I Drew Two Hundred Front Doors Before I Owned One

The Lines Were Always for Other People

The first front door I ever drew professionally belonged to a dentist in Waterkloof who wanted it wider. Not taller, not grander, just wider, because his wife had once struggled to get a pram through their old one and he never forgot the sound she made. I was twenty-three, fresh out of my degree at Tuks, and I spent two full days on that door. I measured prams. I measured wheelchairs. I measured the dentist's golden retriever, which did not enjoy the experience.

That door was the beginning of a habit. For six years I drew other people's lives into rectangles. I drew a granny flat for a man in Lynnwood whose mother was moving up from Bloemfontein. I drew a nursery that was later turned into a study when the baby never came, and I was the one they phoned to redraw it, and I did it quietly and never asked. I drew kitchens for people who did not cook and studios for people who did not paint yet but were hoping to. I learned that a floor plan is mostly a list of hopes with dimensions attached.

By the time I turned twenty-nine I had worked on, by my own rough count, something close to two hundred front doors. I was renting a back room in a house in Hatfield where the landlord kept his spare tyres in the passage. I had a kettle, a drawing board I had carried since second year, and a window that looked straight onto a precast wall.

My Mother's Kitchen Table Voice

My mother has a particular voice she uses at her kitchen table in Mamelodi. It is lower than her normal voice and slower, and it means she has already decided you are wrong but is willing to let you talk for a while first.

She used that voice when I told her I wanted to buy a place of my own.

"You want to owe a bank for twenty years," she said. Not a question.

I explained bond repayments. I explained that I was already paying rent, that the rent went into a man's tyre collection and not into anything I would ever hold. She listened, stirring her tea long after the sugar had gone, and then she asked the question that stayed with me for months.

"And if you lose the job?"

I did not have an answer that satisfied her, because there is no answer that satisfies a woman who raised three children through two retrenchments. She had kept us in school by selling vetkoek from the front gate on Saturdays. She trusted what she could hold in her hands. A title deed felt to her like a piece of paper that could be taken away by a man in a suit.

So I did what I always do when I cannot win an argument. I went home and drew.

The Plan I Drew for Myself

I had never once drawn a home for me. It is a strange thing to admit, for someone whose whole working day is spent imagining rooms. Every evening I would come back to the back room in Hatfield and sit at the board and not know where to put the first line.

Eventually I started with the window. I knew I wanted morning light on the left, because I am left handed and hate the shadow of my own hand falling across the paper. I wanted a kitchen where two people could pass each other without one of them flattening against a fridge, because my mother visits and she likes to cook in other people's kitchens to prove a point. I wanted a balcony big enough for one chair and one pot plant. Not a garden. I knew myself too well for a garden.

I drew it small. Two bedrooms, one for sleeping and one for the drawing board. I pinned it to the wall above my bed and looked at it every night like a teenager with a poster.

Then I started looking at real ones, and that is where the whole thing nearly fell over.

Reading Listings Like Drawings

Architects are terrible at looking at property. We see the wall that should not be load bearing. We see where the plumbing must be running and wonder who allowed it. We notice that the photographs were taken with a wide lens from the very corner of the room, standing in the bath.

I spent most of one winter scrolling through listings for apartments in Pretoria East at night, half reading and half redrawing them in my head. I knew the east side because of work. Half my clients lived out past the N1, near Faerie Glen and Garsfontein and out towards Olympus, and I had driven those roads so often to site meetings that I knew which robots took forever and which petrol station had the clean bathroom. It felt like the one part of the city I understood from the inside.

I kept a spreadsheet. I am not proud of how many columns it had. Orientation. Distance to my office. Whether the second bedroom could fit a drawing board at full tilt, which is a very specific measurement that no estate agent in history has ever been asked. I phoned one agent to ask about the ceiling height in a second bedroom and he went quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped.

My mother asked about the search every Sunday in her kitchen table voice. I told her about light and ceilings. She asked about the levy and whether the security guard would know my face. Looking back, she was asking the better questions.

The Sunday Viewing

The one I eventually walked into was on a Sunday in late August, when Pretoria is all dust and the jacarandas are still bare sticks waiting for their moment. I had booked the viewing on my own. Then on the Saturday night I phoned my mother and asked if she would come.

She said she was busy. Then she said what time. Then she asked if she should bring food.

We drove out together in my old Polo with a container of her chicken curry on her lap, because my mother does not arrive anywhere empty handed, not even at a stranger's show flat. She looked out of the window the whole way down Lynnwood Road and did not say much.

I have walked into a lot of empty rooms for work. I know how to stand in a doorway and read a space in about four seconds. This time I could not do it. I stood just inside and forgot to look at the cornices or the window frames. I just stood there, holding my car keys, and thought: the light is on the left.

It was a small place, much like the one pinned above my bed, not because I had drawn it from life but because I suppose I had always known what I needed. My mother went straight to the kitchen and opened every cupboard. She ran the tap. She stood at the counter and pretended to chop something and turned around twice to see if there was room behind her. There was.

Then she walked to the window and was quiet for a long time.

"You can see the koppies," she said finally. And that was it. That was her whole review.

What I Kept Thinking About on the Drive Home

I did not sign anything that day. I went home and opened my spreadsheet and added the place to it like all the others, though I knew it was not like the others. I compared it with a few other Pretoria East apartments I still had bookmarked, and I did the sums three different ways, and I slept badly.

The thing that kept me awake was not the bond. It was the fact that I did not have a single drawing of my own life in my portfolio. Six years of other people's front doors, and I had never trusted myself with my own. My mother's doubt had become my doubt without either of us noticing.

On the Wednesday I phoned her at work, which I never do.

"Ma, if I lose the job, I can rent out the second bedroom. If I lose the job and the tenant, I can sell it. If all of that goes wrong, I'll come and sell vetkoek at your gate."

She laughed so hard a colleague of hers asked if everything was fine.

"Then buy it," she said. "But you are not using my recipe."

The Door

I moved in at the start of summer. The drawing board is in the second bedroom at full tilt, and it fits with seven centimetres to spare, which I measured before I signed anything and measured again on my first night, kneeling on the bare floor with a tape I had borrowed from the office.

I still read listings sometimes, out of habit. I'll catch myself scrolling through property for sale Pretoria East on a slow evening, mentally moving walls in places I will never live, the way other people do crosswords. I do not think that will ever leave me.

But the strangest part of the whole year was the front door. On my first evening I stood outside it with my key and realised I had not drawn it, had not specified it, had not argued with anybody about its width. It was just a door, built for whoever would come. I had spent six years making sure strangers could fit through their own doors comfortably.

My mother came for Sunday lunch two weeks later. She brought a pot so large she had to turn it sideways to get it through the doorway.

"Too narrow," she said, and walked straight past me into the kitchen, and I stood there laughing in my own hallway like a fool.