Beginner experiences in Cape Town small house building, including choices about sustainability

So this week has been super difficult for building decisions: what to do when buildings get expensive and you're not sure if the people building are doing a good job? I guess you either hold on to control for dear life (what I would do) or you let go and do as much as you can (what Eug would do).  So we're moving forward, with Eug's approach-- doing a lot ourselves as we try to also assume the best of our builders. It's one of those things where we can either get cynical and frustrated, or pray a lot for a great house. The thing is, I'd prefer to pray a lot for a great house, even if bad things still happen. The alternative-- cynicism and pushing desperately for our way-- means we lose a bit of ourselves even if our efforts lead to an awesome house.


When we started out thinking about building a house a few years ago, we had a lot of good potential plans. Mine mainly involved tires, Eug's involved straw. The challenge with these building styles was time and money, while not living on site or doing the building ourselves up to now. It's been a really interesting figuring out what might work with our current resources. We've saved for quite a few years for this, but getting to something even more ideal might involve a leap that is beyond our faith/ability/financial means right now.

We didn't have the bandwidth to physically build our own house in the next few years. So we hired builders, and we've chose a light steel frame structure, which is relatively quick to build and light on materials, and supposedly well-insulated. Some stuff is recycled (insulation, some stuff that we managed to get secondhand like doors etc). But for the most part, we've tried to plan for the smallest house we can, both for cost, efficiency, and because we don't want to have to clean a big house.

Building-- even a small house-- is not cheap (though I'm sure it can be if you're wiser or in a different life stage than us). For full disclosure and if you're trying to find your own way through this process, this house will likely cost about R650,000 (including the cost of getting us off-grid) before we're done (US$54,000). In a cheaper part of the greater Cape Town area where our plot is located, you could buy a larger house for a similar price on a small lot/erf (our land cost +house cost is about R1.53 million, or US$127,500). But we simply couldn't afford a ready-built house with land. This is partly because if a property has an acre of land, it's likely to have a [large] house on it already, and cost upwards of R4 million (US$333,000). We also got one of the very last 1 acre plots in the Masi area (or any area in the southern peninsula)-- since we bought, there haven't been any similar plots available. All to say, we have nothing against ready-made, brick and mortar houses. Oftentimes, ready-made is the more sustainable option. It was just that we really wanted a farm.

Our house is not going to be the perfect low-impact house, but I wanted to write about process nonetheless. Because we feel like while our choices aren't perfect, we're similar to some of our readers so maybe our experience will somehow be helpful. There's something to be said for an approach that stretches us far as we can reach right now, while recognizing that our best efforts have massive blindspots.

So if it's not a perfectly sustainable house, how have we been making decisions about energy/water?

Solar (PV) systems in Cape Town
Solar energy (for electricity) works pretty well in Cape Town-- we have quite a lot of sun 9 months of the year. Once energy needs get close to middle-class average use, however, it's super expensive to cover winter needs (with excess wasted in summer), so most people go with a grid-tied system, which allows them to use electricity from the Eskom grid when they need to, and feed energy back into the grid when they don't. As far as I can tell, this is very expensive and problematic. Better, perhaps, to have the two completely separate systems if a household is connected to Eskom. Partly because we're suffering frequent power shortages nationally, solar power is very popular. There are also a lot of consultants who can help set up a system, but we found that this added absolutely massive expense so we decided to calculate our needs ourselves. It's a bit of a free-for-all.

We wanted to stay relatively small and also stay off the Eskom grid. Our needs are still decidedly first world, but we're working on it. We will have a gas stove/oven, a small wood stove/fireplace, and a solar water heater. So the PV panels are for the washing machine, freezer, bar fridge, laptops, modem (maybe), (non-smart) cell phones, water pump and LED lights. In our old house, we used about 3kWh of energy/day The costs for a system that should power these things most of the year was about R37,000 (about $3080). Maintaining battery life on an off-grid system takes some management, so we have to change our electricity usage according to the amount of energy available-- which might mean going without electricity some of the time.

