My latest project started when my parents were here. My dad worked with our base maintenance guy, Ron Grant, on remodeling the upstairs apartment of the old hangar. It was being destroyed by termites. The old hangar office down below is now an efficiency apartment for guests who are traveling through. It's never been anything too spectacular, so my mom and I jumped at the chance to get to "remodel" it a bit. The hard part is not being able to do things exactly how you would like because of our limited resources here (ie. no Hobby Lobby or Jo-Ann's Fabrics!) So, I think it turned out fairly well with also a limited supply of furniture.
The apartment is the bottom right door. The entire upstairs is the apartment that my dad and Ron were working on.
Here's some before pictures. We don't have any pictures of before when it was actually livable.
Last summer, right before we left for furlough, our landlady told us that she would like to live in her house. We had to scramble to find a place to put our stuff while we were in the US. You can't just pack your stuff and rent a climate-controlled storage unit here! With so much rain, some houses can be rather moldy, which then of course, can make your things smell kind of lovely! So, we found a suitable place and were even lucky enough to have someone available to house-sit. You can't leave your house unattended for six months here and hope that it will all still be there when you get back. God really took care of us and our things.
After furlough, we found out that another MAF family would be leaving in May. They were living in an MAF house. MAF owns six houses in front of the hangar. That area is known as our "base". No idea why. Since ourselves, and one other family (who were planning to leave in August to move to the US) were the only ones living in rented homes "in town," it was decided that we would move into the MAF house.
We liked the house, but it needed a bit of work. It needed some improvements done that needed to be fixed while no one was living in it. We had the perfect opportunity to do the work, since we didn't need to be out of our house until August. So, thanks to our "base" maintenance guy, Ron, we were able to move in at the end of July.
Here's what we did: replaced plywood walls with a different material that would be less likely to be eaten by termites replaced leaky windows painted inside from top to bottom took out a wall in between an office and a bedroom, to make a master bedroom - which also meant closing in two doorways remodeled a bathroom
It's great to be on the other side of the work! We're really happy with how everything turned out and are glad to be so close to both the school and the hangar. The only thing I'm not so sure about is being so close to the jungle. We've already had two tarantulas in the house!
