We have an offer out…

Last week we put an offer on a house we like. Unfortunately, it suffers from much the same problems we seem to encounter everywhere…it has some expensive problems that the owner has failed to correct, but he’s pricing it as if those problems had been resolved.

This particular house has a cottage on the grounds that will bring in rental income, and a studio that, when the half-done kitchen is finished, will also bring rental income, so we can actually offer a little more money for it, since we’ll have some income to offset the higher monthly house payment. But, there are significant…and costly…problems with the place.

Real estate agents use a thing called “comps” to help people come up with a price for their houses. This is a survey of recently sold nearby properties, their size and selling price. That would seem to be a good way…if the house across the street has the same footprint on the same size lot, then the prices should be proximal, yes? Well, no, actually…because the comp doesn’t take a lot of important differences into account.

Let’s say the house across the road has been renovated inside…it has a professionally designed gourmet kitchen with a large gas stove and first rate finishes including real wood cabinets…plus a generous scullery with room for three appliances. And perhaps the bathrooms have been renovated into luxury spas with Jacuzzi tubs and slate-tiled walk-in wet rooms instead of prosaic showers. And that tiny, almost useless fourth bedroom has been repurposed into a huge walk-in closet and dressing room. The back patio not only is covered, but it has a ceiling in which there are dimmable lights and it is surrounded by stacking glass doors that can be closed in cold weather. Maybe there is air conditioning and underfloor heating, gas fireplaces, and costly natural wood floors. And none of this is visible to the neighbours because the house still retains its original appearance from the street.

Now, your house may be in immaculate condition…nothing is broken, nothing is shabby, nothing needs fixing. But your kitchen is original, complete with the cheap melamine cabinets and counter tops, the old white enamel electric hob and miniscule oven, and space only for the smallest of refrigerators. Your washing machine is in the kitchen, and there is no place for a dishwasher or tumble dryer. Your bathrooms are original…30 years ago, when brown fixtures with orange accents was the rage, they were the height of fashion…today they are in like-new condition, but they are still brown and orange. Your patio is paved and a few timbers covered with shade cloth is your patio cover. Space heaters take care of the cold, big fans take care of the heat, and your spotless floors are the original tiles with the house, beautifully preserved, if 30 years out of date.

The comps cannot take into account the differences between the two houses, only the basest of the similarities. And while comps are useful in determining a range of prices in an area, they are useless in determining a fair price for a property simply because the differences in property amenities and condition cannot be factored in. Ok, so the estate agent is supposed to be the arbiter, the person who adjusts the comp figures in order to bring the asking price into line with specifics of the house. In theory this is correct, but in practice…well, the owner is actually the person who determines the selling price: if the agent won’t list the house at the price the owner wants for it, the owner will simply shop agents until he finds one who will.

What does the owner use to determine his price? Well, there are numerous answers to that…back in the States, for example, I knew a man who was in the middle of a divorce and had to share the proceeds of the sale of the family home with his soon-to-be ex-wife He had spotted a house he wanted to buy and determined he needed $90,000 to his pocket in order to be able to buy it. So, he calculated what the house had to sell for in order for him to realize his $90K and that was the sales price he settled on. Other people will take the comp as gospel…the house across the road sold for X a year ago, so my house must be worth X+the rate of inflation, never mind that my house hasn’t been painted in 10 years, the kitchen cabinets are falling apart, and the bathrooms are original with the 30 year old house.

We are seeing a lot of the latter…they look in the newspaper and see that a 3br, 2ba house in their area is on the market for X and immediately assume their house is worth the same, and that is not only the price they list it for, it is the price they insist on receiving. Instead of viewing the listed properties, taking into account the upgrades their house will need to be comparable and either doing the work or reducing their expectations by the cost of the work, they somehow perceive the cost of making their house truly comparable as belonging to the pocket of the person who buys their house. And so the houses sit on the market and buyers like me gnash their teeth in frustration.

I have seen some beautiful houses that are priced right for their size and condition…many of them, in fact. But they were not suitable for our needs…the rooms were too small for our furniture, there wasn’t space for the maid and her family, or something. But the houses themselves were beautifully updated and tastefully decorated and priced fairly for their size, condition, and location. Unfortunately, the few houses we have found that are suitable for us in terms of size and accommodation are sorely in need of renovation, and the owners have fallen into the comp trap…they won’t reduce the price of the house to take into account the necessary renovations to bring the house up to current architectural standards: modern bathrooms, open plan kitchens with good finishes, updated exteriors and, in some cases, necessary repairs.

And that brings me to the house we presently have an offer out on. Our offer is R300K below the asking price because the owner, nice man that he is, is asking “renovated and modernized house” price for a house that desperately needs some very costly work. The house is large and it is lovely, but even the estate agent says the owner’s expectations are out of line with reality. Originally he wanted to list at R3mil and the agent refused to take the listing. The man came down to R2.5mil and the agents took the listing, but with the knowledge that the seller would likely not get offers at that level (nor would the house likely appraise for that, making it difficult to get a mortgage).

We have carefully assessed the property and found numerous deficiencies: two of the brick boundary walls are in bad condition: one is a security risk, the other a safety risk. They will have to be taken down and replaced. Since we recently extended a brick wall at our house in Cape Town, we know this is going to cost in excess of R50K. There are no gates at the end of the driveway, which is a security problem in Johannesburg. To put in the gates and remote control for them will cost handsomely. The bathrooms have not been touched since the house was built: pea green fixtures and rose pink tiles! We had an estimate to upgrade our small bathroom in Cape Town: R20k + the cost of fixtures and tiles. The main bath in this house is quite large, so to update the two bathrooms, we are probably looking at R100K (the main bath has a Jacuzzi bath, also in pea green, that will have to be replaced, and the whole shower must be torn out and rebuilt).

To give the sellers credit, they did redo the kitchen. Unfortunately, they did the wrong things to it. It was an open plan type of kitchen and they sealed it up! They also removed about a third of the cabinets by removing the wall between the kitchen and the scullery! We have a copy of the 1980 house plans (when an addition was put on the house) that shows the original kitchen, so we can see what the layout was. Now, instead of stepping out from the kitchen and going directly into the living room/dining room, you have to step out of the kitchen into the foyer and walk through the foyer and then up three steps into the dining room…all this carrying heavy, hot pots of food and piles of dishes, both clean and dirty. The kitchen will need returning to an open plan design…separate kitchens are very much out of fashion and they make houses difficult to sell because open plan is what house buyers want. And returning this to open plan is not going to be a cheap proposition since it will mean taking out walls, moving electrical work and cabinets, etc.

There is a studio flat attached to the house that could be rented out except for one thing: they brought in the pipes, drain and electricity to put in a small kitchen but never finished the job. So, at least another R30K to buy and install cabinets, countertops, sink and taps, and a kitchen stove.

Some years ago houses built of facebrick were very trendy here. “Facebrick” is a kind of exposed brick that is neither painted nor plastered over, and comes in numerous colours and textures…and is now so out of fashion that some areas actually prohibit the building any new houses with it! And this huge house is not the only facebrick on the property, so are all of the garden walls…and the entire driveway and what should be the front yard are also paved with bricks. Not only does this outdated exterior drive the price of the house down, it is expensive to remedy…it is doubtful we will live here forever and it is essential that we take the difficulty in reselling this house into consideration: if we don’t want to linger on the market, we will have to employ an effective…and costly…program to either paint or plaster over (or both) at least a portion of the brick, remove some of the paving bricks and install plantings to soften what is now an monolithic expanse of bricks, bricks, and more bricks.

Then there is the fact that this house is on a corner…not a good thing in Joburg. The perception here is that a corner house has two boundary walls exposed to criminals and is therefore twice as vulnerable to being invaded. Also, this house is in a boomed area, with only two entrances a neighbourhood of 250-300 houses, and one of the entrances is on the road that runs beside the house, making for a relatively busy street just outside the main bedroom. Now, the wall has electric fencing on top of it and there is an abundance of plantings between the house and the wall to soften traffic noise, but potential buyers will still see that the house is on a corner lot…and a relatively busy one at that. This, of course, drives the desirability of the house…and its value…down further.