In our case, we're not saving money by going with solar energy. I don't think most consultants are telling the truth when they claim a system pays for itself super quickly. Our energy costs in our previous house were only about R80/month, so it would take a long time for the system (uh... minimum 20 years?!) to pay for itself. This is without factoring in installation costs, and avoiding the consulting fees solar companies charge. On the other hand, we're not paying for our system out of future electricity bills. We're paying up front, using money we'd otherwise use to make a larger or nicer house. But still, my opinion is that it still doesn't make much sense to do solar PV panels to save money. It does make financial sense to have a solar geyser/water heater, in most parts of South Africa. These days, the technology for a solar geyser is really good, they're pretty inexpensive, and you can get an eskom rebate if your old geyser is removed. They're also very simple-- the sun heats up water in a panel or tube, which circulates into a tank. There are also some great DIY solar water heating options that are even cheaper. So if you're just starting out, considering solar water heating is a great option.

Solar panels are not a perfect energy source, so it's not like you can just use a crazy amount of energy and pat yourself on the back for using solar. There is a lot of debate about the energy used to make solar panels-- in fact, it was only pretty recently that solar panels generated more energy than was used to manufacture them. We're not only using solar energy-- we're also using wood and gas. Our woodstove is able to use very small pieces of wood, so there's a hope that we could use waste wood, and also use a DIY solar oven to decrease our use of gas (we currently use a lot of gas for cooking). Still, balancing our own need to feel abundance with the need to be good stewards is pretty complex stuff, and in our case it's a gradual process, where we sometimes go forwards, sometimes backwards.

Water
We've decided to get some municipal water, partly because the city provides 6000L of clean water to every household, free, every month. We hope to make minimal use of the water, mainly while we're still on a steep learning curve with our rainwater system. As with electricity, we will work on keeping our consumption low, but we also wanted to use whatever resources we can to help bring our farm an even supply of water year-round, particularly in our first couple of years. Unlike electricity, where we can go without, water shortage would result in hardship. I think there may be a time when we're convinced it's important to go without municipal water, but not yet. Having clean drinking water sent to our kitchen also allows for a relatively simpler water system.


From our kitchen, municipal water can be fed into one of our water tanks if rain has not been sufficient to fill up a tank. We're going with one 5000L and one 2500L Jojo, the basic, plastic tank used a lot in southern Africa. We don't know how much water we'll use: how much to water our trees, how much our own usage will change as our kids grow up, etc. We're not using a flush toilet for the first time in our lives, so that will significantly reduce our water use-- but then we're still not sure of how much we'll need. The water in our tank will be pumped into a low-pressure solar geyser/water heater on the roof. Hot water will be primarily available in our bathroom, where we'll be using rainwater unless there hasn't been rain. The washing machine will also use rainwater.

As backup, we have planned a couple of projects involving borehole/well water. Borehole water is free once a wellpoint is constructed, but if people overuse the water obviously it's a major problem. So we're going to try to build a hand-operated pump ourselves and also set up an electric borehole. We're waiting on these until the rain starts to dry up and we need to begin watering our trees again (and hopefully by then we're living on the farm and know how much money we have left).

All our greywater will be fed into mulch-filled ditches. Most water coming out of the bathroom is pretty clean, so it will be fed directly to our annual garden. The water coming out of the kitchen (sink and washing machine) is more dirty, so it'll go into reed-filled ditches to our food forest. I'm hoping that the reeds will grow quickly so we can use them for mulch every year.

Random tree interlude: Naartjie, almond, blueberry, banana, fuji apple, star ruby grapefruit... waiting to be planted.

Toilet
When we tell people we're going to have a bucket toilet, it tends to freak people out. I'm not sure we're going to have many visitors. Please, don't be afraid, come and visit! If it goes badly (i.e. if it smells-- which the system is not supposed to), we'll figure something out!

