Of houses and homes...

South African houses are strange.

I’m not talking about my previous entry describing such things as no built-in heat or a complete ignorance of window screens, despite this being a land of abundant bugs, here. No, I am talking about the way the houses are built.

Hubby is thinking about building and, in going over the idea with me, he has asked if I would be willing to work with the architect to build an “American-style” home. He doesn’t mean a New England clapboard or Pacific Northwest timber frame, either…he’s referring to the kind of layout that most Americans, living in tract homes, take for granted.

For example, have you ever been in a house that, when you entered from the front door you were in the dining room? Well, if you’ve ever been to South Africa, your answer will be “Yes!” I cannot think of a single American home I’ve ever been in that was laid out in such a way. And sculleries…I thought sculleries were the exclusive province of romance novels until I moved to Cape Town! And garages…what house in America, built after 1960, requires you to walk through rain or snow or blustery storm in order to bring the groceries in from the car?

A few years ago we were avidly visiting Sunday open houses (called a “show house” here) in search of a new, larger home. A couple of months later we were back on the show house circuit, looking for our rental property. In that time we visited dozens of houses and got a look at the bizarre building practices employed by South African home builders.

First of all, I am astonished at how many houses have built-in barrooms! We visited an interesting house that had dining room in what looked like was previously the foyer…when you entered the house you practically fell over a dining chair! To the left of this dining area was a galley kitchen so small that once the microwave oven was placed on the counter top and a dish drainer next to the sink, the counter space was gone. Through the dining room we came upon a tiny lounge (South African for “living room”) that managed to squeeze a sofa, TV, and free standing steel fireplace together, leaving a narrow space for walking through to the next room, a huge bar room. This room was two steps down from the lounge, twice the size of the lounge, and was dominated by a built-in bar backed by mirrored shelves full of liquor bottles. Sliding glass doors lead out into a patio and pool, and a rather shabbily kept garden with a cabana area with its own bar! I was astonished!

The person from whom we bought the rental property had a bar and her new house actually has a separate bar room built behind the garage and connected to the house by a glass breezeway. A beautiful provincial-styled house we visited also had the entry through the dining room (the lounge was upstairs!) and a fully stocked bar complete with ice machine and professional bar accoutrements.

When we bought the rental property, we removed the bar and brought it to our house. Today it sits in the garage, turned backwards so we have easy access to the shelves beneath, which are used for storage. The top is handy for putting bags on as I unload the car after shopping. Our liquor collection is behind the closed doors of our punched tin pie safe, only revealed when we have guests or when one of us infrequently wants something stronger than Coke Light or a glass of wine. I’ve never in my life seen so many houses with rooms dedicated to housing a domestic equivalent of the corner pub!

Garages are another story. In my present house, my garage opens out onto a covered patio, from which there is a quick right turn into the kitchen. My last house here saw me walk several feet in open air from the garage door to a covered porch, and from there I had to walk through the living room and halfway up the hallway to get to the kitchen door. This became somewhat of an ordeal, slogging two or three trips laden with heavy bags while the wind lashed ran onto the porch, soaking me and the bags as well. Unfortunately, most of the houses we have seen here do not have easy access from garage to kitchen. One house we saw recently would require you to climb a steep set of stairs out the back of the garage (assuming there was enough room to get around the car while laden with bags of groceries), out into an uncovered, unpaved space (grass), and then enter the house through sliding glass doors. From there, you’d have to walk through the middle of the family room and then the dining room, in order to reach the kitchen. Another house we saw just a few weeks ago, has had some extensive remodelling recently done, and the appearance from the outside was stunning, Unfortunately, in order to get from the garage to the kitchen without getting wet in a rainstorm, you would carry your bags through the side garage door which opens into the master suite dressing room! From there, through the bedroom, down the hallway past the other two bedrooms, then a right turn into the kitchen.

Most American tract homes are designed with the garage having a door that open directly into the kitchen. My house in Northern California had it, the house my father and stepmother bought in 1962 had it, as did the homes of most of my friends. It seems so simple that you don’t even miss it until you find yourself dodging slanting sheets of rain and having to make multiple trips through the weather to bring in the weekly shopping!