So, knowing all of the above and being aware of the costs of necessary repairs and bringing the house up to modern architectural standards, we made an offer on the house that was R300,000K below the listing price. The owner has until Tuesday evening to respond.

And so we wait.

Are we expecting too much?

With yet another unsuitable house viewed yesterday afternoon, it occurs to me to wonder if the problem is our expectations: are we expecting too much?

In terms of an agent we expect the following:
1) Don’t waste your time, our time, or the time of the sellers. Show us houses that fit the criteria we give you;
2) Don’t be selfish or greedy: share with your colleagues and show us houses they have listed if they fit our needs, even if you have to split the commission with them;
3) Recognize that the upper limit of our budget is for a “perfect” house: i.e., a house that needs no immediate expenditure for work to make it ready for us to move in. That means if the house is listed at the top end of our budget and the bedroom wall needs to be pushed out two metres just to get our furniture into the room, we cannot offer full price for it, we have to offer full price minus the cost of pushing out that wall or we simply cannot buy the house;
4) Respect our needs…don’t tell me I “have too much stuff” when I say the house is too small or that I need to “downsize” my collection of pots, pans, and utensils when I say the kitchen isn’t big enough or that “the owner likes it this way” when I opine that something is not to my liking. Just listen, take the information under advisement, and use it to refine your next recommendation;
5) We have R2mil to spend, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. Don’t condescend or treat us like paupers…it is a generous amount of money and it will buy us a decent house…we have time, we are preapproved buyers, and we will keep looking until some estate agent wises up and shows us the right house at the right price. If you want a percentage of that preapproved chunk of money our lender has promised us, go find us a house that suits our needs…don’t try to shove us into just any old house you are eager to sell. I want to buy the brick-and-mortar equivalent of a gently used second-hand Mercedes ML, not a brand new Ka.

In terms of a house, these are the inflexible minimum requirements:
1) 3 bedrooms, one of them large enough for my large, heavy bedroom suite of six pieces of furniture;
2) 2 bathrooms, one of them en suite with the master bedroom and with a shower, preferably larger than a 1m x 1m cubicle;
3) Either generously sized staff quarters or a granny cottage on the property. Our maid came with us from Cape Town and we need sufficient space to house her and her family. I do not consider one room barely bigger than a double bed and an outside toilet to be sufficient space for even one person, and some of these sellers should be abjectly ashamed at the conditions in which they expect their live-in helpers to reside! It is this requirement that has us looking at more expensive houses, as only they have granny flats or staff quarters.
4) No cluster houses, no houses on panhandle lots, no houses backing up to a freeway, shopping centre or industrial park, no houses on busy roads.
5) Adequate security, please! That means a functioning alarm system, security gates, locks that work, and intact boundary walls at minimum.
6) Fireplaces, pools, air conditioning, water features, covered patio and other amenities are nice, but they don’t make up for the lack of a large shower, space in the kitchen for a double fridge, automated garage doors, remote controlled driveway gate, or room for a washer, dishwasher AND a tumble dryer, and we don’t consider them necessary. We won’t turn down a house because it doesn’t have a pool or the patio isn’t covered…we will turn it down if the fridge won’t fit into the kitchen or there is no shower in the en suite bathroom.
7) Please, no houses that don’t have at least a modicum of decent room flow! I don’t want to open my front door into the dining room; I don’t want to walk through my closet to reach the bathroom; I don’t want my mother-in-law to have to walk to my room to get to the guest bedroom; I don’t want to carry a hot, heavy pot of food down a hallway, through a dark “TV room,” and around a corner to reach the dining table; I don’t want to pull into my garage on a rainy day, the boot of my car full of grocery bags, and have to lug those bags, in one of our torrential downpours, across a courtyard or lawn, down some steps, past the pool, through a security gate that I must stop and unlock with a key, and then up to the front door which must also be opened with a key, all in order to just get the groceries into the house. I want a house that has had some reasonable consideration to traffic flow put into its design…I will have to live in it every day for years and I simply do not see myself living happily in a house in which the rooms have been stuck randomly together!
8) An adequate-sized kitchen is not negotiable. It doesn’t matter if it is poorly laid out or has insufficient cabinet space…I can sort that out with a good kitchen designer. But if the room is too small, we are talking major money here to add on foundation, walls, roof, and plumbing in addition to new cupboards, counters, appliances, fixtures and flooring.
9) Trees. I want a mature garden with trees to shade the property. This is Africa and it can get bloody hot here, and trees are cheaper than a/c, they filter pollutants from the air, give off oxygen, and look beautiful. I want shady trees and I simply will not buy a house that doesn’t have them.

So, a 3 bedroom, 2 bath (one with shower) house with large kitchen, adequate space for our live-in maid (newer American homes often have “in-law suites” which would be perfect), double garage with automatic door openers, adequate security, and a quiet, tree-shaded location…that’s the bottom line. It sure doesn’t seem like too much to expect for a couple of million bucks, now does it?

More houses…more estate agents…more disappointment…

While the process of buying a house here is largely like the process in the US, there are some differences. In the States, for example, once an offer on a house has been accepted, the marketing of the house ceases. The buyer and seller have a contract, usually with some contingencies included that could result in one of the other of them being able to back out of the contract, but if you accept an offer from me for your house and somebody comes along a couple of days later offering you more money…and in cash…you are out of luck unless I am unable to secure a mortgage (bond) or sell my present residence (assuming the sale was contingent upon selling it) or some other such circumstance.

Not so in South Africa. If you accept my offer for your house, unless I have offered you cash, you still have options open. A contingency sale, for example, can derail if you get a cash buyer, even if you have accepted my contingent offer. In such a case, I get 48 hours (used to be 72) to come up with enough cash to cover my offer to you or I lose the house to the cash buyer. There are certain other conditions under which an accepted offer can be invalidated as well, so even after your offer has been accepted, the owner and the [real] estate agents will continue to show the house to prospective buyers until your bond is granted and the money is in the hands of the seller’s attorneys.

Buyers here are greatly at risk. The estate agent works for the seller, as do the conveyancing attorneys. We don’t have escrow companies here, so the money and paperwork transfers (such as deed registration) are handled by specialist law firms…who are engaged by the sellers, not the buyers. We also do not have title search companies, but the deeds registering office is supposed to make sure the property is free of liens prior to the transfer…and if there are liens, it is the job of the conveyancing attorney to clear them from the funds he has received from your lender prior to handing over cash to the seller. The conveyancing attorney acts very much like an escrow company in the US, but with one notable difference: in the US, escrow companies are, by their nature, objective in their dealings; here, the conveyancing attorneys work for the seller and sometimes that works to the buyer’s detriment.

So, knowing that the estate agents and the cash-and-document transfer specialists are in the employ of the sellers, we approach our house hunting with great caution: we’ve been burned once by an unethical, thieving seller and shafted by both her agent and attorneys…we aren’t going to allow it to happen again. We therefore take agents’ ecstatic waxing about houses with a lump of salt and expect very little…for a great deal of money.

Houses here are sold “voetstoots,” an Afrikaans word meaning “as is.” This can work both for and against a buyer: on the one hand, the house must be in the same condition (and have the same fixtures) as when the buyer viewed the house (items specifically noted as exceptions excluded)…but if there are defects in the house that the buyer failed to notice, he’s stuck with them. Yes, there is a clause for latent defects (i.e., the roof leaks, the seller knew about it and concealed it), but activating that clause is prohibitively expensive (I know, I sued that unethical, thieving seller a few years back). But if your seller is moving out of the country (which is common around here), the latent defects clause is just pointless…even if the house collapses around your ears, you have no recourse. So, we are very cautious about houses that look like they will need work, especially with regard to drainage, foundations, plumbing, electrical work and roofing.

