This Global Home | Day 24: Brazil

Hi guys! My name is Brittni, and I live in the coastal city of Recife, Brasil with my husband, Jd, and our 10-month old Rottweiler puppy, Selah. We moved here about a year ago with an organization called Shores of Grace Ministries. You can see more about our work with them here! Connect with me: Blog Instagram

In Brasil, the cultural norm is living in an apartment. We went totally against that by moving into a large home with a small yard! We want our home to be a place where anyone and everyone can feel welcome and at home. We love to host dinners, birthday parties, and just be a general gathering place. Though we hope to start a family soon, at the current moment, we have 3 guest bedrooms - one for short-term couples (like family), one for kids or singles, and one for long-term overseas workers (like friends who need a place to crash while apartment hunting or when they first arrive in the country).

When we moved to Brasil, we were gifted with furniture from some former expats who had gone back to the US to start another branch of our ministry. It was an amazing blessing, but it always felt like “their” furniture even though we’ve had it for a year! Moving into our new home made the furniture feel like ours. We just needed a change of location! We’d love to add another couch and chair someday, but for now, this living room is great!

Kitchens in Brasil are typically empty, other than a sink (sometimes). We were extremely lucky in that our house came with some cabinets and a countertop already installed! We’re currently using some cheap plastic shelves to hold some more of our stuff since there isn’t a ton of storage space. We also have a small closet under our stairs that we use as a pantry, and our fridge is down in the garage as well.

We have an AMAZING dining table made from Brazilian hardwood. We love to host dinners and small group meetings around our table, and I love the fact that the tile in the dining room almost perfectly matches the tones of the table!

Since we live on a street with a lot of apartments, there isn’t much privacy on the front porch. The back porch is cool, has an awesome breeze, and is only visible from one apartment rather than several! When we first moved in, this porch was extremely dirty and we weren’t sure how we would use the space. You come through the office to get to it, so it was a little awkward, but we knew it had potential. My husband used a power washer to clean off all of the muck before he hung our hammock. It is the perfect place to read a book in the afternoons.

Since we live in the suburbs of a big city, we love this little area of greenery in our home. We hope to add some fruit trees (like avocado or lime) and some brightly colored bushes!

Like many people around the world, we do not own a dryer. We hang our clothes to dry on a clothesline, and we love it! We are SO thankful that we were able to create a drying area in a covered part of our house. It makes it so much easier to keep up with laundry!

This is probably my favorite space in the house right now! Since we moved in just a little over a month ago, it’s the room that is mostly finished. The light in this room is amazing and it’s a great place to read, give an English lesson, or work on our monthly newsletter!

Our bedroom is still a work in progress, but it has a fantastic balcony overlooking the driveway and our neighboring apartments. The light that comes in as the sun rises is gorgeous.

This little ½ bath is one of my favorite spaces in the house, though we haven’t done anything to it! I love the tile, the color of the sink, and the light fixture... It’s just adorable!

We’ve got these gorgeous windows with shutters on the outside and glass panels on the inside that can both be closed (just one or both), but we have two broken ones that will probably stay that way for a while… They were kind of a big concern when we first moved in, but I’ve honestly forgotten about them since then!

Thanks for pinning this home!