renting in africa

As we were getting things ready to move into our house we had many, "that would never happen in America" moments. I'd love to share some of these with you. These are in no way to hate on our landlord or property.. just things we found to be funny.

• The fridge doesn't really close... so we put duct tape on it to help. It doesn't exactly do the job, but it'll do until ours gets here.
• There's not a toilet seat in our bathroom. When we asked the landlord about it, he said that we told him we had our own plumber coming and he should get the toilet seat for us.
• We noticed the ceiling fan in our bedroom didn't seem to be going as fast as the other rooms. We asked the landlord about it and he said just to use the AC unit in the room. (obviously AC is better than a fan, but more expensive for us) So we just switched that fan with the fan in Chandler's room-to-be.
• We had to wait for the lady living on our property to move out before we could move in.
• They changed the mosquito netting on the main rooms of the house. It was great until we realized it has a green tint & therefore everything we look at out our windows does as well.
• Typically, when you move into a rented apartment or home, it's fairly clean. We spent approximately 3 days scrubbing this place down. There's still places I want to clean again.
• There are things that we have had to put in because its not common to have here like a hot water heater, washer & dryer hookups, kitchen cabinets... when we move out, we will take all of that with us. And the toilet seat.

We really do love our new little home. It's 3 bedrooms, 2 baths (one in the master bedroom with a bidet), and a mother-in-law suite that we can only use the living room & bathroom (the rest of the suite was negotiated out of the contract for the landlord to store the furniture we're currently using). We have nice little living room/dining room and a very little kitchen. All of the rooms came with built in closets, which can be difficult to find. We have some other things we plan to "work" on... like we really need some kitchen cabinets up :) But enjoy our before pictures.

disclaimer: this house is a MESS. Remember, these are before pictures :) And I had a sleeping hubby when I was taking these pictures so I don't have one of our Master Bedroom yet. It looks like the other bedrooms... just bigger.

walking in the gate

front porch with Chandler's new toys we were given!

Thanks Hobby Lobby for our Welcome sign

living room/dining room with our lovely temporary furniture

living room/dining room

tiny kitchen without cabinets

bathroom - french style

toilet on the right

shower & sink on the left

spare bedroom

Chandler's soon to be bedroom

Master bathroom (avec bidet)