Last week we called an agent about a house in Paulshof, a nice upmarket suburb within easy commuting distance of Hubby’s job. She took us to two houses, neither of which met our requirements, and neither of which were the house we called about! Leafing through her book of open mandates, she flipped to the page with the house on it and I stopped her…“That’s the house we called about,” I told her. She seemed surprised but promised to set it up and call us back.

Well, for some reason she turned it over to her partner (miffed that we didn’t like the houses she showed us, even though they clearly did not meet the requirements we gave her?) to show us. The internet ad showed a neat brick house and the description fitted our needs. It also included two rental cottages and river frontage. The only thing that bothered me was the lack of interior photos, but I know that sometimes that happens because nobody was home the day the photographers came to take the pictures.

Well, I should have listened to my instincts. The house was shabby, both inside and out. It was a panhandle house, reached by a narrow, twisting driveway and located behind one house and bordered closely by another house and a huge apartment complex overlooking the garden. The view to the front was a rubble pile backed up by the house in front, the view to the right was the roof and windows of a neighbouring house less than two metres away, the view to the left was a multi-story apartment complex with at least two floors of windows looking directly down into the front and back gardens, and the view to the back, which should have been inviting river frontage, was that of a cliff as seen from behind a massive snarl of razor wire. Oh, there was a river, all right, and you could hear it flowing…but you couldn’t see it because it was at the base of the cliff, masked by the razor wire barricade.

Inside, the house had once been attractive, but now it was just shabby with age and neglect. The owner, a frail woman who looked to be in her eighties, was just no longer robust enough to keep the place up. A kind of dingy grey overlaid everything, from the paint to the windows to the carpets to the furnishings. Most of the rooms were of a generous size, save the living room which was amazingly small, none of the bathrooms had seen renovation since the construction of the house, and the work that had been done to renovate the kitchen had left it a dark, disjointed, poorly designed and shamefully executed space (the lower kitchen cupboards, for example, were so out of plumb that it was obvious to the naked eye!).

The garden was a wreck. Oh, it was planted and neatly trimmed, but there was a huge gouge in the earth, nicely covered with lawn, that would doubtless fill with water during the rains and become swampy, as it had no outlet to the river’s edge or to anyplace it could drain. Evidence of neglect was everywhere, from the peeling paint on the window frames to the threadbare garden to the scummy shower tiles. But the shocker was that she had wanted to list the property for more than R2mil and only settled for R1.95mil when the agent simply refused to list it for that.

Looking at the work the place needed, especially the fact that the back garden would need a visit from a hydrologist to work out proper drainage for that gash in the earth in the back garden, and the fact that to give the place even a semblance of privacy the front garden wall would have to be raised at least two metres and tall trees put in to screen the property from the prying eyes of the apartment building, we figured the place probably needed close to half a million in work. This figure took into account the need to completely re-do the kitchen and renovate the bathrooms, install a security system, and relandscape the back garden as well as haul away the rubble in the front of the house and landscape that area which, presently, is nothing but bare sand, piles of construction debris, and a lone tree. At the end of all that expense and work we would be left with a small house with a tiny garden…perhaps a hidden jewel, but even then, barely worth the nearly R2mil she was asking for it.

We asked the agent if he had explained to her the fact that, no matter what a buyer wanted to pay, the lender would send out an appraiser who would value the property and the lender would not lend one rand more than the appraiser’s estimation. He said he had. We then asked if the woman was aware that the properly could not possibly appraise for her asking price and, in fact, might not even appraise for the R1.5mil we might consider offering, in present condition. He said he had…but she was immovable.

And so, we go to see another house today…we’ll see how that one goes.

Do they really want to sell these houses or not?

If you could get a 100% mortgage, how much could you afford to spend on a house? We can afford about R2,000,000 (Hubby can get a 100% mortgage for that amount), which translates to about $270,000 USD. Sounds like a pretty modest amount, yes? Take a look at this to see what $270K US can buy here in Joburg. This particular property search is confined to the “better” suburbs, middle class and up, and shows 448 homes between $135K and $270K USD.

So, while we aren’t looking at Hollywood mansions or Beverly Hills estates, we are looking at very nice homes in upmarket areas, houses selling for a respectable amount of money and located in beautiful settings. The problem is, I am coming to question just how serious these people are…agents and sellers alike…abut selling their houses.

Take the mid-century modern house I have been coveting…it has been on the market since November and was originally listed at R3.1million, a hallucinatory price if I ever heard one. It is a lovely house, but would you pay Beverly Hills prices for a house located nearby…but definitely outside the confines of BH? Well, Bryanston and Randburg have a similar relationship, Bryanston being the prestigious suburb and Randburg being more of an ordinary middle-class kind of place. And although this house and the surrounding area look like Bryanston, the fact of the matter is, the utilities are supplied by and taxes are paid to Randburg and, as one estate agent told me, “Nobody pays 3 million for a house in Randburg, no matter how nice it is!”

So, the owner learned the hard way that this is very much a live sentiment and has been lowering the price of the house, little by little. When we first saw it, he wanted R2.7mil, too rich for our blood. But a few weeks later, checking the website, we saw the price had come down. Unfortunately, our offer of R2.1mil was not accepted…twice. But this weekend we were told the price of the house has come down to R2.2mil…100K more than the best we can stretch to offer. And I have to wonder…does this man really want to sell this house??

He’s had it on the market for nearly five months. He had one offer at R2.4mil, which he accepted, but the buyer couldn’t qualify for a loan. He has had at least six open houses (“show house” in South African) and not a nibble. His own attorneys have advised him to accept our R2.1mil offer…we’ve made the offer twice, the second time backed up by a letter of qualification from our lender. We’re the only game in town and the amount of money he’s quibbling over is around $13K USD…he’s already returned to the US (he’s American) and his family is presently en route, so the house is empty…does he really want to sell this house or doesn’t he?

This being the 21st century, I do a lot of my house hunting on the web. Property Genie, the link noted above, is a particularly good source as it aggregates listings from multiple real estate agencies, allowing me to browse the offerings of many companies all in the same place. But many of the listings are of a very poor quality…not only on Property Genie, but on the agencies sites themselves. Tell me, would you be motivated to go see this house? No pictures, about as unremarkable description as you could possibly get…why would anyone even click on this ad, let alone call to make an appointment to see it? Does this agent really want to sell this house? It sure doesn’t look like it to me!

Or this one, headlined “Bank Repo Bargain”… No photo and the description consists entirely of “look no further for a property that meets your needs.” Excuse me? How am I supposed to know if it meets my needs or not…or even want to explore that possibility…if all I know is the house has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms? Douglasdale is one of those schizo suburbs (I know…I live there) that, on one side of the main road are luxury homes with lush gardens and on the other side are tacky little boxes that pass for houses…without a picture, how can I tell if it’s on the side of the road that would interest me? Without a description, how do I know if it has a garage or a pool or if it is even big enough for my family and possessions? It doesn’t seem the agent is particularly interested in selling this house because if s/he was, wouldn’t there be a few pics and at least a basic description of the property?

Then there are the house listings that show a dozen pictures of the outside of the house from every possible angle and distance, but no pics of the inside. Those listings make me nervous…what is wrong with the inside that the agent isn’t posting any pictures of it? Kitchen and bathrooms not updated since the 1950s? Holes in the walls? Broken cupboard doors? Missing fixtures or sanitary ware? Hideous tiles or paint? Evidence of destructive tenants? What is wrong with a house that pictures of the interior are conspicuously missing? I don’t want to waste the agent’s time…or my own…battling traffic to a house only to find that the kitchen is too small or bizarrely laid out, that the living room won’t fit the sofa, or there isn’t a shower in the place. Show me pictures of the interior and I’ll self-select out the obviously unsuitable houses without wasting anybody’s time…agent, seller, or my own.

