This Global Home | Day 15: Indonesia

Salam! (translation: peace, wholeness, blessing... and just plain hello.) I’m Leigh, living and loving village life in the remote highlands of Sumatra, an island of Indonesia. I moved here 8 years ago with my hubby, himself a TCK born and raised in the Philippines, and our then 4-month old baby. Within our first couple years overseas we added two more to the mix, and thus our little tribe has birth certificates from three different countries. We’ve called this same region home for all this time, but less than a year ago we had to move out of our beloved, old wooden fixer-upper house and landed in a modern, newly built house up in the mountains. It still has its quirks (hello daily water and power outages), but I absolutely love our home on the edge of the rainforest.Connect with me:    Instagram

Creating a beautiful, welcoming home environment is very important to me. As anyone who lives overseas knows, this expat life can be a bit "much" at times, and I wanted to cultivate a space that felt like a sanctuary for our family – and anyone else who comes through our doors. Does my house look very Indonesian? No, not really, but I have long abandoned any notion that my house had to somehow look exactly like a local's for me to have meaningful relationships here. We're in this for the long haul, and I know that I’ll never feel like I fit here if I don’t have a space that’s reflective of who I am. That said, it's become a fun hobby of mine to adopt elements of local design - like these ikat wall hangings (ikat means tied in Indonesian), or the rice sifters/turned air plant holders in my living room. My neighbors get a kick out of my unusual way of blending our cultures! Most of all we love making guests feel welcomed and loved, the way they so often make us feel in theirs.   

Opposite of the living room is our front entry shelf, where you’re greeted with some of my favorite things: plants, pictures, our collection of sand from different beaches we’ve visited, local wildlife guides, and wood trays and jars for the kids to collect their nature finds. (Strategically close to the door, so I can periodically chuck some of the rocks my daughter’s always bringing home from our gravel road.) Both this shelf and the coffee table in the previous photo were made by welders who usually make those iron gates you see all across Asia, for so much cheaper than the model picture I printed from the internet. 

When we first moved overseas with just 6 bags to our name, our home was pretty sparse, but in 8 years’ time, I’ve gathered pieces that help our home feel more familiar and less foreign. I do love discovering handmade baskets and batik patterned cloth in our local markets, but I’m not immune to the lure of Target and shopping my favorite creative shops on Etsy (which only happens about once every three years). Then there are the sentimental pieces that we’ve carted over, like the Indian cloth/turned table runner for our dining room that I bought in college, or the hand-carved elephant candlesticks wedding gifted to us from my husband’s Kenyan roommate - could you spy them in the first picture of our living room?

This wall in our dining room used to be covered in heavily textured, sparkly pink Victorian-esque wallpaper. I just couldn’t work that into my style, ha... but rather than scraping it back down to the cement underneath, we asked the contractors to cover it up with thin plywood boards that we then had sealed and painted, and there you have it – shiplap in my overseas home! The old house we recently moved from was actually made of wood, so every room looked this way, but locals have been abandoning the old wood style for modern cement. You can imagine how backward people thought we were when this was going up, but now everyone comments on how much they love the "minimalist" look. The baskets I've collected from all over, my favorite there on the right with the hexagon patterns from the Philippines. 

I think you can probably tell by this point that my most favorite thing to decorate with are plants. Here’s a confession though: I don’t have a green thumb. The plants often go neglected, until they're eventually sent to the "plant hospital" outside to recover with all our daily tropical rains and sunshine. (But sometimes, they don't. Sigh.) When all else fails, I’ll at least cut some jungly thing from the yard and stick it in a jar of water. Having green in the house is good for my lungs, my eyes, and my soul.

Bright, white, and simple are my favorite (a respite from the busy and loud cultural norm) and that carries into our giant kitchen. Our first overseas kitchen of 5 years had no sink, pink tile, and was buried underneath a stairwell with standing room for one. Plus there were always rats squeaking in the pipes trying to get in – and

many

did. I am still in awe over this gorgeous space we have now! There used to be boldly patterned tile around the sink area, but I literally packed the kitchen sink I had installed from the old house to bring it here (though found locally, it’s much deeper than most). And darn, replacing the sink meant we had to re-tile. Luckily for me, the plain white tile I wanted was the cheapest on the market, so we went ahead and added a backsplash to the length of the wall. Like most Asian kitchens, I don’t have an actual oven and our stove only has two burners – but I do not enjoy baking anyway so this does the job.

