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 then I would stop myself because there is still useful information there that can be referenced by new and inexperienced builders. But, “why did I not share any more of the progress?”, you may be wondering. Well, building a house is a full time and stressful job.

The two of us owned and ran a small online business together before starting to build. Once that first brick was laid, my fiancé was on site from 7am until 6pm every day after that. In his absence, I had to take on the mantle of doing both our portions of work to keep the business ticking over. Prior to starting, I had such large dreams and schemes about the YouTube fame I would achieve by documenting the whole process, I could already see the time-lapse videos flashing before my eyes. The reality was that I was hardly ever on site and when I was, I was just in the way.

If you are anything like us, you watch a lot of DIYer and building people to learn from them. What you may not know is that their work is slowed down to a half speed so that they can incorporate self-filming and editing into their process. If they are not self-filming, they have a dedicated (and paid for) film crew that does all that film and editing work for them. So if documenting your process is an essential part of the experience for you, then you either need to accommodate this in terms of time and/or budget.

Aside for not being able to post regularly about the project, I found myself having to do more work to keep up with increasing bills. If you don’t budget your build correctly or you don’t have enough saved before you start and one or both of you is going to have to fund the process at some point, you need to take heed of this because it can halt your project in it’s tracks and put a serious strain on your relationship. We are lucky in that we see eye-to-eye about most problems and design decisions that need to be made and so the building process brought us closer together in having to tackle those problems – this is not the case for everyone.

Current Status

There came a point where the cost of renting was starting to eat into our building budget (see my post about budgeting) and so we made a decision that we were going to move into an unfinished house. We checked with our architect, as we didn’t want to be breaking legislation and he confirmed for us that because we are exempt from the NHBRC regulations, we were essentially not breaking any laws by living in an incomplete building (please check with your local authorities and professionals before letting me influence you to make a similar move). So the push was on to make at least one part of the house habitable, secure and have amenities such as a kitchen and bathroom. Towards the end of 2023, we managed to complete enough of the house to be able to move in. And so we’re in.

But let me stress this: even though we love being here, it is not ideal. The house is constantly filthy, we are surrounded by building materials and debris and we seem to be making much slower progress now, than when there was a pressure on us to get things done within a limited time frame. I would not want things any other way and I am very grateful to already be living in my gorgeous home but the idea of what it will eventually be one day, grows dimmer and dimmer in my mind as I become more accustomed to how it is now. You may be in a similar situation to what we were in and my advice is to weigh things up carefully before ‘making your move’, so to speak.

All the best with your building project and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me on info@ownerbuilderinsouthafrica.co.za.