Then there are the ones that show multiple interior shots but nothing outside…or no pics of the front of the house. It just makes me wonder what they are trying to hide. We actually went to see a house that had an absolute horror of a back yard…boundary wall backed up to a busy freeway, the trees that once shielded the household from the traffic noise cut down and some of them burned in huge pits dug into the back yard, no flowers, bushes, trees, or shrubs…nothing but a dry, scrubby lawn and a pit at one side of the house full of stagnant water. The house interior was also a nightmare, with sagging ceilings, no room flow whatsoever (you had to walk through a dark TV room to reach the dining room from the kitchen, for example), and a tenant in the cottage who refused to let anyone in to see it! This house was listed at R1.65M and the owner had turned down an offer from a neighbour for R1.5mil…about half a mil more than I would have considered it worth! Did that woman really want to sell her house? Her actions would suggest that she wasn’t really a committed seller.

Then there are the pictures themselves. Even when the agent includes interior pics, they seem to be randomly chosen, and often so dark that the features of the room are indistinguishable. Do they think this lends an air of mystery to the property, that it piques curiosity on the part of potential buyers? Well, not this buyer. There are literally hundreds of listings to sort through and if other buyers are anything like me, they only spend a lot of time on the really interesting listings and just skip over the ones that don’t jump out at them. In fact, I suspect most buyers are like me, because the listings that jump out at me often are for properties that have already sold, indicating the listings jumped out at somebody else before I even got there!

Which brings up another problem…houses that remain on websites long after they have been sold and the mortgages granted. The laziness on the part of the agents who fail to take the listings down causes a lot of pointless phone calls. OK…I suspect some of the agents leave them up because they will generate calls to which the agent can say “I’m sorry, that house has been sold…but what are you looking for and maybe I can find something for you?”

In America we call that “bait and switch” and it is illegal. Surprisingly, it is not illegal in South Africa, although it is gravely unethical. I won’t work with an agent who suckers in potential clients this way. Advertise a good house with decent pictures and appropriate description and I’ll call you, waving my prequalification certificate like a flag!

I don’t understand why agents aren’t breaking their bums to find houses for buyers like me. If these agents really, really want to sell houses and take commissions to their pockets, what is their issue with sharing with their colleagues? Don’t they realize that 3% of a sale is much nicer to the wallet than 6% of a no-sale? I see multiple houses listed by the same agency but an agent working there will only show me his/her listings! Agents! I don’t care who listed the house, you or your colleagues…they have listings…I am a serious, committed, prequalified buyer…why aren’t you showing me everything your agency has listed that fits my needs, instead of the one or two houses in your own personal inventory? Don’t you realize that half a commission is better than none? That your sellers need more foot traffic than less because the more people who see a house, the better chance of selling it?

But I seem to keep coming across agents who would rather try to talk me into buying the wrong house than find and sell me the right one. How lazy…and ultimately stupid…is that? We saw a house that was too small and too expensive. Instead of hearing us…at this price we wouldn’t have the money to expand the house…and saying “Let me check with my colleagues and see what they might have available that would suit you”…she countered each objection with an explanation for why the owner did that, or that the owner likes it this way, or we could make something bigger or paint it or… Sorry, but the owner’s taste and sense of balance and style were way out of whack with mine, it would have cost a fortune we don’t have to fix it, and unless her owner was willing to drop the price by about a million rand so that we’d have the funds to fix it, this was just not the house for us!

So, we continue househunting, slogging through internet listings that don’t tell us how big a house is (and those that do invariably include the garage, patios and balconies in the square footage, places I am loathe to put the sofa, king-sized bed, or Hubby’s big screen), that list prices the owner won’t accept, that fail to show pictures of such important areas as the kitchen, bathroom, and front of the house…or just simply fail to show pictures at all. For an entire afternoon’s perusal of hundreds of listings, yesterday I came up with four houses…one of which has been sold, two of which we are going to see today, the fourth one we will see tomorrow. Nearly 500 listings and only four suitable…

But what about all those that fit our price and location requirements but didn’t have any pictures or descriptions? Wouldn’t it be sad if my perfect home was one of those but because some slothful estate agent couldn’t be bothered to write a description and post some pics, we never meet?

Later…Hubby on his way to pick me up to see a house…

A new week

My father has been buried and with that a chapter in my life comes to a close.

The house hunting continues, and it is not easy, despite having more than 150 pages of real estate ads. Unfortunately, print media is organized for the benefit of the advertiser, not the convenience of the reader, so instead of being able to go to a page for the suburb I want to buy in and then select a group of ads for houses (not duplexes, flats, clusters, or townhouses), I have to peruse each page individually, filtering each page by my criteria. Exhausting and, after looking through the whole thing, found fewer than eight properties of interest. The paper does provide an index of suburbs with a list of the page numbers where relevant ads are located, but it is discouraging to thumb through dozens of pages and find apartments, flats, cluster developments and townhouses instead of stand alone houses.

I don’t think clusters are a popular option in the American housing market. Here, they are all the rage, despite narrow lanes, miniscule plots and postage-stamp rooms and a homogeneity in appearance that makes it easy to park in front of the wrong house, especially if it is dark or you are tired. The houses all look alike, are mandated to be painted the same colour, and individuality in the exteriors…at least the part of the exterior that can be seen by your neighbours…is verboten.

We looked at a cluster house recently…it was a rare one that had staff quarters (read: maid’s room) and even a few trees. But we parked Big Bertha on the street and nearly blocked the road, once inside the gate it was obvious that there was no shade in the garden whatsoever, the plot was so small the swimming pool was in the front yard, and the view from all windows was into the neighbour’s houses and gardens. The kitchen was so small I would have had to expand it into the dining room just to house the pots, pans, and dishes, and the living room was so small we would not have been able to put the 3-seater sofa in it. And the bedroom? Well, one wall was all windows, one wall was built-in cupboards, the third wall was doors (to the en suite and into the hall) leaving only one wall for positioning furniture. Since my bedroom furniture consists of considerably more than just a bed, there was no way it could have worked for us.

Aside from the forced homogeneity of the clusters and the crowded conditions, one of my chief gripes about them is that the developers knock down all the trees on the land and when the building is done, it is as bare as the Gobi. Yes, we can plant our own trees and shrubs, but next Sunday I will be 63…I will be in my grave before a tree I plant reaches sufficient size to provide respectable shade, and will have lived those years without the comfort and ease provided by trees and lush landscaping.

But South Africans seem to like clusters. I am told it is the security they like, the boomed gates and the high walls with security, but I find that difficult to accept. I live in a separate house…I have high walls with electric fencing, an alarm, an armed response company, and my street is access controlled. And the house is twice the size of a cluster with three times the landspace…AND I have a lushly landscaped garden with mature trees in it, even though the house itself is only a few years old. Like me, the owner loves the greenery, and when he built the house, he positioned it on the lot so that the trees already here would be spared.

Clusters are not like the boomed communities in America that border golf courses or vineyards. Those “gated communities” boast expensive luxury homes with large properties and grand, opulent houses, places where those teetering at the top of the “upper middle class” ladder live conspicuous consuming lives as they ready themselves to leap to the nouveau riche rung of the next one. That kind of gated community is just arriving…Waterfall Estates is just getting underway and promises the kind of luxurious enclave that our upwardly mobile will flock to until they can afford Illovo or one of the other areas where you don’t buy houses, you buy multi-acre estates. No, clusters here are a developer’s dream…they buy one gracious older home on a large lot, knock it down, scrape the land bare, carve out tiny little parcels of land with dangerously narrow lanes between them. Then instead of burning the bucks to build houses and risk standing around with an inventory of unsold bricks and mortar, they simply put in the services, hire an architect to draw up a couple of housing plans, then sell “plot and plan” to buyers who spend their own money to build a house that takes up most of the plot, has views of their neighbour’s windows, no shade, and will always look like every other house in the development. I don’t like them, but then I am not a “cookie cutter” person (no offense intended to those of you who are).

Apparently some of the older clusters, however, are not so uniform in appearance, have larger lots, and they’ve been there long enough for the trees to have grown to a size sufficient to provide some shade. We will be looking at two houses in a 13 year old cluster this week, and hopefully one of them will be right for us. I am tired of looking at other people’s awful houses and biting my tongue to keep from laughing when I am told they are asking a premium price for a house that hasn’t had the kitchen or bathrooms updated in 30+ years.

