Nonezile's cottage, our home for two years

Nonezile and her family have been good enough to rent us a cottage for the two years that we are going to be in Nqileni. I think we have got the nicest view in the village.

Instead of a group of traditional rondavels, the cottage we are renting is a small T-shaped building. For lots of practical reasons this has made our lives easier. Each of the arms of the T is a room.

The front door opens into a small 3x4 metre room that Sonja and I will have as a bedroom, but that must also double up as an office space for a couple of months until we either rent or build a single rondavel as an office.
Although small, our bedroom has an amazing view down towards the lagoon and the beach.

When we get a chance we will try and add on a very small porch, just 2 x 3 meters, but big enough to fit two rickety chairs on to watch the dolphins in the sunrise.

We can squeeze our bed inside, plus a small trestle table to work on. If we are lucky we might even get in a set of shelves.

Our room leads into the main living area which is perhaps 4x4 metres. This will serve as our kitchen, dining room and living area. At the moment there is no door, but we will need to get one in if we want any privacy from the children.

The living area is a small room, even with nothing in it, but it has rough wooden rafters with an open roof right up to the corrugated sheeting that lend it a bit more of a feeling of spaciousness.

We won't fit much in the room, we plan for a small counter, a small gas fridge, a low coffee table and a few home made benches with scatter cushions. We hope to get our hands on an old wood burning stove before winter so that we will have some form of heating.

A door off the back of the living area leads to the children's room which is also about 3 x 4 metres. This will be a tight fit for an urban family, and must also fit in a desk for home schooling.

The entire cottage has a mud and dung floor that we paid Nonezile to do after we were there in October fixing the place up a bit. She would have applied the floor in several coats and we will need to add a layer every six weeks or so.

The house had not been lived in for quite a while and was being used for cooking and livestock must have been sleeping there as well by the looks of things.

There were no doors at all, and only some very old metal window frames that were basically rusted right through. The outside of the building was plastered, but has quite a lot of cracks. Inside, the walls were a mix of various materials, but 90 percent of the structure was mud brick. The inside was not plastered at all, and with the exposure to the elements the mud bricks had become quite crumbly.

The floor was basically piles of dry sand and dirt and had a lot of old rusted metal and bits of burnt wood and rubbish mixed in with it.

This is a detail of the condition of the roof. Quite a bit of the roof beams were rotten from exposure to the elements. Have a look at the wall. Lots of character. This is a mix of mud bricks, then a couple of layers of broken concrete building blocks, a couple of planks of wood thrown in, and then topped with a layer of loosely placed mud bricks. This is how the house is built and it seems surprisingly sturdy.

Anyway, we love the cottage to bits and will work really hard to get it habitable when we arrive.

It has lots of character, and will build lots of character in us if we all survive the experience.