Little over a year ago we bought a property in Baardskeerdersbos, Overstrand, Western Cape, South Africa. We intend building a house on our little slice of heaven. In fact, I thought that we would already be living in our house and yet we are still waiting for approval on our plans from our local municipality (update 14.01.2022 : we received our planning approval on the 9th of December 2021 – one week before builder’s holiday unfortunately). We have learned so much in the last year that I thought it a shame not to share this information with people. I have decided to start a blog not only to recount what I have learned thus far but also to document what we do going forward. First of all, I want to fill in a bit of background and context to our project and who we are.

So how did it come about that we bought in this little town? How come we feel so confident to build this house ourselves? Why are we building in the particular style we have chosen?

My fiancé and I had already been living rurally on a wine farm and were talking and day-dreaming about moving further away from urban areas and having space to be more self-reliant. In November of 2020 while on a short holiday in Gansbaai, we took a day trip to Lomond to do a wine tasting. En route I saw the sign for Baardskeerdersbos and asked the people we were travelling with if we could go and see the place because I had always had a curiosity about it. Our first impression of this charming little hamlet was overwhelming and two weeks later had bought a property here.

We chose our land because of its ample but manageable size, it’s proximity to the main road, the fact that it was already terraced and had been cleared of stone and most importantly, because it has legal rights to leiwater. Additionally, our land is registered for agricultural land-use which opens up possibilities for doing small-scale, intensive farming or building a guest house (let’s see what the future holds…).

Things just seemed to fall into place, or so we thought in the beginning. In the following 12 months we really had our patience tested with everything from the process we went through to buy the land; to waiting to receive our title deed; to climbing back on the bicycle of architectural drafting after nearly 10 years; to submitting our drawings to the local municipality; to discovering that there was a recently promulgated heritage overlay for the town; to discovering where our actual property boundary lay; to studying for and receiving ‘owner builder exemption‘; and so much more. For each of these experiences I will write a full article to share all that I have learned.

There were a couple of upshot benefits from these delays. One was we had a lot if time to scour second hand building yards and look for doors, windows and various other building materials. We saved a lot of money buying things second hand rather than if we had bought new. Even though we have to refurbish the things we bought, this is part of why we wanted to build our own house.

The other benefit of taking time to process paper work etc, is that we could rework our design a few times. Our first iteration was a container house which I have to admit that I am relieved we have moved away from (I explain why in this post). Part of our final design is a steel shed and this element remains as the central living space of the house after starting as the main structure for the whole house.

We have borrowed a lot from industrial building processes not only because we like that aesthetic but also because fiscal economy has been our priority with every aspect of the design. It is because of this that we got stuck at heritage. Their intervention resulted in a better building that we love even more but it will end up being more costly than we intended.

The final costing still has to be tallied which we will only do once we receive the final approval from municipality.

Update (14.01.2022): when we re-costed our building, we discovered that in the 5 months we had to wait for the plans to be approved not only had the steel price gone up by 65% thus probably negating the possibility of cladding our house in sheet metal, but so had most other building material prices especially with the hike of fuel prices in South Africa. We’ve had to adapt the plan slightly and hope that we can still implement everything we wanted but it looks like we will have to scrounge some extra funding from somewhere to make these things happen (see this post about budgeting).

Now that we have received the planning approval, we can begin our building process. I will be documenting every step and sharing it on this website. Where I can, I will try to follow a format of ‘how-to’ so that you can learn from what we go through. I hope this blog turns into something valuable for other potential home builders in South Africa.