Now, I’m off to scour the internet for my next exercise in futility…

Household amenities…or the lack thereof

Americans expect certain amenities in their houses, expectations that apparently are not shared by the majority of house-buying South Africans.

For example, I think most Americans would shy away from a house that had no sink in the kitchen, even if there was a huge, state-of-the art sink in the very next room. And central heating…Americans pretty much expect central heating in their houses unless the house is of a certain age and has not been remodelled to add it. But there are things that are just accepted as “normal” in South African houses that would amaze, amuse, and dismay an American home buyer.

Windows…most modern American homes have aluminium window frames. Often they are clad and require little or no maintenance, and they have channels built in for screens. South African houses mostly have wood-framed windows…unpainted wood-framed windows, at that. They are varnished and require yearly sanding and revarnishing in order to stay in good condition. And there aren’t any screens. In fact, you cannot buy, beg, borrow or steal screen doors or window screens in this country! The only window screens I have ever seen here were at a home show, and they were for blocking the sun, not keeping insects and other little nasties from sneaking into your house. You buy a house in South Africa and want screens on your windows, be prepared to import both the screens and the windows from the US, because you simply will not find them here!

Burglar bars…I don’t know about where you live in America, but where I lived, if you saw a house for sale and it had burglar bars on all the windows and doors, you would immediately assume that the area has a serious crime problem and you would pass on the house. South Africans take a totally different view…if the house doesn’t have burglar bars, high masonry walls with spikes and electric fencing on top, CCTV cameras and monitors and an alarm hooked to a private armed response company, people walk away! I have gotten so accustomed to barred windows that the only time I really see them is when I want to take a photo out the window and the blasted bars mar the view…the camera lens can’t blot them out of the picture the way my brain can. Sometimes the problem you are fencing out, however, is not human…my mother-in-law lives in Durban and she had to put up electric fencing to keep the vervet monkeys out! These are the cutest little creatures, but terribly destructive if they get into your house…think raccoons but diurnal and with prehensile tails!

Heating…every American house I lived in from 1975 onward had forced air heating, including a heat vent in the bathroom. One even had an electronic thermostat that would allow you to program it to turn on the heat just before you awoke in the morning or got home from work and could be zoned so you wouldn’t heat the guest bedroom unnecessarily while you were warming up your bedroom and bath. Nothing in South Africa even comes close!

We are not looking in low-rent districts nor are we looking at cheap houses. Our hunt encompasses larger, finer homes, places you would expect to have the finest in creature comforts….like heat. But, despite this being the 21st century, South African homes are still being built without heat in the rooms…a fireplace in the living room and/or family room is about the best you can hope for. It’s not because it is so balmy here that heat is unnecessary…no, it gets pretty cold in the winters and even occasionally snows here in Joburg. But even in Cape Town the winters are chilly, so much so that the local shops make a pretty good business of selling space heaters of varying design. So, in an elegant home costing millions of bucks you will find cheap, ugly little space heaters tucked away to heat the rooms.

And the bathrooms? Suck it up…not only is there no heat in the room, there aren’t any electrical outlets to plug one into…or for a hair dryer, curling iron, or the chargers for your electric toothbrush or shaver. Not only that, the light switch for the bathroom is outside the bathroom! So, except for the wiring to the hole in the ceiling into which the light is wired, South African bathrooms have no electricity!!

This isn’t where the peculiarities of South African bathrooms end, however. Back in the early ’60s my father and stepmother bought a modest new tract home in Southern California. The master bath had a sink, shower and toilet, the main bath had a tub, sink and toilet. American houses have evolved since then, and in most houses built after that time, the main bath (“family bath” in South African) has a shower over the tub. Sometimes there is a shower curtain, sometimes there is a sliding glass door, but there is invariably a shower to accompany the tub. Well, that’s practically an unheard-of concept in South Africa. Around here, if a bathroom has both a tub and a shower, most likely the shower is a separate unit from the tub…and just as likely, it is only big enough for an extremely thin child to turn around in comfortably. Even in new homes or freshly remodelled bathrooms, the showers tend to be tiny little affairs tucked behind a door or stuck to the foot end of the tub. My last house in California had a large walk-in shower (easily big enough for sharing with my generously proportioned husband) in the master bath and that house was built in 1960!

And extractor fans? A fan to suck out the steam and thereby keep mildew down and afford you use of the mirror? Unheard of. The only bathroom I have ever seen that had an extractor fan was in the cottage at my rental property…and I had that installed when we renovated the cottage!

I’ve touched on some of the peculiarities of the South African kitchen, but there’s more. While a South African bathroom probably doesn’t have an extractor fan, a South African kitchen probably does, in the form of a stove hood. Unlike their American counterparts, however, these extractors do not vent to the outside. This came as a great surprise to me in my first South African house. I opened the cupboard above the extractor, expecting to find the big vent tube leading up to the hole in the roof, and found nothing! It had a fan, the fan had filters…but no ducting to the outside. I still have no idea how (or even if) it worked. The next house had a stainless hood with a long tube that went up the wall and into the ceiling. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I discovered it, too, did not vent to the outside, but vented into the attic crawl space!! Why don’t they vent these things outside? I shudder to think of going into that crawl space…the house was built in 1972…can you imagine the kind of sticky crap hanging around up there? eeewwww!

South African houses seldom have laundry rooms or even a laundry area in the garage (and basements are pretty much non-existent here). There are no “mud porches” either, although a good number of houses have a scullery. So where do you do the wash? Well, in the absence of a scullery or a laundry room, you do it in your kitchen. Yup…In the space where you or I would put a dishwasher, the South African housewife has a washing machine. A dryer? Oh…it can be anywhere in the house since most dryers sold here do not have a vent hose to the outside. Nope, they have a peculiar perforated ring around the dryer door that allows the hot, damp air to be vented right into your house!

Dishwashers are not terribly popular here, but they are starting to show up more and more in recent years. The house I live in now has space for two appliances in the scullery with water hookups for both of them…but no place for a dryer, despite the fact that it customarily rains every afternoon here, so clothesline drying is frequently not an option.

Garbage disposals are pretty much unknown here, too. I had one for so long in America, I had to reach back in my memory to my grandmothers’ houses to recall what to do for food prep with no disposal to toss the peelings and trimmings into. I particularly miss the disposal when I find something disgusting mouldering away in the back of the fridge and can’t just dump it down the sink and flip the switch to get rid of it! But the fact that in most homes all sinks and tubs drain to an open drain outside and from there to the sewers, would make a garbage disposal unwise…the pulverized foods that cling to the inside of the drain and the pipes would be a feast for the local insect life and I have enough bugs to content with, without inviting them over for a feast every time I turn on the disposal!

Oh…and you know those convenient little sprayer thingies on the sink, the one you use to rinse stuff down the drain, clean the sides of the sink of scouring powder, rinse shampoo off the Yorkie or use to fill pots or buckets too big to fit under the faucet? Unknown here. Completely and totally unknown, both in practice and in concept! When I remodelled the last kitchen I found a faucet that the head could be pulled out (on a tube) and if you pushed a button the top of it, water would spray. But it was a rather wide-angle, high pressure spray that pretty much sprayed everything within a metre’s diameter, so it was not the optimum solution. I think when I remodel my next kitchen, I’m going to send to the States for my kitchen sink and taps!

When was the last time you say a house without a closet? My parents bought an Eichler-style house when I was in the first grade…around 1952…and this house had closets with sliding doors. Apparently built-in closets are relatively new in South Africa, as it seems to be a feature people find worthy of including in their advertisements. “BICs” the ads read, like they were some kind of new, fabulous invention and this house has them. Well, they are crap.

We aren’t talking a sliding door closet, here, we are talking cupboards…cheap white melamine cupboards in most cases, like closet sized el cheapo kitchen cabinets screwed to the bedroom wall. Cupboards with doors that sag within a year or two, and with both hanging space and shelves designed to supplant your dressers. Since when is a shelf that you cannot see to the back of better than a drawer you can pull out and see what lurks in the back? I hate these things…they are ugly, cheap, and don’t do half the job a simple walk-in closet would do! And even in the expensive up market homes you find them…although they are probably clad in a faux woodgrain covering so they don’t look quite as tacky as the white ones.