It is not common to lay tile this direction, but I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out! Also, note the wood crates holding our spices – I just asked the spice guy in the market if I could purchase the crates and not what was in them. He laughed and basically gave them to me for free, so I carted 13 of these babies through the crowded

pasar

like it was my job. I am used to being weird here. Another tip: storing dry food items in jars on open shelves is not only practical but pretty. Just be sure the lids screw on super tight because if not, the ants will find a way.  

My style may have graduated from the post-its and dry erase marker on mirrors of my younger days, but I still want - and need - to be reminded of truth by writing on the walls. I’m not great at hand lettering, but I’m all about instant Scripture downloads from Etsy shops stuck onto clipboards, large chalkboards made from DIY chalkboard paint (tile grout + wall paint) using my husband’s old teaching projector to make the letter tracing quick and easy, or these large, DIY signs I made for above our bed. To make those, I printed to size on paper, rubbed pencil along the back, then taped it front side up to the boards. Next, I outlined the letters which left behind a pencil residue, and finally, I filled in the outline with black paint and a sharpie. 

I’ve kept the kids' rooms mostly calm and neutral as the rest of the house, but added polka dots and mountains for fun! I do have three littles so my house isn't always this clean, but clutter turns me into a crazy person, so we keep the number of toys to a minimum (good quality toys are hard to find anyway so that helps). We utilize lots of bins and baskets and tidy-up together before moving on to other activities. You’ll see too my fondness for global elements appropriate to our well-traveled family: a collection of elephants from different countries, maps and globes, travel themed artwork, suitcases for extra storage, and books and dolls that reflect the diversity of our big beautiful world.

When we were looking for a new house late last year, we dubbed this one the “stairs to nowhere house.” There were stairs (without a railing, we added that later and my son still managed to fracture his arm playing on the steps), but they led to a hole in the ceiling covered by a rusty sheet of roofing metal. The homeowner never got around to building the planned second level, but the rebar supports were all in (and an eyesore from the road). We hoped maybe someday we could add a simple room, partly because we needed to secure the house, but mostly because the mountain views from the top are incredible. Also worth a mention, the doors throughout the house were all shellacked in shiny dark cherry at first. The dust was annoying, but 100% worth hiring someone to strip them all to their gorgeous natural wood underneath. I could stare at that woodgrain all day. 

Amazingly just a few months ago, we worked out a deal with the landlord and the construction for our rooftop bonus room began! It’s pretty basic with unfinished concrete floors and exposed brick, and it's certainly not perfectly built, with all the sparrows nesting in the rafters and occasionally sneaking in the big gaps, but our new upstairs space feels like a retreat. This is now our homeschool room, with a fold-out couch for guests, and with those views, it’s our favorite family hang-out space and makes for the loveliest morning prayer times. Such a gift! We have two bunnies who live up here too, the "class pets" - can you spot one?

I would never have expected it, and it for sure wasn't the case in our earlier expat years, but I'm pretty much living in my dream house. (A note for the homeschooling families: there's a complete homeschool room + resources video tour saved on my Instagram stories if you're curious.)

I was so hoping this part would be done before this photo series! (Edit: you can now see the finished desk on my Instagram!) But as I thought about it, this little capture shows a lot about life where we live. I have been talking with a local carpenter since April trying to get the kids’ desks built. That’s 6 months of visits to his workshop, of messaging back and forth, of waiting for supplies to come in, of long breaks for holidays. This used to be the only way things operated here. But (you may have noticed), IKEA recently came to Indonesia and just this year began home delivery service – even all the way out to this remote village! Mind-blowing. So, while I’ve been waiting forever for a basic wood tabletop to be made, I ordered the cabinet legs for the desk and they were here by the end of the week. Online shopping, in general, has taken off lately, and even though I still love and want to support the highly relational, albeit inefficient, local way of life, the modern direction some things are going sure make it easier to live here.Also seen in this photo, two mosques have gone up since we moved in; the one across the street we’ve been watching go up little by little every day this month, and the larger one is not far behind it. Please appreciate the loudspeaker mounted on bamboo poles facing directly into our room. Just off the picture to the left is our next-door neighborhood school, an Islamic Madrassah. We love doing homeschool up here with the beauty of the mountains before us and a bird’s eye view to the happenings of the neighborhood, but at least five times a day, often more, it can be too noisy to talk to one another. And that is just part of life in Indonesia – it’s loud, green, and beautiful, and I feel lucky to call this place home.

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