There’s a wall in my main bedroom I’ve been not-looking-at for a while.
Black mould. Damp patches. Cracks working their way across the plaster, and outside, paint lifting off the wall in sheets. None of it happened overnight. All of it happened while I told myself I’d get to it.
I didn’t get to it. I patched it. Painted over it, filled it, moved a cupboard in front of it. And patching is just deciding that future-you can deal with it.
Future-me is out of road.
So over the next few months I’m doing the thing properly — stripping the main bedroom and bathroom back, fixing the exterior, and then doing the second bedroom and the rest of the outside after that. Two phases. Real builders. Real quotes.
And I’m putting all of it on camera.
Why film a renovation?
Because nobody shows you this part.
Renovation content online is a before-and-after. Thirty seconds of dust, then a reveal set to music, then a comments section full of people asking what it cost and never getting an answer.
The part I actually needed when I was standing in front of that wall was the boring middle. What does a damp specialist say when they look at it? How many quotes should you get? Why is one R30,000 and the next one R70,000 for what sounds like the same job? What do you give up when you take the cheap one?
I don’t have those answers yet. I’m going to find them out in public, and I’m going to show the numbers as they come in.
The plan, such as it is
Phase one is the main bedroom, the main bathroom, and part of the exterior. The bedroom is being gutted — not touched up, gutted.
Phase two is the second bedroom, its bathroom, and the rest of the outside.
We’re living in the house while it happens. Which means the main bedroom has moved into the dining room, the dining room has moved into the lounge, and the lounge is currently doing an impression of a storage unit. It sounds mad. There is, loosely, a plan.
I’m also weighing up a vertical garden on one of the exterior walls, which is the only genuinely fun decision in the entire project.
The one thing I got wrong
I assumed the mould was my fault — that it was the direct result of leaving things too long.
Some of it is. But the mould specifically isn’t a maintenance problem. It’s a ventilation problem, which means no amount of scrubbing, sealing or repainting was ever going to fix it. I could have patched that wall every year for a decade and it would have come back every time.
That’s the part I keep thinking about. I wasn’t lazy so much as wrong about what I was looking at — and the difference between those two things is a diagnosis I didn’t pay for until now.
Where to watch it
The series runs on TikTok, one episode at a time, filmed as it happens. No reveal held back for the end, no reshoots, no pretending the timeline is neater than it is.
If you want the honest version of what it costs to stop patching and start fixing — every quote, every supplier, every decision where the cheap option and the right option went in different directions — follow along.
The builders arrive in two days.
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