South African houses often have sculleries. What is a scullery? Well, it’s difficult to explain because each South African household seems to have a different definition. The most common definition is a room where you wash the dishes, separate from the kitchen. Seems rather pointless to me…but it gets better (or worse, depending on how you view it). In America, most modern houses have the laundry area in the garage, near the hot water heater (called a “geyser”…pronounced geezer with a hard “g”). In South African houses, if you are lucky enough to be plumbed for a washing machine, it will be in your kitchen (front loader). Space for a dryer? Not bloody likely. And dryers sold in South Africa tend to vent hot humid air into the room as they have no vent pipes to the outdoors. I’ve gotten around that by buying a costly Bosch dryer that condenses the moisture taken out of the clothes and deposits it into a water tank that is emptied periodically…usually once per wash day. It works well, keeps the humidity and heat in the house down, but sells for approximately three times what a “normal” dryer costs.

You also are unlikely to find garbage disposals or dishwashers in South African kitchens, and in some kitchens you won’t even find a refrigerator or a sink! Why? Because they are out in the scullery! When he was looking for his first house here in SA, Hubby would email me photos of houses he saw and liked. He was particularly taken with a house that had dark wood and green malachite counter tops in the kitchen. I have to admit, the effect was stunning. But as I peered at the pictures of the kitchen I began asking questions…where is the fridge? Where is the kitchen sink? What is all that huge empty space in the middle of the room used for? Why is there no counter space next to the stove? He didn’t seem to think this was much of a problem until I suggested that he imagine himself making a cup of coffee and a sandwich in that kitchen…how much hiking around from point A to point B would be required? American kitchens tend to have a more efficient layout, requiring fewer than four steps from the sink, stove, refrigerator, which are set out in a triangular pattern. A centre island may be used, something I have seen only once in South Africa.

The scullery idea has some merit, but more like a pantry-cum-mud porch than in its present incarnation. When I see a house with a scullery, about the only thing I can count on being there is the sink. Some houses have a dishwasher or washing machine in the scullery, some have the refrigerator, and others have extra cupboards, like a pantry. Almost all of them have a door to the outside, which is convenient for carrying laundry out to the wash lines. But for the most part, the scullery seems not only superfluous to me, it seems to be inefficient. I don’t like them at all, despite their apparently being a big selling point around here.

Electric stoves are the norm here, despite the energy crisis we are currently experiencing, and I find it surprising that more people have not converted to gas. Now, gas mains do not run in the streets here like they do in America, but I have two 19-litre gas bottles installed outdoors, connected via copper piping to my kitchen stove, and in three years of living here, I’ve used two bottles of gas. Not such a bad deal…and they are amazingly cheaper than the electricity I would be using for the same cooking! But while gas stoves…very nice commercial-type ones, at that…are readily available here, builders continue to install electric stoves with ovens so small you are challenged to roast a large chicken, never mind a Christmas turkey!

It amazes me that South Africans think nothing of having their dining rooms just inside the front door. I have seen dozens of homes with this set up, and it always seems to be just so wrong! I have never cared much for open plan design, and this particular twist on the concept I find particularly offensive. I like my kitchen behind closed doors so that when my guests sit down to table, they aren’t forced to view the mess of dirty pots and pans that went into the creation of their feast.

I also do not like the concept of having to walk through one room in order to reach another. In that house with the extraordinary bar room, one had to walk through the dining room and the living room in order to reach the bar. If you were sitting there swilling beer, every time nature called you’d have to pass in front of the TV in the lounge and dodge the chairs in the dining room just to get to the hallway that leads to the loo. The traffic simply does not “flow” in so many of these houses…the rooms feel like afterthoughts, tacked on in the cheapest, most expeditious manner possible.

So, if Hubby decides we shall build, it appears I will be tasked with educating the architect in the subtleties and pragmatics of American home design. It will have thermostatically controlled ducted heat/air conditioning in zoned areas that can be cut off from each other…why heat or air condition the guest room if no one is visiting?

We’ll have a huge geyser…solar heated, of course…so we never run out of hot water. The windows will be double-paned, energy efficient, and will open in such a fashion that window screens can be used to keep insects out. The doors to the outside will be screened as well…no more mosquitoes!

