Under the Twisted Mango Tree: 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.