NAFASI THE BLOG

I'm so excited to share with everyone my latest kitchen interior design project, and the bright young woman who lives here!  Claire is a neighbor, a friend, and a client of NAFASI! She had just decided she was ready to settle into her Kigali house, but wasn't quite satisfied with it as her and her son's home . Luckily Claire called on NAFASI, had some great visions of what home meant to her, and we opened up her space into the cheery welcoming kitchen you see now!  This is how it used to look: Can you believe it!?!? Claire worked with her landlord, as she is renting the house, to share costs for the renovation. It was win-win for everyone! A lot of landlords are ready to make renovations on older homes, and willing to pay for the renovation costs that come with it. Claire was responsible for the interior design costs. This way the owner is able to get free design, and the value increases greatly on their home, and the tenant gets the home they actually ...

Hey everyone! I'm SO excited to finally share the finished product photos for The Art House , our small backyard house-turned- Airbnb !! ( Click here to see the live listing on Airbnb! ) We chose the house we're in, almost solely because of this small separated house in the back. We asked if we could renovate it- like REALLY renovate it- and the landlords seemed positive. But it was a risk! (Read how we decided here on the blog .) We tore down the interior walls and renovated the space in May 2018. (You can see the photos of the the whole process, and all the before photos in this blog entry. ) Since then, I have been designing and filling it in to be the comfortable rental studio (equipped with a kitchen, bathroom, living room, work area, and bedroom) that it is today! ;) What a process! Please enjoy the big reveal of The Art House and all the love we put into it!  Bedroom Living Room  Kitchen  Work Area  Bathroom The Art House Ex...

Having all the space in the world now with our Kigali house has been wonderful for me getting back into painting. And luckily our new house needed artwork on the walls too!  While furniture had mostly all been ordered and renovations were done, now was the phase of thinking about art. We had a big blank wall in our kitchen, and a big open space above that apothecary in the entry too. So what better way to fix it than with a Sip 'N Paint date night at home for me and Patrick!  Now he is a very patient man. Not my painting style however. So he tackled the measuring, taping, and meticulous painting of lines in the pattern on the kitchen wall.  He had this vision of a very light faded pattern on that wall, almost unnoticeable. He then also came up with the idea to make it a strip of detail, instead of a whole cliche accent wall... Creative too! Meanwhile I had been dreaming up this painting of a woman with windblown hair covering her face, us...

So I am realizing that as soon as we actually moved into our house after all of those renovations is when I completely abandoned all blogging on it! Sometimes you just a get so busy living that the blog gets pushed aside. However, now that our house is fully renovated and fully designed and decorated I have time to show you all the rest of the steps into getting our finished Kigali dream house! Let me go right back to where I left off in May 2018.... Throughout our first week of living in our new house, we had all of the construction materials removed,  (YES!) The tiles dug out, and re-cut correctly, New hardware on the cabinets, and plenty more! Once the backsplash, lower cabinetry and hardware were all finished, I was able to move on to my uppers!!!  Most importantly because we had to cover his monstrosity of electrical work in the kitchen, but also so I could have floating open shelving!!  This was the idea... They brought the cab...

So once the cabinets arrived, the kitchen started to come alive! However one small annoyance, was I wanted to move the plumbing to be centered under the window. The way the kitchen used to be, the sink was to the left of the window, and when you tried opening the window on the left side, it would hit the faucet. So I planned to center everything. This just took forever. I think there was stalling because no one else but me wanted to do it, or thought it was necessary. ;) And then once the pipes were moved, we built a huge cement farmhouse sink around it. So that just means that the right side cabinets just had to sit in the middle for a while instead of being pushed into place. Here's that whole fiasco! First- the old kitchen arrangement: The new kitchen with cabinets patiently waiting to be pushed into place. ;) Digging a hole through the outside of the house to move the pipes and center the plumbing. The outside of the house did sacrifice here for that centered f...