Not gonna lie...

It was the perfect plan. Buy a home that needed some work, but not too much. Fit new concertina glass doors to open the house up to the spectacular view of the forest, move the staircase to the back of the house and boom, done. After all, it is a wooden house – only need to move a few dry walls around and sorted. It would take three weeks absolute max our architect assured me. My husband left Jozi on 1 November, an auspicious day as it is my birthday, to start working the plan. You can imagine my surprise when, a full 7 weeks later, I arrived at the property and discovered an empty shell. I mean, I kind of knew what was going on from conversations with my husband, but talking and seeing? – very different things. Here’s how it happened. Once work started on the house, it became apparent that:

• the plumbing? had to be flushed.

  • new installation

• the electrics? not current.

  • must be redone

• the septic tank? ewww…septic stench!

  • it was installed incorrectly, new tank needed

• the walls insulation? insufficient

  • pull all the internal walls down and install insulation.

• the wooden floors? sagged and slanted

  • tear them all up and reinstall from scratch

Here we are now, THREE months later and the work is still not done. Sure, we can live in the house in that there are showers, toilets a kitchen and beds. But there is a team of builders swarming around every day installing decks, laying brick walls, installing kitchen cupboards fixing snag lists and making one hell of a noise as I try to run meetings between screeching drills and pounding hammers. Not gonna lie, it has been HARD. The perfect plan became the perfect problem. The budget broke – no, not broke - the budget was shattered. The sense of humours frayed and it became hard to remember why we ever wanted to relocate from our beautiful home and disrupt our perfectly organised lives. When your entire world is literally ripped apart and you are forced to build everything (literally and figuratively) from scratch, where do you even begin? All we can do when things go wrong, and they will at some point in all our lives, is to get curious about what we can learn.

• Resilience

• Vasbyt

• Determination

• Where to find Relicalm tablets at Dischem (seriously, they are the bomb!)

• Why good friends and an incredibly supportive family are crucial to get you through the tough times

• And how to stay focused on the end goal

The upside? It will be a spectacular home once we are done. Located on the Garden Route, in one of the most beautiful places in South Africa, 3kms from the beach. And it has given me writing inspo for daaays! 😊 Where in your life have best laid plans gone awry? How did you cope with it? Hit reply and tell me about it, I’d love to know!