<aside> 🪄 Week 17 Date: 25 April 2026
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I heard the ocean from my living room on a Tuesday afternoon.
I was working, laptop open, a YouTube video playing. The ambient sound was lovely - rolling, rhythmic. I thought the video just had really good production. Then I paused it. The sound didn't stop.
I sat there, confused. Can I hear the ocean from inside an estate in Lekki? No. Definitely not. But there it was. I opened the front door and found water sliding across my floor in a thin, quiet film, and the wave sound I'd been enjoying was actually cars on the main road pushing through floodwater, their tires sending ripples that lapped between buildings like a tide nobody called for.
That was how I found out the estate floods.
I should back up.
I've lived alone for most of my adult life, since I graduated from university. I didn't grow up in Lagos, but I had family here, and when I started working, I stayed with my cousin in Magodo Phase 2 - close to the office, practical arrangement. It was fine. But I realised, over time, that I couldn't do my best work or be my best self squeezed into someone else's space. It wasn't about the people. I just needed room. Room to spread out. Room to think without managing the chaos of a full house.
So I got my first place in Ogudu. Started with a mattress on the floor. Literally. I was so proud of it I posted photos. Found out maybe two or three years later that certain people had been passing those pictures around behind the scenes, laughing with their families about why I would lay my bed on the floor and still be happy enough to share it online. That one landed differently when I learned about it. But anyway. I digress.
Ogudu was home between 2020 and 2024, and it was good in the beginning. Then Lagos did what Lagos does. More people started rebuilding on my street, which meant the street narrowed with more humans, more cars, less air. The landlords got greedy. They did a small increase in 2023, about 10%. I knew others had it worse elsewhere, so I absorbed it. But the problems kept stacking. It would rain and my ceiling would leak - I was on the ground floor of a four-storey building, but somehow my neighbour's broken pipes upstairs became my ceiling's problem. The landlord and their appointed lawyers didn't want to hear it. They just wanted tenants to figure things out and keep paying.
Then, one day, they pulled the rug on the service charge completely. No warning. Within less than a month, no facility management at all. So I took it on. I had a house manager I'd been working with and training - the way I run my home is the way I run most things: documented, tracked, reviewed. We set up sheets, coordinated with tenants, handled the building. It worked for about a year before the lawyers came and told me I needed to move. They said they wanted to use the space. What they wanted was to hike the rent, and because I'd been the one asking questions and making noise, I was the easiest tenant to push.
Fine. I decided it was a good moment to leave anyway.
Around that time, a friend and I started talking about building a craft house - a creative space, a mini residency, something between a studio and a boutique guesthouse. I'd been running Motitomi for a while, hosting events and community programming, but it had always operated closer to an NGO than a real business. This was going to be my attempt at entrepreneurship. I'd started my career in finance, moved into operations, and this felt like the natural next step - learning how to build something that could sustain itself, especially here in Lagos.
Finding a space was its own education. Everything was overpriced or falling apart or both, and the cost of bringing a bad building up to standard was more than most people could justify. Eventually, a colleague found a place in an estate where he lived, in Lekki. I knew people nearby. It was far from my office, but close to things I cared about. It made sense.
Then the rains started.