Anne-apolis

  I can remember so many things my dad taught me, from how to hold a pencil, to fixing a petrol lawnmower, and even how to listen to classical music. The most dramatic of these "lessons" was when I was in my early teens and I had hit a cricket ball through one of the large windows (I was absolutely hopeless at cricket and most other ball games, so this was an accident waiting to happen!) My dad insisted that I should replace the glass, so he set up a deckchair outside and proceeded to instruct me. The first step was to remove all the broken glass. My dad was excellent at thinking beyond the task at hand, and suggested I use some old painting drop-cloths on both the inside of the room and the flowerbed directly outside to catch the glass splinters and chips of paint and putty. This is definitely a job for leather gloves - the tiny splinters of glass can pierce through even quite thick gardening gloves. This gave me an early appreciation for why construction workers prefer to w...

  Since I was an undergrad architectural student, I have always been fascinated by the concept of invisible design - where the result fits so perfectly in its setting that it looks invisible or timeless. This was almost certainly inspired by a house that my dad designed, that I have always regarded as his masterpiece. His client was a botanical artist and the site was very heavily vegetated. The plan tried to minimise the loss of any trees and large shrubs, and Anita Fabian spent many hours on site in the initial weeks, carefully transplanting the smaller flowers away from the house footprint. The finally completed house, with its low lines and natural materials, was completely invisible from all viewpoints, concealed by the dense vegetation, and meeting the clients' brief exactly.  I have used this philosophy in my heritage work, in particular at the village of Rhodes in the Eastern Cape, aiming for a very modest interpretation of the Victorian architecture for the new house...

 Earlier this year, I explored some of the things you can DIY easily and safely without learning advanced skills or compromising your home insurance. Today, I was inspired to share some projects where I have collaborated with others who started out as unskilled as myself, namely outdoor paving. While going through some of my mom's photos of the house that I grew up in, I found one that brought back memories of seemingly endless weekends working side by side with my dad. We had a very long and narrow plot, with the house at the far end from the road, and a winding earth track with a "middelmannetjie" of wild grass growing in the centre. Our project started quite modestly, simply to put down some paving outside the new garage doors to provide a hard-standing for our weekend car cleaning ritual. The project soon escalated, and ended up with much of the earth track being replaced with brickwork. The driveway looking towards the street We had chosen paving bricks for the proj...

  Today I am following on from last week's theme of tasks that are manageable and safe to do by yourself. My earliest first-hand memories of wallpapering are rather dramatic - my mom (always a sucker for a bargain) had been to a closing-down sale where you could have as much wallpaper as you could carry for some ridiculously small amount. Despite being less than 1.5m tall, she managed to carry a boot-load of rolls out of the store, leaving my dad and myself with a legacy of many weekends of DIY joy! Back in the day (and even now in some countries), wallpaper was not just a decorative finish, but an important part of the construction of a house, sealing off all porous building materials and gaps in boarding to make the rooms more airtight. People would simply add another layer of paper when the old one became a bit faded and torn, improving the insulation with each refurbishment. In places where lightweight boarding is the main external and internal walling method, plain paper is us...