I've been reading about composting toilets for several years now, and the best book on the subject is the Humanure Handbook, available online free in pdf form. Joseph Jenkins argues that the best system is the simplest one (so no concrete lined rooms below your bathroom-- hooray!). The main part of the bucket toilet that makes it non-smelly is sourcing abundant, carbon rich, cover materials. With these cover materials, the toilet shouldn't smell. Once a week or so, you take the bucket(s) and empty them into a compost pile outside, where again, the new toilet material is well covered by carbonaceous materials (often hay). The compost pile outside also has a very thick layer of carbonaceous material on the bottom, so that no pathogens seep into groundwater, and the compost pile is left for a year before use in the garden/food forest. Once we move in I'm sure I'll share a lot about this process and our learning curve. It'll be new for us, and it's a bit risky-- we're not having a flush toilet as backup, so we are all in! But it makes so much sense so here's hoping it's successful.

There's uncertainty and a lot of work in front of us to finish our house before the new baby is born. It also feels like there's blessing we can claim in the process. Please pray with us for a smooth building process... We're really hoping to move in around the end of this month.

June journal

The kids have adjusted to living at my parents' house. I'm grateful to be in a household with four adults, with my sister's family just next door.

Some cool stuff from June:

Clay Room, Hout Bay

We've gone to the clay room twice to make gifts for birthdays. I justify the expense by saying it's a bit like an art class, where you get a cool plate or bowl at the end... The brilliant bonus on our most recent visit was that they had three jumping castles set up for a party later in the day:

Heaven = painting clay + bouncing castles

The first two creations from the clay cafe are the kids' bowls now.
Eli's in the top right, Noah's still full of breakfast, in the front. 

Art

We're still doing art first thing in the morning. We sometimes get into a bit of rut, then I remember to look up something and prepare a little. Five minutes of prep goes a long way. We've recently discovered watercolour pencils.

Eli still likes pastels over anything else. He seems to be right-handed, but he sometimes likes drawing with two hands at once...

On the day when this photo was taken, there was loadshedding (electricity outages) and our day starts out pretty dark in winter:

Burning the candles on both ends.

Giant bubbles!

We've been looking out for glycerine for this project and found some for R5 at our local Spar. It's cheap, it's fun, it works!

Chess

Noah has been wanting to learn chess for a while, but he also hates feeling like he's being told one way to do things, so up to now we've waited. But recently, he's been learning chess using an iPad app called Dinochess. His eighteen year old cousin is an avid chess player, and has also started coming over to play with him. Noah uses the "hint" function on Dinochess liberally.

Tulbagh

As part of the quest to preserve my dad's sanity while we're crowding out my parents' house, we went to Tulbagh for a couple of days. We tried to work and hang out with the kids...

Running to start art time.  

Noah explains he's going to draw the mountain landscape. Eli explains he's going to draw a train track.

This locust hung out all day, and we spent a lot of time watching it.

Tulbagh is a pretty quiet area, so there's not tons of places to go to-- we decided to pull over and find a place to play by the river. It turned out to be the party bank of the century, covered with glass and trash. But the kids didn't care.

Trying to be good citizens, we spent a few minutes cleaning up. I spent cleanup time trying not to let my compounded public health/mom paranoia get the better of me.

Planning stuff by the river.

This time, the swimming pool was much too cold to swim...

...But not too cold to play, and try out making vortices in the pool

This time we discovered Fynbos guest farm, where you can call ahead and ask to visit the animals, in exchange for bringing some vegetable scraps. It's a lovely and inspiring visit, with a lot of detail and work put into making the farm pleasant and interesting. The animals-- rescued from various places-- seem really happy.

Hello goat!

Hello turkey!!

Hello Horse!! They leave their horses to free-range. The horses were calm and friendly.

Hi pig!

They have brushes for pig-scratching, which the pigs seemed to enjoy...

We also visited Die Tolhuis, where we saw some baboons and explored another mountain stream. The kids loved this playground by the side of the highway... but it was super cold and I just wanted to go inside. The owner encouraged us to just let the kids play while we were inside, so I briefly overcame my fears and we did just that.

Winter colours.

The kids and mountain streams...  

When we visited Tulbagh wholesale nursery, I was pretty much in heaven-- trees for half the Cape Town prices!! But Eli was disgusted that such a large nursery doesn't have a playground.

Truck tire swan...

bananas for R40!

Grapefruit for R79!

If only I had a large truck.

Noah found rocks and sticks to make a garden sculpture. Hopefully Eikelaan doesn't mind...

