base salon project, before and after

I have just completed a project of giving a face lift to the salon at our mission base.  Salon as in living room, not a place to style hair.  The salon is an oddly shaped kind of circle room, maybe the building is an octagon? It's kind of an all purpose room at the base, but very often we have our Tuesday night worship meetings there.  When I lived on the base back in 2009, the salon was our living room; if we wanted to hang out indoors but not in our dorm bedrooms, it was in the salon.  As you can see from the before pics, the salon really needed some TLC and especially a new paint job.
Every time I was in there before I was distracted by the need for new paint and by several places that the cement wall was crumbling around the bottom.  I thought "this should get redone, someone should redo this" and then one day I realized "I should make it my project to redo this."
We used some money we had set aside for special projects.  It took up quite a bit of time but wasn't all that expensive really, the price for labor is low here.

The first thing to be done was to replace the old florescent wand light bulbs and fixtures with modern small spiral low energy bulbs.  I guess you can't see that in any of the pictures, but they're there.  There were 7 lights on the ceiling of the salon, plus one in a smaller attached room and one in the bathroom on this ground floor of this building.  So that was 2 appointments with the electrician.  The first for him to come and see and make a list of what he needed to buy and the second to come back and install.  I got to sit and watch the exciting work. (that was sarcastic, it was not exciting to watch.)

The next step was to get a mason to come and tap and scrape around the bottom of the wall and patch it up with new cement.  Then I pulled out nails and screws and patched the rest of the wall with plaster.  The painter came and spent a whole day scrubbing and cleaning the walls.  While he did the walls I did inside of the window ledges that were caked with dried mud (accumulated dust having mixed with rain) and dead bugs and lizard poo.  Then the painter spent a few days painting.  I washed all the windows, and these louvered windows are a pain to clean.  I also painted all the bottom edge by the floor with a brush to help the work go faster; the painter used the ladder up high and I sat on the floor and scooted around.

Here is the painter in action.  He did some painting in our house last year.  He does good work, and with only 1 hand!  He lost the other one in a hunting gun accident.

 The paint comes in a big bucket and it is white and really thick.  Water and colorant has to be added to it.  There aren't strips of color samples to choose from (unless you go to one certain place in Bamako and pay way more money for paint) so you mix it yourself and hope for the best.  When the paint started going on I thought it looked like mustard, but it dries much lighter and it ended up being a cheerful sunny yellow color.  Don't the walls look so much nicer!  The salon has a whole new feeling to it, I find it much more relaxing and nice to be in there.

The bathroom needed some a minor tune up from the plumber, so that was another appointment. The final thing in the project was to scrape and paint some of the metal doors and trim for the salon. This is the screen door, the screen had to be removed and replaced in order for the door to be painted, so the metal worker took care of the screen.  In all, there were 8 people involved in getting this project done.

I enjoyed making this project happen.  A few people expressed surprise that I (a woman) was the one directing the work and even doing a bit of it myself.  For example, one worker came to the base and didn't seem ready to have me show him the work to be done, he asked where my husband was a couple times!  I like disturbing people's stereotypes.