South African houses, for all that they look very much like American houses from the outside, seem to lack much of the amenities that Americans take for granted and are, therefore, glaring in their absence. There is one South African amenity, however, found in here homes both modest and grand, that Americans seem to overlook when building or remodelling their homes: the built-in pub-style bar. This just boggles me…perhaps it is that Puritan streak deeply buried in my American consciousness sticking its disapproving head out, but I would be mortally embarrassed to have such a thing in my house! I would expect people to think perhaps I had an alcohol problem…indeed, if you drink so much beer that you have a professional tap setup and you can kill a keg before it goes flat or stale, I’m thinking you probably do! Aside from the fact that it would seem to narrow your sales market (every time we see a house with one of these, we start calculating what it will cost to remove it and restore the room back to normal…always too much!) these things are just huge, cumbersome and ugly. I have actually seen three houses with kitchens that desperately needed an infusion of cash and decent design that had, instead, well-appointed bars with plumbing, refrigeration, cabinets and shelves for a broad array of liquors and glassware, and even expensive sound equipment. What kind of message does it send to any kids living in the house… “my parents can’t afford to fix up the kitchen but they spent thousands on a professional pub in the family room…guess I can tell which is important!” No piddling kegerator here…nope…a real pub-style bar that will seat four to eight people and keep them supplied with the poison of their choice for hours…even days…on end!

I don't expect to find an American home here...I really don't. But it seems to me when someone is selling a beautiful, expensive home, some basic creature comforts...like heat...would be part of the basic amenities! But I know better and will be satisfied with a house that has a footprint that can be massaged to accommodate the installation of my most precious creature comforts, which is turning out to be a bigger job than expected. I am starting to feel like this house hunt is going to go on forever!

The house hunt continues...

South African houses are different from American houses in many ways. The renowned architect, Buckminster Fuller, once said “…a house is a machine for living…” and American home designers have, for the most part, seized on that sentiment and run with it. American houses, by and large, are logically laid out and come with a basic minimum of creature comforts and conveniences, particularly homes built in the last quarter century. Not so South African houses, not even those built in the last year!

Not only have South African home designers never heard of the kitchen work triangle, they’ve apparently never heard the phrase “room flow.” Americans may never have heard of this term, most likely because “room flow” is conspicuous only by its absence, and the vast majority of modern American homes have it…and the majority of houses I have seen on this most recent house hunt do not.

So just what is “room flow”? Well, it is easier to describe some examples of what is not… In average American home you enter from the front door into either an entryway of some kind or directly into the living room (“lounge” in South African parlance). There is usually either a bedroom wing served by a central hallway (“passageway”) or a second story with bedrooms. If the house has a dining room, it is probably adjacent to (or across a hall from) the kitchen. In open plan style houses, the kitchen will most likely be open plan with a family room, the formal dining room separated from the kitchen but perhaps open to the living room. When moving from room to room, you do not have to use one room as a passageway to another (with the exception of the kitchen and open plan areas).

We are not looking in any “downmarket” neighbourhoods. All of the houses we are seeing are in middle to upper middleclass areas and the average price we are looking at is around R2 million. This price will also buy us a very well-appointed McMansion in a gated community, so don’t let the exchange rate fool you. Here is a link to a house we have looked at and is going for R2.1 million. As you can see, this is not a cheap fixer-upper, it is a beautiful, gracious house of more than 5000 sq ft set on a half acre of landscaped grounds. All of the houses we have looked at are pretty much in the R1.6M to R2.6M range, like this one…and despite their handsome prices (and the implication that for this money you are getting a premium property), a shocking number of them were laid out in such a way that they had what Hubby calls “the glommed-on effect,” the antithesis of room flow.

Last week we saw a large house in a leafy suburb near Hubby’s office. It started off ok, we walked into the house through a small entryway, the bedrooms in a wing to the right, the public rooms (“reception rooms”) to the left. The living room was so small as to feel claustrophobic and a narrow opening in the far wall proved to be a doorway to the “family room.” Actually, it was a thatched-roof patio that had had brick walls erected around it, and you had to enter it by walking diagonally across the cramped living room. At the other end of the house, the fourth bedroom had to be entered by walking through the master bedroom…although the room did have its own private door to the driveway. This room, too, had been added on, the insides of the walls simply painted brick, no attempt made to plaster or insulate the walls. So, two of the rooms were just kinda stuck onto the house with no thought for access to them…how would you like your child to have to traipse past your bed in the middle of the night en route to the bathroom? The owners wanted R1.99M for it, way too much considering that it also needed the bathrooms and kitchen (original 1970s vintage) gutted and redone and some kind of internal remodelling was necessary to restore room flow to the house.

Another house we visited had no dining room and a bad remodel of the kitchen had left it withno place to sit and eat. The owners had taken space in the already small living room for the dining table, and right next to it they had erected an enormous, dark, pub-style bar. It overwhelmed the small space, dominating the room like a huge vulture brooding in the corner. Access to the back yard and the pool (and another bar, this a freestanding open-walled room at the back of the garden) was through the living room. So, if you wanted to come in from the pool, your drippy wet self would have to enter the living room to get to a bathroom or your bedroom; if you wanted to take raw meat and gooey potato salad out to the patio to braai, you had to take it through the living room; if you wanted a tipple…well, same thing…no quick trip to the kitchen fridge, but a stop in the family pub that dominates the living room. Pity anyone trying to watch TV or read a book or have a conversation with the local vicar, eh?

There was the house that had a cramped windowless room between the kitchen and the dining room. Dubbed the “TV lounge” by the sellers, the room had to be traversed diagonally to get to the living room, and then around a corner to meet up with the dining table. Then there was the R6.5M “estate” that you had to walk through the main bedroom to access the stairway to the loft bedroom above…and for 6.5M you didn’t even get a garage! It had a nice kitchen, but you had to walk out into the hallway, down the hall, and around the corner to reach the dining room that was just on the other side of the kitchen wall.

Some houses have their family rooms right next to the living room…doesn’t seem to make much sense to me since the family room was intended to be a place where the family could kick back, shoes off, sprawl on the rug to watch TV or play games while the living room, in another part of the house, was reserved for more formal, even adult purposes. And I have yet to figure out the South African obsession with installing a fully functioning bar in the home…we saw a house that had an incredibly dysfunctional, windowless kitchen that needed thousands of rand worth of work, but down the hall there was an obviously costly bar installed…plumbed and boasting beer kegs and bar top taps…that was worthy of a corner pub! This house also required an extensive hike from the kitchen, down a hallway, and around a corner to deliver food from the kitchen to the dining table...but the expensive, professionally-equipped pub was obviously a higher priority than creating a functioning kitchen and rational access to the dining room.

There are houses where you enter directly into the dining room…no foyer or entry way, just a front door that opens into the dining room. I don’t think I have ever…not even once…seen an American house that you stepped through the front door and bumped immediately into a dining table! But I have seen several South African houses with this design, so obviously people buy them despite their awkwardness.

I have seen several houses that had peculiar dressing room/bathroom arrangements…when your closets are in the bathroom, steam from the showers will mildew your clothes, even if there are doors on the closets (I know…I had a house like that). I viewed one house where there was a huge…and I mean as big as the master bedroom…walk-in closet adjacent to the bedroom but no en-suite bathroom. Well, at least I thought there was no master bath until I walked all the way to the back of the closet, past all the clothes and stepping over the owner’s considerable collection of shoes, to find a doorway leading into the bath. I could just imagine myself making a 2 am trip to the loo and getting tangled up in a dress or tripping over Hubby’s size 13s! No thanks…access to the bathrooms should be proximal and unimpeded!