Cool websites I've gone to for inspiration this month:

Project-based homeschooling for discussion of homeschooling generally, and an approach based on engagement in specific projects. 

Happiness is here -- I love this blog about unschooling kids about the same age as Noah and Eli. Those organized wooden toys get me every time!! But I also had the insight that some things that look totally awesome on a blog don't fit every child's temperament (like when we try to copy stuff from Pinterest, right?!) and that I shouldn't derive theories about all children from my tiny sample size of two. The kinds of organized beautiful learning zones on this blog are completely lovely, and would make me go crazy if I tried to replicate them right now.

Beginning a permaculture farm, and building a house in Cape Town

I haven't used the phrase "permaculture forest" much in my descriptions of what we're doing on our plot, but for about half the plot, that's probably the best term for what we're attempting. At the same time, having killed many a plant following the latest farming theory, I'm hesitant to follow a set of principles as dogma. We're attempting pretty close spacing of trees, together with mulch and support species, and seeing how they grow. We have one acre total (4100m2), and in this space there'll be two small houses (one for my parents, one for us), and a shipping container (which we will be converting into housing for Eug's mom and brother, and for storage/guests when they're not staying).

The porch facing west-- our plot goes about halfway to the wooden fence in the distance (there's one 1/2 acre plot vacant next to us). On the right of this picture are three olive trees.

The metal part will be the house, then we also have a porch and a sunroom-type thing, framed in wood..

On the building side: Building a house is really hard, even though we're not actually the ones building it. We want control and a sense that we're being good stewards with our resources (we also don't want to run out of money), but we're beginners and we don't really know much. And we're working and living about a 30 minute drive away from the farm with our two small kids. The house is very small (36m2, or 387sqft on the ground floor, plus a loft space of about 120sqft which will be the adult's bedroom one day, when the kids stop sleeping over). It's a little difficult to imagine living in this house with three growing kids, but most of the world occupies much smaller, less fancy spaces. My prayer, coming from a place of stress, is "what would it take for building to be a good process?" And usually the answer God gives is along the lines of remembering that the house itself is a gift, not proportional to any kind of work we've done, and that perhaps it could also be a blessing to those doing the building. We've also had some pretty fun encounters buying second hand stuff for the house (a few doors, a spiral staircase, a bathtub, wood flooring) from interesting people. Eug, who swore his career sanding, staining and varnishing was coming to an end when we finished renovating our old house, has been doing just that with old doors and stairs. I'm very lucky and grateful.

Stairs prepped for the spiral staircase.

On the farming side:

Both houses on the plot will be one bedroom cottages with lofts, so they don't take up a huge amount of space- less than 1/8 acre with some space between them for my parents' dogs to roam. Still, with a small pond (or the cement structure for a pool that came with the property), a few vegetable beds, as well as chickens and ducks, greywater systems, water storage tanks and medium-scale composting, the space gets used up pretty fast. Getting dairy animals does not seem to be a practical use of space, at least for now. So, despite my voracious appetite for goat care manuals, goat ownership fits in the "not in the next five years" category. While we could buy all or most of our animals' food, and therefore keep them in a smaller space, I'm not sure that's a great idea for us. The significant costs of land -- the costs of ownership and the cost of purchase, as well as the opportunity costs of not growing fruits and vegetables -- would also make those animal products extraordinarily expensive.

It seems like chickens, ducks (muscovies) and bees (and maybe fish-- tilapia) are a good use of space and well-suited to the cost and relatively poor current state of our land, as well as to the climate. The chickens and ducks will ultimately be able to roam free in the forest once the trees are mature (perhaps in five years' time). I'm still considering whether raising a couple of pigs every year for meat might be workable, if we can find a good butcher to help us.

Given the years it takes trees to grow and bear fruit, we've been focused on starting a food forest. The goal is to get as close to a self-sustaining forest as possible, with various layers of foods and support crops (most notably nitrogen fixers and stuff that quickly accumulates biomass for us to chop and drop onto the forest floor). Food forests are a bit of a fad, at least in the online world that I'm exposed to, often involving certification, designers, large earth moving equipment and surveying instruments to figure out how to catch water along contour. We don't have easy access to that stuff. So instead we're looking at the land as best we can and thinking of how to catch and retain water, increase the amount of biomass, and plant trees in an micro-environment that most suits them. When I am less pregnant, or Eug is less busy sanding and painting things, we will dig ditches by hand to catch water.