The garage will be attached to the house in such a way that I can step directly from the garage into the scullery. Yes, there will be a scullery, but unlike the traditional South African one, mine will be more of a utility room, housing the washer and dryer, a space for ironing and a hanging rack for the clothes. There will be pantry cupboards, a laundry sink, and space for an upright freezer, as well as a cupboard for brooms, mops, and the vacuum cleaner. There will also be a storage room adjacent to the garage, one with a workbench, good lighting, rack shelving, and places to store such things as the lawn mower, garden tools, ice chests, and various other bits and pieces of suburban life that simply have no place in most houses.

The kitchen will be laid out with the “golden triangle” of the sink, stove and fridge, and my stove will be gas. The breakfast bar here gets good use, and I like the no-stain, easy to clean black granite counter tops, so that will be repeated in the new kitchen. I’ll get another Franke 3-bowl sink, but this time it will be hooked up to a garbage disposal and a lovely dishwasher will be tucked in under the counter right next to it. I love my wrought iron pot rack, so the new kitchen will definitely have one, and I’m sold on ceramic tile floors in the kitchen and baths. The rest of the house, however, will have French Oak floors, like my present bedroom.

The main bedroom will have a huge bath with a big American-style walk-in shower. A Jacuzzi for two, and double sinks, and the heated towel rail Hubby has grown so fond of on winter mornings complete the bathroom “must haves.”. A walk-in closet and dressing room are a must, and each of the two guest bedrooms will have their own small baths.

With a proper foyer and hallways connecting the various rooms, rather than walking through one room to get to another, the house will be All American in design…at least inside. I’m wondering how a New England Colonial might look here, though…

I have a very nice life...

I have a very nice life.

It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but at this time in my life I am living better than at any time in my past.

For some people, life is a struggle from the moment they are born…and it remains a struggle until the day they die. The definition of struggle is subjective, of course, dependent on the lowest common denominator for survival in the society in question. But in my life, the struggle to simply survive, to have enough to eat and a warm, dry place to rest my head, often came perilously close to being lost.

A person living in a tipsy shack on the edges of Gugulethu might find that comment laughable, since I grew up in America, but it is no less true for all that my definition of privation is richer than hers might be. Before the word “homeless” came into common use, I found myself so, staying with a series of friends and working peripatetically. When I was able to establish my own place, it was an endless struggle to earn enough money to pay for that roof and eat. There were infinite days of hunger, eating one scant meal a day or living on unsweetened, milkless oatmeal for days at a time. There was a time that my entire cache of personal possessions could be rolled up into a sleeping bag and carried on my back.

This life of privation was not freely chosen, not a vagabond manifestation of my hippie soul or artistic free spirit, but the culmination of a series of events in my life, most of them not of my choosing. From the sexist paradigm that deprived me of a scholarship opportunity in favour of a less-deserving male student to the corporate ball-gazing that deprived me of a respectable career opportunity because their tests told them I was “too smart to be happy doing this work,” I found myself uneducated, unqualified, and unemployed.

For most of my life I compounded an unfortunate beginning with expedient choices that had short term advantages but were long term disasters. But hardship creates limits, not only on opportunity but on your thinking. Long term planning is not possible when you have been forced to focus and plan only as far as the next meal or the next night’s rest. It was a relief to come to a place where I could plan week by week instead of day by day. And it was a luxury when I could indulge in month-to-month living, although no less a struggle.

My life has never been one of plenty. Even when I reached a time of having an abundance of stuff, I knew no other way to live than to battle my way through life. I never lived in an upscale community, I could barely afford to buy a house in a working class neighbourhood and then it was a never-ending struggle to scrape together enough money to pay the mortgage. Twice I came perilously close to foreclosure, and only managed to get out from under by refinancing the house…increasing my debt and monthly burden, and paying the instalments from the proceeds of the new loan, a strategy calculated to end badly, but the only solution available.

I had dreams, but unlike others, I never mistook those dreams for reality, entitlement, or even goals. Life had ground me into a pragmatist, a person who knew her dreams were just that…castles in the air…pretty fictions to be enjoyed but never mistaken for reality…or even possibility. One of my favourite dreams was to come to a place where I could work for the pleasure of it, not for the necessity. In this dream, I would have a fine house…not opulent, but generously sized and nicely situated in a pretty garden…and I would drive a nice car. My life would have security and I would feel loved and valued by my partner. In this dream I would have a nice car…practical, of course, so I would not feel guilty for having it…but a quality marque. I would not have to worry about money…and although I would be able to surround myself with things of beauty and quality, lavishness didn’t seem to be a part of my dreams. And I would be forever relieved of the drudgery of housework…I had laboured as my mother’s maid from the time I was big enough to drag a chair to the kitchen sink and wash the dinner dishes, and the ultimate luxury, to my mind, was someone to wash my dishes and clean my bathroom on a regular basis without stressing my budget.