Then there are those darlings of trendy housing design, open plan kitchens. I can think of only one that I have seen, here in SA, open onto a family room so that the cook would not be isolated from her family while preparing their dinner…and in this solitary example, the stove was situated to that the cook had her back to the family room, the family, and all the activity on going (not only that, but her sink, microwave, and fridge were in a different room!). I’ve seen other open plan kitchens that are also laid out so that the cook, while in an open room that segues into another…usually the dining room…is forced by the layout of the kitchen to turn her back on any guests or family that might happen to have wandered in to keep her company.

So, creating easy, sensible room flow is not a particularly strong skill with South African home designers, making it a challenge for us to find a house that does not feel like half the rooms have been “glommed on.” It is an important criterion for us…that, and finding a house with at least a few amenities. More about that next time.

The (Kitchen) Bermuda Triangle

There is a thing in kitchen design called the “golden triangle” or “work triangle.” This concept puts the three most-used kitchen items…the stove, the fridge, and the sink… within just a few steps of each other and provides counter top space between them. It is not a new or even a high-end concept: my father and step-mother bought a modest new tract home in the early 1960s that incorporated this concept to great effect.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your kitchen is, how fine the finishes, how modern, trendy and up-to-date the lighting is, if the kitchen is not laid out efficiently, it is going to be a nightmare to work in. A golden triangle layout puts you within easy reach of the fridge, stove and sink, with food prep space in between them. I have had several kitchens of this design and they are excellent, efficient, workspaces.

South Africa has never heard of the Golden Triangle. South African kitchens are more like the Bermuda Triangle, a space given to disaster for even the most casual, laissez-faire cook. Even in new homes, the kitchens here are horrendous, classic examples of inefficient design and poor layout, and a testament to having been designed with no thought given to function. Oh, many of them are lovely…the kitchen in my rented house is beautiful---and spacious, too---but it is an absolute nightmare to cook in because the layout, in a word, sucks.

I paced it off the other day…eight paces from stove to the kitchen sink (which is in another room), ten paces from the sink to the refrigerator (which is in yet another room), twelve paces from the fridge back to the stove. This is about double the optimum distance between the major points in the kitchen...imagine carrying a heavy pot of pasta and boiling water into another room to drain it! I’ll give a bit of credit for good thinking…a small round prep sink has been installed a few feet from the stove but, unfortunately, it was installed in a corner, set well back from the edge of the countertop, and one needs to have the arms of and orang-utan to use it without neck and back strain.

Sadly, this kitchen with the lovely window overlooking a lush garden (in front of which there is no sink but should be), is typically South African. The lighting consists of a single light fitting in the centre of the ceiling…the kind you might put in an entry way and which uses only one dim bulb…and a light in the exhaust hood above the stove. That’s it…no task lighting, no wall sconces, no downlighters…and when I try to chop veggies after dark, invariably my shadow falls on everything because there is but a single light in the centre of the kitchen which, wherever I might be standing, is behind me.

This lack of forethought and planning is typical of the South African kitchen. This is a country where the vast majority of middle-class families have household help…the PC phrase is “domestic workers,” but the truth is, we have maids. And a rather large percentage of South African kitchens have a second room attached to them and that room is called a scullery. Originally the scullery was intended for washing up…that was where the grubby work was done, like washing pots and such. But, because the scullery is a rather amorphous space, without any hard and fast conceptual rules to keep it honest, South African kitchen designers (and redesigners and homeowners) each have their own ideas of what a scullery is/should be…and the result is nothing short of disastrous.

The scullery in my house isn’t too bad. It has a tall cupboard for cleaning supplies, brooms, etc., a double kitchen sink (remember, the kitchen has only that puny little prep sink) and space beneath the counter top for a washing machine and dishwasher (washers are all front loaders here). There is a door to the garage and another door out to the “drying yard” with the clothes lines. This is pretty much what a scullery is supposed to be…a place for washing dirty dishes, storing cleaning supplies, keeping the stinky trash bin, mops, brooms, laundry… But there is a problem here… I have acres of counter-top space in the kitchen and a table that seats eight. On either side of that scullery sink is barely a 2-foot by 2-foot piece of counter space…hardly space to put all of the dishes before and after washing and certainly no space to hide the aftermath of a cooking orgy from the view of my dinner guests seated at the dining table in the open plan space that combines kitchen and dining room. Also, the trash bin is in a cupboard in the scullery, meaning I have to hike there and back to dispose of eggshells or packaging…actually, I toss it in that silly prep sink, which is useless for draining potatoes or pasta (awkward location splashes boiling water all over the counter top) and impossible to reach for peeling anything.

As inadequate as my scullery is, some of the ones I have seen in houses for sale were downright flabbergasting. In two houses in the last ten days I have seen kitchens that contained nothing more than a breakfast table/bar and a stovetop. I am not kidding! Oh, a few cupboards and some countertop space, but no refrigerator, no microwave oven, no sink (not even a prep sink)…nothing but a stove and a place to eat. I tried to imagine myself cooking breakfast in one of those kitchens…eggs burning on the stove, toast burning in the toaster in the scullery while I’m digging around in the refrigerator out in the hallway looking for the cream for Hubby’s coffee. The major “stations” of the golden triangle were in different rooms…and this was a remodelled kitchen!! I shudder to think what it must have looked like before!

In another house with a remodelled kitchen, the scullery was literally twice the size of the actual kitchen and was, in fact, the kitchen minus the stove. In a long narrow space adjacent to the scullery there was some countertop space with a stovetop fitted into the centre. If you were standing there cooking, your back would be to another countertop that was supposed to be the breakfast bar, and beyond that bar was the family room. Unfortunately, the chairs for the breakfast bar completely blocked the walkway space from the front of the house to the bedrooms, so if anyone wanted to travel from the front door or living room to the bedroom, those sitting at the breakfast bar would have to move to allow access. This kitchen had no prep sink, no appliances, nothing except the stove…the rest of the kitchen was in another room.

South African kitchens tend to have the washing machine plumbing in them. I consider this kinda gross. Even if the washer is in the scullery, I don’t exactly relish the thought of my soiled undies and Hubby’s dirty socks sharing space with the drinking glasses and forks…ew! And what if a basket of laundry is sitting on the scullery floor and you trip and spill a plate of leftover spaghetti onto a basket of whites? I like the idea of a laundry space, but my kitchen…or scullery…just doesn’t do it for me.

Kitchens in this country don’t have garbage disposals and most of them have insufficient drawer space as well. For as large as my present kitchen is, there are only four drawers. Base cabinets here do not have a drawer above the doors, as is the norm in American kitchens. I have a single bank of four drawers which is next to the stove and more than 15 paces from the dining room table. So, forks, spoons and other table ware are now kept in the drawer of the china cabinet in the dining room…that one piece of furniture has five drawers in it, one more than my entire kitchen and scullery combined.

The lack of a garbage disposal is not that big a problem in terms of food preparation, but I live in a country that has aggressive flies. You know those TV ads soliciting money for starving children in other countries, the ones that show big-eyed little black children with flies crawling all over their faces? Yup…those flies. Nasty buggers that will fly under your glasses, up your nose, and even try to enter your mouth as you open to put a forkful of food in it. They have never heard of window screens in this country, so the flies are everywhere, and I’ll bet you can just imagine what a kitchen bin smells like in 90°F heat…and how difficult it is to keep the flies away from it. A garbage disposal would be nice…

One of the things I do like about South African kitchens is that they all seem to have ceramic tile floors, which are pretty easy to clean. They’re awfully hard on dropped crockery, though, but seem to clean up easier than the vinyl floors that are the norm in American kitchens.

But the bottom line is, the average South African kitchen is a dismal affair. Poorly designed and badly laid out, unimaginative (no kitchen islands, no pot racks, no gas ranges or microwave shelves) and wholly dysfunctional, the kitchens here are, at best, bleak.

We’re still house hunting but have come to the conclusion that as far as the kitchens go, we are just going to have to take one that has sufficient floor space so I can tear it all out and do it right…and that means a complete redesign using the golden triangle concept.