Blackberries growing along the fence. The leaves look dry but they keep the soil below pretty moist.

In Cape Town, there's a lot that potentially grows very well, because we don't have frost (except perhaps on the mountains) and there's plenty of sun. We're less able to grow things that require a certain number of cold hours per year, or which don't tolerate the months of heat of drought-- such as apples or walnuts-- but there are even varieties of apple that can do ok our climate. It's even possible to grow tropical fruits, if they're well-placed in a warm, protected spot. On the other hand, our soil looks a lot like sandpit sand, so there's a ways to go before trees will be healthy and thrive here without any help.

Eureka lemon-- it had a tough summer but it's recovering well now.

Theoretically, it would be great to completely oversupply fruit trees and support species to the half acre, then see what does well as they grow to maturity, chopping the rest for mulch and firewood. In practice, it takes a long time to plant trees well, and it's hard to see trees grown from seed succumb to guinea fowl or giant moles or roaming chickens. Grafted trees cost between R70 and R300 (US$6 to US27) at the nursery, so we've been slow to buy the more expensive trees-- we don't want to waste them! I've also been sowing quite a lot of nitrogen fixing tree seed that I've collected while biking around.

Put in a fig today. It seems super hardy from a summer with very little rain in a concrete patch of my parents' yard, so I'm hopeful it'll survive.

So far we have pomegranate, acacia (siberiana and xanthophloea), moringa, pawpaw (papaya), cape gooseberry, goji berry, almond, granadilla, hanepoort grape, pineapples, seedling avocado, seedling mango, lemon, peach, guavas, elderberries, prickly pears, macadamia nut, a few olives (already there), sweet potato and spekboom. Waiting at my parents' house in Plumstead we have a fig, more pomegranate, some more small nitrogen fixer tree seedlings, tamarillo, blueberry, orange, apricot, plum, more peach, more lemon, more pawpaws, many more grapes.

All the heads from the pineapples eaten during the summer season are growing along our fence, about 20 in all. 

Once we're on the plot we'll buy or grow from seed/cutting blueberries, granadilla, rasberries, grapefruit, Natal plum (num nums), kei apple/wild apricot, more spekboom, marula, more orange trees, naartjies, bananas, coffee, persimmon, more macadamia,  cultivated mulberry and many more support species. A friend has gifted me with lots of native seeds received from Kirstenbosch, including edible natives, that I'm going to try and cultivate.

Moringa-- starting to go dormant for the winter. I'm not yet sure whether moringa is going to be a success, but I'm hopeful. We have about 10 on the plot.

The dreaded acacia saligna (port jackson) is currently the main support species/nitrogen fixer on the plot, as it was there before we arrived and I've been coppicing them rather than trying to pull them out completely. They're deeply hated here in the Cape, but on our plot it takes me about 2 hours to cut all of the port jackson shrubs down to ground level-- the wood is soft and very easy to saw through. I guiltily admit I love them-- while everything else was struggling to survive over the dry, hot, summer, the port jackson thrived. Which I guess is why they're a problem to native habitat. Coppicing them seems like an good investment of time every few months, particularly given all the leaves and branches we get in return. We're careful not to let them go to seed, so there's not too much danger of our choices affecting our neighbours. We're also on the lookout for a few tons of (probably horse) manure, leaves and grass cuttings to cover and build the sandy ground.

Whew. So starting out is a slow and demanding process. But the goal is so exciting: an off-grid* home with a resilient and quite prolific food system that requires little outside water or other inputs. From a more abstract/idealistic perspective, I love the idea of leaving a piece of land in great condition, and of feeding our boys on food produced right where we live.

If you're trying permaculture here in Cape Town, or have some edible perennials in need of a home, please do let me know! We'd love your wisdom. And if you're the praying type, please could you pray that our builders do a great job, and we're able to move in and settle down before the baby comes.

*sortof- we'll be connected to the municipality's water supply for emergencies/drinking water.