Bar & Recreation Walls

After reception walls were done we started with the bar and recreation area with their shared toilet facilities (restaurant & lounge have their own as well). These buildings have large windows and around the front will have many wooden full-length louvred doors opening to a 2m wide wooden deck and the forest beyond. Part of the view from the bar and restaurant will include the large communal outdoor campfire area.

The bar/lounge lobby entrance from reception on the near right with 2 of the large windows of the bar visible to the centre.

The lobby between the bar and lounge seen here from the lounge in the foreground. The bar is beyond the the lobby.

View across the floor of the bar towards the recreation area. The wall on the left will form the back of the half-moon bar. From centre to the doors (visible in the right of the shot) is an 8m radius - this building will also have the highest roof with the centre post in excess of 12m high.

The location for the bar centre post visible in the foreground. Further across, the opening where full-length louvred 'shutter doors' will open to a 2m wooden deck.

Bar, Lounge & Restaurant

During May the concrete slabs for the bar, lounge and restaurant were completed. In order to deal with the varying levels between sections and buildings as well as aesthetic purposes, the concrete was poured 'within' a perimeter of small shaped volcanic rocks. This then also hides the level of concrete from view when the buildings are seen from the outside as the walls will be erected inside but against the edge of this little rock perimeter.


The photos below show clearly how big the difference in levels between sections and buildings really is.

From foreground to back: edge of bar, lobby from reception, lounge, restaurant to far left and bathrooms serving restaurant and lounge to the far right.
Bar and recreation area (far left) - looking across to where the campfire area will be

'New' House in Musanze

December 2008 we moved house in Musanze. A lovely property we're renting at the moment but decided it needed some work to on the gardens and outside - for a start anyway. A little bit further from centre of town but generally still a reasonably central location and 1.5km from the site. The one side of the property was previously all dedicated to a vegetable garden which, by the time we moved in, was totally overgrown.

The idea was to convert part of this to a lawn and garden adjoining the existing front garden and formalising a section into a vegetable garden towards the back of the property. I also designed an outdoor bbq area with a banana fibre roof which would also prove to be a worthwhile 'test drive' for similar structures at Ikoro for the campsites etc.

The photos here are of the work we'd done to date and the way it looks at the moment.

Part of the rock garden at dusk I built with some of our guys using large volcanic rocks. Some rocks took 4 of us to carry.

A view of the vegetable garden with rock pathways between the beds.

View across part of the back lawn of the covered bbq and entertainment area

Before and After Review

These photos are of the bar delivery road which although short, took exceptionally long to clear due to amount of trees growing seemingly out of solid rock. The roots had found/created cracks and grown around the rocks.

View of the road (looking south) from where a ridge separates the road from the back of bar area. It took almost two weeks to remove one tree(People working furtherest from camera)that had been growing through cracks in massive slabs of rock


The Bar delivery road photographed toward the north after completion. The actual delivery ramp will start at the far right hand end of the road, angling over the ridge to back of bar.