Four years of putting one old Cape farmhouse back together, written down as it happens.
Start at entry oneI bought a house that nobody wanted, with a roof that had already given up and a wall that leaned about forty millimetres out of true. I am not a builder. I am writing this down partly so I remember what I did, and partly so the next person who tries this knows what it actually costs.
The previous owner rendered half the north wall in cement. Cement is stronger than the stone behind it, so the stone cracked instead. Everything I have done since has been undoing that one decision. Lime plaster moves, breathes and lets the wall dry inward. It also takes three weeks to cure and burns your hands if you get careless.
Eleven hundred clay tiles came off the roof. Six hundred and forty went back on. The rest were sorted into a pile marked usable-for-outbuildings and a pile that went to a man in Wellington who grinds them for paths. Matching old tiles is not about colour. It is about thickness, because a batch two millimetres proud lifts the course above it.
One room got stripped to stone and then left alone for a year while I worked out what it wanted to be. It turned out it wanted to stay like that. The beams are yellowwood, cut long enough that they were clearly never meant for this span. Somebody reused them from somewhere else, a century before I did the same thing.
Four sash windows survived. Their glass has ripples in it that make the garden move when you walk past, and no modern pane does that. A glazier in Paarl re-puttied all four for less than one replacement unit would have cost. The catches were soaked in vinegar overnight and went back on the same screws.
Lime, clay, yellowwood and stone — what they cost and where they came from.
How long things actually take once you account for curing and weather.
Real invoices, including the ones I regret.
The people who know how to do this, and how to find them.
The house is open two Saturdays a year, usually when there is something worth seeing and nothing wet in the forecast.
Ask about a dateIf you are doing something similar, or you know how to fix something I have clearly done wrong, write to me.