted (hence the name of the blog). The tree on the right is a guava on the top of the slope  which makes a quaint shaded sitting area by the guest house.

We wanted to find another place for parking to make the area between the two houses as more of a garden path between the two houses. So we had to get creative. Since the only other flat surface in the yard that was somewhat easy to get to was at the drop off area at the back, (field for kids to run and play at recess) we decided to make a gentle slope to access it. (I wanted to use the court since it was already paved, but hubby wanted to preserve this area where kids could play, draw with chalk and the guys could toss a few basketballs.) 

We will park our cars next to the house for ease of everyday living, but will ask guests to park below (after unloading their luggage first, of course). We will be also be adding in steps for the 5' climb between the two levels. 

We currently have an engineer working and living in Mbale (along with his wife, 1 yr old and 3 yr old). He graciously came to our compound to help us figure out if what we plan to do is feasible and to give us heads up on costs since pricing is very different in Africa than in America. (Labor which costs an arm and a leg in America is cheap here. Products which are cheap in America are expensive here.) 

He told us to use concrete from gate, to create slope and for parking area would cost $9000. After I put my eyes back in my head, we asked if there were alternatives. He said that to use murram (dirt) and aggregate (gravel) would cost around $900. 

Whew! Now that's more like it. Plus it goes with the quaint country feel we're going for. Can't you hear the gentle crunch of small rocks as you drive onto the compound? 


Here's the layout for 'The Old Schoolhouse'/Future Guest House

The next blow was the bathroom situation. We had planned to put them in the hallway which was currently the entrance into that area of the building, but what we were going to make into the back.

Even though the bathrooms were going to be tiny 45" wide by 9' long we thought it wouldn't feel cramped because of the soaring ceilings. 

These are open privacy clay tiles used all over the place here in Uganda. They are put up to serve as a 'wall' to an area, but to allow the air (and critters) to pass through unless a screen is put over it, which these did not have. Since this was just giving privacy to a hallway full of doors, it really didn't matter. 

However, Matt the engineer, said it would cost thousands of $$ to create a new waste line for these bathrooms because you can't make water go uphill to tie into the current line. Feeling defeated, we asked if they could be put anywhere else. He said if we put them on the wall we wanted to make as the entry area into the rooms that it would cost hundred of $$. 

So...we will now be knocking out these walls (foot thick brick walls) and filling in this step down to the same level of the rest of the two end rooms (again, probably with brick). Both brick and labor are cheap. A fact we are very pleased about!

When I was feeling discouraged about having to start over with new plans my husband, Daryl said, "All these setbacks may make us rethink our plans and give us an even better room." And I think he was right. What was an architectural throwaway before, I want to try to incorporate into a feature wall.

Now that this is where the head of the bed will most likely be, we want to find a way to cap off the back, but leave all the architecture as a sort of 'headboard'. (I will definitely be posting what we do when we figure it out.)

These are the other rooms in the Old Schoolhouse:

starting from Guest Room #1 and working our way around to the future living room area. (We'll come up with cuter room names later ; D)

The new shared bathroom will probably stretch across the entire width of this room which is only 9' wide. We will take out this huge window since it won't be needed in the bathroom and reuse it in the old hallway or new back wall of bedroom. Since this is the 'end' room, we can make a door on the side wall which faces the guava tree. Near where that cardboard box is sitting.

This would have been the entrance into the bathroom. Now we will have the wall taken out. Ordinarily, you would have stepped down into the hall. This is the area we will probably raise so floor will be same level throughout.

Guest Room #2:

Same situation as other room...wall knocked out, hallway raised. 

But it will have door to the right of the window you are seeing, which will face the main or 'big' house and will open onto a shared porch or verandah.

Guest Room # 3:

This is currently the Resource Room for the school so it is full of a mixture of books to be discarded and bookcases and other supplies to keep. This room is all one level, but guests will need to step up into the shared shower area. 

Since this room is more spacious we had planned to put the guest laundry room in the hallway. But since that is out, too we will put in a laundry area in another area in the future. This allows this room to be more of a family room with bunk beds. (Another plus ; D)

Shared Bathroom in corner of L of the bldg.:

When you step up by the sink

and turn left, you see these 3 doors. That yellow one you can catch a glimpse of on the bottom right of the photo is the doorway into the bathroom. The green door on the right is also a toilet room, but will be turned into a shower room.  The other green door on the left will probably be hot water closet and cleaning supplies for rooms. Blue door straight ahead is the last guest room in the school house.

Guest Room #4:

So far, this is the ONLY room in both buildings that has water damage and 

we think it's from an overflow pipe in ceiling. Yeah!! No major roof/ceiling repairs.

Future Kitchen:

Oops, I just realized that I didn't get a picture of this room. When you step out of Guest Room #4 you see a door on your right which is the room where the kitchen will be. It's a tiny room that's about 7 x 11. To open it up we will probably knock out the center of this wall where that light switch is and take that blue door off at the end of the hallway which leads to the Living/ Dining Room area. Where the picture ends on the left side is the entrance into this area and where the verandah will be added.

Living Room/ Dining Room Area for Guests:

The door that is standing open is to a closet that will be for guests to store luggage or whatever if they need to leave the city but don't want to keep paying for a room. The other room is the door we would like to remove to open things up a bit.

We're planning on opening up our Living Room and Dining Room to our guests, but also wanted to give them a place of their own if they wanted to make foods for themselves or to have a place to hang out other than our place. Especially if it's late at night and they can't sleep. 

And there you have it. This is the mock up of the 

same building with added in areas and furnishings.

We would value your feedback on things we may have forgotten 

or things that would make a nicer experience for our guests.

We hope you will come and experience it  for yourself some day!!