If you have good, sharp eyes, you will see how much time has passed between this post and the last "progress report". I kept on having the urge to unpublish those articles because of how I wasn't able to keep up with the reporting on the progress and the ...
Being an inexperienced and naive owner builder, I was not very successful with budgeting for our build. I did draw up an extensive spreadsheet and populated it with prices I found online but in practice, I had missed many small details that added up sign ...
These updates should probably happen more frequently but in reality, things move so quickly and are so overwhelming that its only now with completing this stage, that I feel I can properly report on it. The focus of these last two months has been to prep ...
It's becoming more common for people to put up container homes in South Africa. They can be done quite quickly and with fewer external resources. There are even a few in Baardskeerdersbos. We really like that industrial aesthetic of these sorts of homes ...
The first week on site for actual building has started with levelling the area where the building will stand and filling in the old dam. We bought the land because it was already terraced but the top terrace still had a slight gradient on it which we had ...
There are rigorous steps involved in submitting and obtaining approval for drawings in South Africa. These steps are then followed by various inspections and finally building approval and an occupancy certificate is issued. In this post, I only cover what is required in the set of drawings.
When building in South Africa, one must submit a set of plans for approval to the local municipality to be assessed and approved (in our case, to the Gansbaai building control office). The submission must comprise of two sets of drawings printed on either A2 or A1 and a very long form (Form 2) filled out by the SACAP registered professionals that you are working with such as the engineer or architect.
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As owner builders who are turning every penny to squeeze the most beautiful building out of our modest budget that we possibly can, unexpected large costs that were not included in the initial budget, come as a terrible knock each time. I fattened the planned budget by 20% to account for these sorts of things but that age-old concept of a building project costing double what one budgets for, rings true when one encounters these pit fall payments.
I am sure that we haven't seen the end of these nasty bills yet so this post will be updated as I discover more of the costs that we didn't factor in when embarking on this project. So far, I will cover title deeds registration fees, building approval submission fee at the municipal office, geological survey fees, conservancy tank test fees. I hope that by writing about these things, other new owner builders building their own homes for the first time will avoid these horrors and make sure to account for what is to come.
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There was nothing straight forward about applying for Owner Builder exemption from the NHBRC. In the end I did receive it without a hitch but if I had known then what I know now, the process might have gone differently. If you want to build your own house in South Africa and are actually capable of doing so (this is the key factor) you can request to be exempt from the obligatory quality control procedures governed by the National Home Builders Registration Council.
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The below text is copied from another document found here.
How do I become an owner builder?
the nhbrc and you
I have decided to summarize again what the answer entails and document it. My disclaimer is that it is my interpretation and built on my experience as someone who had to go through the process, so pardon any bias - I take no responsibility or credit at all for anyconsequences of this writ.
In these months of preparing the plans for submission, I found it very difficult to get all the Informaton I needed to draft the drawings correctly with the right colours and hatching. Even though we worked with an architect to submit the plans, the information I needed to complete the set of drawings and get them 100% correct was difficult to find. In another post I explain why it is that I and not the architect himself did the drafting; over here, I explain what is required in the set of drawings when submitting to council. However, in this article, I explain the conventions and reasons for various colours, hatches, and line types required on any set of building plans in South Africa.
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