It is perhaps a supreme irony that I grew up in the richest nation on Earth and could not partake in its wealth. I was born with a fine native intelligence but that is not enough in a society that values educational certification over intellect and quickness, that values one gender over another, that substitutes supposition for empiricism. Like most women of my generation, I ultimately looked to marriage for my salvation but I soon found myself in another situation of short term gain followed by long term loss: marriage should never be entered into with ulterior motives, no matter how compelling they might be.

Ultimately I was able to have a life free of hunger and privation, but maintaining that life was an endless struggle. Always, I was one payday away from disaster, one severance package away from losing it all. In Silicon Valley, where I lived most of my adult life and where big companies eat little companies and giant corporations swallow big companies whole without warning, sudden unemployment is a fact of life. But in a place where an executive secretary earns less than $5000 a month but the monthly payment on a modest tract home in a lower middle-class neighbourhood can take all that and more, the distance between affluence and desperation can be measured in weeks of unemployment after a sudden downsizing or corporate buy out. When it takes all you can earn to just keep above water, when you are no longer earning, you drown quickly. And all of the months of princely earnings do not blunt the sword that hangs portentously over your head…on the day the pay checks stop, the sinking begins.

And so I found myself widowed, alone, my income cut in half, my obligations undiminished. Life insurance is an unattainable luxury when you have to worry from one month to the next if you will have enough money to make your modest mortgage payment, when you don’t have enough to put new tires on the 14-year-old truck or the 24-year old station wagon, when you have given up all of your costly vices and still have to scrounge for change for enough gas to get to work. What had been a modestly successful effort by two people to live with a modicum of comfort became the uphill battle of one person to survive.

But there was an epiphany in that sudden plunge into widowhood and self-sufficiency: the sure and certain knowledge that if I kept doing the same things, I would keep getting the same results. A never-ending length of days full of scrimping and struggling stretched before me…unless I changed something.

And so I did. I took out that loan and finished the renovation of my house. I took a long term temp job that paid rather well because the boss was especially odious and couldn’t keep employees from throwing up their hands and walking out…they had to bribe us with fat salaries to stay in our jobs. I just ignored her nasty barbs, icy demeanour and picky personality and put those voluptuous pay checks in the bank. And I began rewriting my life rules.

The first rule I rewrote was the one that said I had to pinch every penny and live close to the bone. I finally remembered that worry is a wholly unproductive activity…the only thing it is good for is to increase stress levels.

The next rule I rewrote was the one about being appropriate. I started wearing brighter colours, I quit fretting about my weight, and opened myself to new experiences, people, even foods.

I then decided that people who live in the past have no future and began planning the next chapter in my life rather than staying stuck in old ones.

Funny thing about opening yourself to new stuff…new stuff happens! Today, that little old tract house is someone else’s burden and I have a lovely, spacious home set in a third of a landscaped acre. My old pickup has been replaced by a Mercedes SUV, and that horrible boss is ancient history: now I employ the sweetest little maid you could ever want to meet and a weekly gardener. My new husband is a professional man who earns a respectable income, is investment savvy, and pays the bills without stressing me about finances. “It hurt me to think of you alone and struggling like when I met you,” he told me the day he increased his life insurance…this, despite his being considerably younger than I am.

I like my life. I live in a beautiful home set in a beautiful garden, all located in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. My house and garden are superbly kept with very little effort on my part. I can buy what I want in the supermarket, although years of frugal living have conspired to keep me from being a spendthrift and I still shop the sales…but now it’s the steak and chops sales rather than hamburger!

Most of all, my life is filled with love. A horde of happy yappy little doggies dance at my feet when I return from an outing, my maid hugs me when she comes to work with her handsome little baby boy tied to her back and again when she goes home in the afternoon. And my husband…he has half a dozen pet names for me, he brings me chocolate when I least expect it, and tells me he loves me without warning or prompting.

Yes, I like my life. It is full, it is abundant, it is rich with those things necessary for a life of comfort and security and love.

Pity I had to come half way around the world to achieve it.