I Moved for a Job and Ended Up Buying My First Home by Accident

I am a Joburg boy through and through. Born in the East Rand, schooled there, first job there, first heartbreak there. I used to be one of those people who rolled their eyes at everyone who moved to Cape Town and would not shut up about the mountain. I found them insufferable. And then, at thirty four, I became one of them, and now I am the person at the braai talking about the mountain, and I have made my peace with the hypocrisy.

It started with a job. My company opened a bigger distribution operation in the Western Cape and asked me to come down and run it. I said yes mostly for the money and the title, and I told everyone, and myself, that it was for a year, maybe two, and then I would come home.

The plan was to rent and stay uncommitted

My whole strategy, if you can call it that, was to stay light on my feet. Rent something small. Do not put down roots. Keep one foot in Johannesburg so that when I came to my senses I could go home without any fuss. I did not want to like it here. Liking it here would complicate the story I had told myself.

For the first six months I rented a dreary little place near the airport, chosen entirely for how close it was to the warehouse, and I kept my head down and worked. I did not explore. I told my Joburg friends on the phone that Cape Town was overrated, that the traffic was worse than they said, that the people were cliquey. Some of that was even true. Most of it was a man trying not to fall in love with a place because falling in love would mean admitting he might not go back.

The problem was the weekends. I had nothing to do near the airport, so eventually, out of boredom, I started driving. And the driving undid me. The light out here does something to a person. There is a quality to a late afternoon by the sea that my defences were simply not built for.

The Sunday I started looking, just to look

I want to be clear that I did not go looking for a home. I went looking the way you window shop, telling yourself you are only browsing. One Sunday, restless, I started scrolling through apartments in Cape Town purely as a fantasy, the way you look at holidays you will not book. I told myself it was research, that I was just getting a feel for the market for when I eventually did go home and could laugh about the prices.

But something happened while I scrolled. I stopped imagining these places as somewhere to live for a year. I started imagining actually living in them. Where my things would go. Where I would drink my coffee in the morning. Which one had a spot to put the bicycle I did not yet own but suddenly wanted.

That was the tell, and I knew it even then. You do not imagine where the bicycle goes in a place you are only renting for a year.

The viewing that finished me off

I went to see one on a whim. A newish apartment in a lifestyle development, the kind of place with a gym and a pool and a bit of green space, aimed at exactly the sort of person I was pretending not to be. I went in cynical. I came out different.

It was not the finishes, though they were good. It was standing on the small balcony and realising I could see a slice of mountain between two buildings, and thinking, without deciding to think it, I could look at that every single morning. The agent asked what had brought me down from Johannesburg and I gave my usual line about it being temporary, and I heard how thin it sounded in my own mouth.

I spent that week doing sums I had told myself I would never do down here. I compared what I was throwing away in rent against what owning would cost. I had spent months browsing Cape Town apartments as pure fantasy, and now I was sitting with a calculator and a bond calculator open in two tabs, and the fantasy was quietly turning into a spreadsheet, which is how you know a Joburg boy is serious.

Telling my mother

The hardest part was not the money. It was phoning my mother. In my family, buying property is a real thing, a marker, a settling down, and doing it in Cape Town rather than back home felt almost like a betrayal. I put off the call for a week.

When I finally told her, there was a silence on the line, and then she surprised me. She said she had heard it in my voice for months, that I had stopped talking about coming home somewhere around the winter and had started saying down here as if it were home already. Mothers hear the things you are not saying. She said, buy it, my boy, a person should live where the light makes them happy.

So I did. I stopped pretending I was a tourist in my own life and I bought the first home I have ever owned. Signing for property for sale in Cape Town as a self declared loyal son of Johannesburg was one of the more humbling and one of the happier days of my adult life. I signed with a slightly shaking hand and then sat in the car park and phoned three people in a row who all said, in three different ways, we told you so.

The braai where I became insufferable

I have been in the apartment for two years now. I bought the bicycle. It lives exactly where I imagined it would. I can see my slice of mountain from the balcony and I look at it every single morning while my coffee cools, and I have never once tired of it.

My Joburg friends come to visit, and they arrive with the same eye rolling scepticism I used to have, and I watch the place go to work on them the way it went to work on me. On the last visit, at a braai on my little balcony, I caught myself talking about the light and the mountain and the ocean air, and I saw my oldest friend grinning at me, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. I had become the very person I used to mock.

I went home to Johannesburg for a wedding recently, and it was wonderful, and I loved every minute of seeing everyone. But on the flight back, as the plane banked over the peninsula and that ridiculous mountain came up to meet me, I felt something I did not expect. I felt like I was going home. The Joburg boy is still in there somewhere. He just lives by the sea now, and he cannot for the life of him understand why he waited so long.