NAFASI THE BLOG

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...

In the following months, new furniture was arriving in the house every week! How fun! Patrick would come home every day wondering what he'd find. I was drawing up designs with different carpenters, and essentially testing out who I would like to continue working with through NAFASI as a business for future clients as well! I found some great people to work with, and of course some hiccups along the way too... You saw my pretty apothecary being made on last week's blog . They delivered it without finishing, as I requested, and just leveled everything out and added my apothecary pulls. I was thrilled with how it turned out!!  Then I shopped around for the best wood stains, and tried a few out. This stain is great, and I think it turned out really beautifully, but it was a hugeeeee pain to work with. It stains everything. EVERYTHING immediately. Including my hands and nails for 2 weeks. :/ My own fault for not using gloves. But that's pretty difficult to do to...

The Guest Room It was really easy to forget about the bedrooms through the hallway. We weren't renovating them, we were keeping the floors the same and the walls were just white. They were 3 simple rooms and not the highest on my priority list, considering the magnitude of the main area and all of the work that that needed! But after looking at it this way for so long, and basically using it as a huge walk in closet, I wanted to get organized, and more importantly, I was in the mood to make a mural. :) This is how the guest bedroom looked when we moved in. First I took the old curtain rod down and had a wooden curtain rod made.  Then the mural began! I wanted to do something very bohemian, light, and resembling a layered watercolor. I added the circles Some yellow And some burnt orange and purple! (night-time painting lends for bad progress photos) But by morning it looked pretty good!! The next night I added some white geometr...