I Inherited My Father's House and Spent a Year Fighting With Its Roof

The house nobody wanted to deal with

My father died in the winter, quietly, in the house he had built additions onto for forty years on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast. My two sisters live overseas now, one in Perth and one in London, and by a kind of unspoken family logic the house became my problem, because I was the one who was still here and still, at forty-one, apparently the child who fixed things.

I did not want to sell it. My sisters gently suggested it, and every practical part of my brain agreed with them, and some stubborn animal part of me refused. It was the house where my mother had grown tomatoes and my father had told the same three jokes for four decades. So I kept it, and I moved in, and I discovered within about a month that a house that has been loved for forty years and maintained for maybe twenty comes with a reckoning, and the reckoning starts at the top.

The smell before the stain

It was not a dramatic leak, not at first. It was a smell. That particular damp, mushroomy, disappointed smell that old houses get in the corner of a room, and which I had smelled at my aunt's place as a child and never wanted in my own. It was in the back bedroom, the one my father had used as a study, still full of his box files and a rugby-ball ashtray and a rickety desk.

When I finally moved the box files I found the ceiling board in the corner had gone soft and brown and slightly bowed, and I understood that water had been getting in slowly for a long time, probably while he was ill and not climbing ladders any more, and that my father had almost certainly known and said nothing to anyone. That undid me for an afternoon. The idea of him lying in that house listening to a slow leak he no longer had the strength to deal with.

The salt air had been eating it for years

I climbed up eventually, on a borrowed ladder, and I did not really know what I was looking at, but even I could see it was not good. The house is close to the sea, and the sea, it turns out, is patient and merciless. The salt air had been quietly corroding the older metal sheeting and the fixings for years. Some of the screws had rusted to almost nothing. A couple of sheets had lifted at the edge in some forgotten storm and never been put right. My father's forty years of additions meant the roof was a patchwork of three different eras joined at awkward junctions, and every junction was a place for water to sneak in.

I want to be honest that my first instinct was avoidance. I put a bucket up in the study loft, told myself I would deal with it after the estate was wound up, and ignored it for a further two months, during which it rained properly twice and the brown stain crept across the ceiling like a slow tide. Avoidance, I have learned, is just a leak you are choosing not to look at.

Asking around a small town

The coast is a small-town kind of place and word travels. I asked at the hardware shop, I asked the man who cuts the verges, I asked my father's old bowls club, which is a surprisingly powerful intelligence network. What everyone told me, in one form or another, was to be careful, because a stretch of coast full of holiday homes and elderly owners attracts a certain amount of chancer, and to use a proper established roofing company rather than whichever bakkie happened to be doing a job down the road.

An old friend of my father's, a retired quantity surveyor named Mr Naicker, was the one who really helped me. He came and stood in the study with me looking at the stain and told me, kindly, that a house near the sea is a lifelong negotiation with corrosion, and that the previous generation understood this in their bones and my generation had forgotten it. He told me to find people who knew coastal conditions specifically, who would spec materials and fixings that could stand up to salt, because inland roofing contractors who did not understand the sea would give me a repair that failed again in three years.

The assessment that respected the house

The roofing contractors I eventually used came recommended by Mr Naicker and by two separate people at the bowls club, which in that town is more or less a sworn affidavit. Two men came out, an older one and a younger one who was clearly his apprentice, and they spent a long time up there and a long time in the loft with a torch, tracing where the water actually travelled.

What struck me was that they treated the house with a kind of respect. The older man, when he came down, did not talk to me about a total tear-off first. He talked about which of my father's three roof eras was actually sound and could stay, and which sections had reached the end and needed replacing, and how the junctions between them could be reflashed properly so they stopped funnelling water inward. He understood immediately, without me having to explain, why I did not want to just flatten the whole thing and start again. He got that it was a house with a life in it.

He also told me the truth about the parts I did not want to hear, that the corroded section was worse than it looked and that patching it would be throwing good money after bad, and I believed him because he had just spent twenty minutes telling me what I could keep.

Two days on a ladder, learning my father

The work took the better part of a week. I stayed, and I helped where I was allowed to, which was mostly carrying and making tea, and I learned an enormous amount, not just about roofs but somehow about my father. Up in the loft, moving his things to give the men room, I found evidence of his own patient, amateur repairs over the years, a bit of sealant here, a offcut of sheeting screwed over a gap there, decades of a man quietly keeping the water off his family with whatever he had to hand. I found it unbearably moving. He had been fighting this same fight for forty years and had simply, at the end, run out of strength for it.

When the younger apprentice asked me, on the last day, whether the old man who built all these additions had known what he was doing, I looked at the honest, careful patchwork of my father's decades and said yes. Yes, he did.

What I have now

The study is dry. I painted over the stain eventually, a small ceremony, and I kept the rugby-ball ashtray on the newly solid desk. The men gave me a proper guarantee and, more useful than that, a plain-English explanation of what to check every year and when to expect the next section to need attention, because near the sea there is always a next section.

My sisters still think I was mad not to sell. Perhaps I was. But I have thought a lot, since, about how many of us inherit not just a house but a slow leak somebody loved us too much to mention. If you find yourself standing under a spreading brown stain in a parent's house, my only real advice is not to look away from it the way I did for two months. Find grounded, well-recommended roofers who understand your particular conditions, let them tell you what to keep as well as what to replace, and treat the whole business as what it really is, which is one more year in a long and worthwhile negotiation between a family and the weather.