An update & an invitation to our house warming!

The beginning of May meant the beginning of our contract with our new job at Thembalitsha Foundation. We are still in the Western Cape but doing our training out of town in Grabouw and Somerset West which means that our work on the house is now limited to weekends and time is ticking on as we try our best to get the house rentable by the end of May. Of course getting the house rentable to other people is a lot more work than just getting it liveable for ourselves.

Exciting updates and a surprising announcement

I decided not to wait quite as long as last time to give everyone an update on our house, mostly because Cam has been working like crazy and so much has changed in the last few weeks.

I thought it might be easiest to go through each section of the house and show you the progress. So here goes:

A long overdue update: in which our house get doors, ceilings walls and more…

Firstly, apologies for the silence. We have been away a lot and life has been a little non-stop. Cam has had tons of rock climbing guiding work which is fantastic for him and his business but has made progress on the house a little slower. None the less he is doing an amazing job and the house has changed so much since you last saw it.

When we left off the last blog we had just finished insulating the containers and had cut back the excess foam. The next step was to paint the foam. We are planning on putting wooden cladding around the exterior but figured that grey would look better through the gaps in the wood then the yellow.

We painted it all grey (left) and then will continue with the cladding (right) once the interior is a little further. We also have a front door! Hooray!

A Few Hiccups and the Spray Foam Spaceman

Every one we meet up with these days asks – “How’s the house going?”… and to be totally honest it’s all been a bit much. The house is finally insulated and looks like a dwelling from another planet at the moment, but it’s been a much longer and more expensive process getting to this point than we hoped. Cam has been on a number of intensive training courses for his guiding business (19 days in total!) which has slowed things down, and the insulation team upped their prices and had to push things out by a week.

We have walls… on hinges!

There are two questions that we are getting asked all the time. “Are you connecting the two containers?” and “Are you insulating them?”. The answers are “yes” and “definitely yes!”. Here’s a little bit more about how we are going to do that and what it’s meant to look like once we’re done. To give you a bit of perspective, here is our proposed floor plan… it changes all the time but this is how it looks at the moment:

Special delivery

We got our containers today! Whoop whoop! That’s the exciting part. Now for the practicalities – where have we put them, and how, and on what?

2015 – a year of new beginnings and adventurous (smaller) living

Since Cam and I returned from Canada at the end of 2013, we have lived in 3 different houses – our wonderful in-laws’ spare room, a friend’s little cottage, and most recently, an ex-WWII army bunker in the mountain side which Cam worked wonders on to make liveable. This old assortment of houses have all had one thing in common – we have been living rent free and loving it! As 2015 rolls on up and we have to find somewhere to live, we are really digging our heels in about paying someone our hard earned moola for rent every month and we definitely can’t afford a bond on a house. So we figured there had to be another option.