**sigh** So much for finding our dream house…

Open Plan Gone Awry

Well, I'm back. Have been in my too-small and insect-infested rental house for a month now...and have more than 60 mosquito bites to show for it...and we are desperately, daily, house hunting. And so far, the results of our search is, at best, dismal. Contrary to local myth, Johannesburg is much more costly than Cape Town, it rolls up its sidewalks at 6 pm (except for the unbelievable abundance of bars, clubs, pubs, and other watering holes), the roads are worse than any country road I've ever driven, at any given time half of the traffic lights in town are not functioning, the traffic is akin to LA's, and I don't think I have ever encountered so many rude, self-absorbed people in such a short time anyplace else in my life. To put it succinctly, Joburg sucks and I am not happy here. (And that is without even giving a passing mention to the absolutely horrific weather here.)

But despite my feelings, I am stuck here, at least until we can find a way back to the Cape and, because Hubby must pay back the cost of relocation if we leave within one year, we are pretty much stuck here for a while. (Don't even ask about the move...suffice it to say that my list of grievances against the moving company has more than 50 items on it, from breaking a piece of heirloom china to packing an antique doll beneath a cast iron door stop to finding my missing lingerie packed in a box beneath a soiled dog bed and blanket to damaged furniture.) Yesterday was Valentine's Day and after a sumptuous lunch at a landmark restaurant, Hubby and I hit the streets, looking for open houses (called "show houses" here).

I am not impressed with South African architecture, in the main, but then I'm not terribly fond of certain trends in American home design in recent years, either. I remember when the “open plan” concept, as applied to homes, began popping up on such programs as “This Old House” and Bob Vila’s home renovation shows. Touted as the latest and greatest thing in home design and already incorporated in newly-built tract homes, I was appalled at the blatant attempt on the part of builders to reduce their construction costs (fewer walls, less cost to build) by snookering people into accepting their self-serving, penny-pinching new design as something desirable. Two decades later, open plan is not only incorporated into newly built homes, you are hard-pressed to find a separate kitchen in even older, classic homes…everybody has jumped on the bandwagon and remodelled under the “open plan” banner. And, for the most part, the results I have seen have been unmitigated disasters.

I hate open plan. Just hate it. When I have spent hours banging about in the kitchen, dirtying pot after pan, piling the sink full of soiled dishes and littering the countertops with colanders, cutting boards, measuring cups, half-emptied cartons of milk and packets of pasta, why would I want the disaster-filled kitchen to be in full view of my guests? Or even my family, for that matter? Clean as I go along? Sorry, when making a choice between burning the chops or swabbing the sticky stuff in the sink, the chops win out every time. Besides, that is what kitchen doors are for…to separate the grunt-labour involved in putting a meal on the table from the innocents who should be allowed to eat their meal in peace, unburdened by the potentially guilt-inducing knowledge that their smiling hostess has just sweated off the equivalent of a marathon in her pursuit of their gastronomic happiness.

Think about it for a minute…have you ever worked in an open plan office? Think not? Do the words “cubicle” or “cube farm” ring a bell with you? If you truly haven’t ever been subjected to this kind of work environment, do you know anyone who has? Know any cube denizens who love working in a cube? There is no privacy…the sniffles of the allergy sufferer to your left cannot be shut out; the incessant and annoying giggle of the phone-addicted twit on the right cannot be silenced, and the toilet-mouthed guy with the booming voice over your third wall precludes any phone conversation you might want to make, for fear of the background noise of sniffles, giggles, and F-bomb backdrop offending your listener. You cannot speak freely as you most certainly will be overhead, and your activities (or lack thereof) are visible to anyone who happens to walk by your non-existent cubicle door. I used to laugh when given a “confidential” memo to type…just how confidential is anything you type up in a cube where anyone can stand at the entrance and see your computer screen without your knowledge because your back is to the doorway? Life in a cube farm is devoid of any kind of privacy, peace, or dignity…why would we want to replicate that in our homes?

But the marketeers did their jobs well, eventually convincing First World home buyers across the globe that spending more money for less privacy, fewer walls (and a lot fewer cupboards!) was the hip, modern, trendy thing to do (did I mention I also hate “trendy”?). Now, a couple of decades later, in order to attract serious buyers a house must have an open plan kitchen. And that is where it all started to go wrong.

You see, aside from the desire to save some money on construction and gouge gullible buyers out of a few extra bucks, the concept of “open plan” was supposed to be a way to keep the cook from being isolated from the family during meal prep times. Personally, I relished that brief respite from the demands of family life…let Daddy parent the little darlings for a while so I can vin his coq for him, steam a little asparagus and whip up some lemon butter and a mountain of fluffy mash to delight his taste buds. But sentimental home buyers…read that guilt-saturated career moms who left the fruit of their loins in daycare while they work…bought into the “spend more quality time” with their kids idea and the open plan concept took off.

But, like anything else, the basic reason for the whole concept became forgotten as the trend saturated the market and owners of traditional kitchens began dragging down cabinets and smashing down walls. Open plan as a concept, but devoid of reason, began to take over. Traditional houses, venerable older homes, seldom had family rooms and if they did, those family rooms were seldom adjacent to the kitchen. In the more classic home layout, the dining room was adjacent to the kitchen and the living room was generally on the other side of the dining room. In the frenzied stampede to jump on the open plan band wagon, homeowners overlooked the obvious: the room in which Mom slaves over a hot stove is NOT adjacent to the room where the kids sprawl out in front of the tube…but open plan now rules home desirability so dining rooms and kitchens began merging into a single open space. The fact that Hubby and kiddies were still in a separate room and Mom can no longer close the kitchen door on the mountain of dirty dishes and other detritus of meal preparation was immaterial in the face of the power of the trend.

The next phase of the movement returned to the new home build. I now live in a house that was built to have the lounge and dining room in a single open plan space. Interestingly, the living room is beyond the dining room and it has double doors on it to shut out the noise from the kitchen and the cooking smells! A large granite breakfast bar divides the dining space from the kitchen space…what kind of sense does that make? A breakfast bar literally beside the dining table! The purpose of the open plan concept is completely defeated in this house…Mum is still isolated from Dad and the kiddies while she cooks and they sprawl in front of the big screen, but now Mum can’t shut the kitchen door to hide the eyesore the kitchen became during meal prep.

Developers, however, are building on their success. If people will swallow the ridiculous notion of paying more money for fewer walls simply by telling them that this is a new trend, why not take it further? A couple of years ago we looked at a flat we were considering as a rental…until I saw the bedroom. The bathtub and the sink were in the bedroom, as was a shower stall. Only the toilet had its own walled-off space with a door. The salesman tried to tell me this was “romantic,” but I am sorry, as much as I love my husband, some things…like spitting toothpaste into the sink and gargling afterwards…should just remain private. Besides, who needs the steam getting into the closet and mildewing the clothes?

In our house hunting last week we saw a house that just floored me…this open plan bathroom thing had been incorporated when it was remodelled but they had just gone too far…from the bed you could see the toilet and there was no door! Speaking only for myself, there are times that being able to close the loo door is all that saves the rest of the family from being gassed in their sleep, such is the consequence of indulging in certain delicious but pungent and lingering culinary delights.

Maybe I am just getting old, but I value privacy. I want a door on my bedroom…a door that locks. It is nobody’s business but my own what goes on in there. I want to close my kitchen door when I bring out the roast so you don’t see the greasy pan, the gravy spilled on the stove, the mixer beaters coated with mashed potatoes still plugged into the machine…you should be looking at the art on the walls, the beautiful garden out the window, the perfectly steamed artichokes sitting invitingly in front of you. I want a door on my bathroom, too. There is nothing “romantic” about some of the ablutions and processes we go through to make ourselves clean, well-groomed and presentable. Give me a door and allow me to keep a little of the mystery alive, please!

Most of all, let’s stop getting sucked in by greedy corporations because they prey on our insecurities and lingering adolescent desire to be “cool.” Paying more money for a house that has fewer walls, less storage space, and deprives you of essential privacy because some marketing hack in a construction company tells you it is the “newest concept” (read that “trendy and saves us big money”) makes no kind of sense at all.