The Eleventh Time I Packed Boxes, I Decided I Was Done Renting

I worked it out one Sunday while taping up a box, which is a very on-brand way for me to have a revelation. I counted the times I had moved as an adult, and the number came to eleven. Eleven times I had wrapped my glasses in newspaper. Eleven times I had begged friends with bakkies for a Saturday. Eleven times I had cleaned an oven that was not really mine so that a landlord I would never see again could keep a deposit that was. I was thirty-eight years old, I had a decent job, and I had nothing to show for a decade and a half of dutifully paying rent except a very refined system for packing plates. That Sunday, kneeling on the floor of yet another flat I would soon leave, I got angry in a quiet, useful way. I decided I was done.

For most of my twenties and thirties, buying had felt like something other people did. People with two incomes. People whose parents helped. People who had planned in a way I apparently had not. I had absorbed the idea that renting was simply my lot, the natural condition of a single woman on one salary in a city as expensive as Johannesburg. I never questioned it. I just kept moving, kept paying, kept treating every place as temporary because it was, and kept telling myself that ownership was a fantasy that belonged to a different kind of life than mine.

The landlord who finally tipped me over

What actually pushed me was not the eleventh move itself but the reason for it. My landlord had decided to sell the flat I was living in, which he was perfectly entitled to do, and I was given my notice with the polite regret of a man who had never once fixed the geyser when I asked. I remember standing in that kitchen, the one I had painted at my own expense because he would not, realising that every improvement I had ever made to any home had been a gift to someone else. I had planted herbs I would not harvest. I had hung shelves I would unscrew. My whole adult domestic life had been spent making other people's assets nicer.

The unfairness of it was not new. What was new was my refusal to keep accepting it. I sat down that night and did the thing I had spent fifteen years avoiding. I looked, honestly, at what I earned, what I spent on rent, and whether the gap between renting and owning was really the canyon I had always assumed it to be. And I was startled. Rent in my area had crept up so much that the monthly figure was no longer wildly different from what a bond might cost. I had been paying a mortgage all along. It just belonged to somebody else.

Starting to look, and how ignorant I felt

I began looking the way anyone begins anything they are secretly afraid of, at night, alone, on my phone. And I felt immediately out of my depth. I did not know the vocabulary. I did not know what levies were, really, or how transfer costs worked, or the difference between a freehold house I could never afford and the thing I was actually looking for. I started typing clumsy searches for apartments for sale in the parts of the city I could realistically reach, and a whole landscape opened up that I had been walking past for years without ever seeing, because I had trained myself not to look at what I believed I could not have.

I made a lot of beginner mistakes. I fell in love with places far outside my budget and then felt crushed. I did not understand why two similar-looking flats had wildly different monthly costs until someone explained levies and what they covered. I nearly signed up for a show day for a development I could not afford simply because the photographs were beautiful. Slowly, though, I got educated, mostly by making a fool of myself and paying attention afterwards. I learned to read past the pretty pictures and look at the real monthly number, the one that included everything, because that was the figure that would actually govern my life.

The Saturday I stood in an empty unit that could be mine

There is a specific moment I return to. I had narrowed my search and gone to see a unit on a Saturday morning, one of dozens of viewings by then, and I had grown a little numb to the process. But I walked into this particular empty flat, sun coming through the windows onto a bare floor, and something shifted in my chest. It was not grand. It was a normal, sensible, well-sized place. But I stood in the middle of the empty lounge and understood, physically, that if I bought it, no landlord could ever make me pack again. The walls would be mine to paint and keep painted. The herbs would be mine to harvest. The eleventh move could be the last one.

I want to be honest that the feeling was not pure joy. It was also terror. Committing to a bond is a large and irreversible-feeling thing when you have spent your whole life keeping your options open by never committing to anywhere. I stood in that empty flat and felt both the freedom and the weight of it at once, and I think that is the real texture of buying your first home as a single person on one income. It is not the champagne moment the adverts show. It is a quieter, heavier, more grown-up feeling. It is choosing to plant yourself.

Learning that the fear was mostly outdated

The months that followed taught me how much of my lifelong assumption had simply been out of date. I had believed home ownership was closed to me, and it was not closed, it was just complicated, and complicated is something you can learn your way through. I discovered that browsing property for sale as a serious buyer rather than a wistful window-shopper changed how I read everything. I stopped looking at homes as dreams and started looking at them as decisions, with numbers attached, that I was actually equipped to make.

The bond application itself was its own education in patience, paperwork, and self-doubt. There were days I was certain I would be turned down, that someone would look at my single salary and my history of renting and decide I was not the sort of person who got to own things. I gathered payslips. I explained my finances to strangers. I waited. And then, on an ordinary weekday afternoon, an email arrived telling me I had been approved, and I read it four times in the office bathroom before I let myself believe it.

The first night on my own floor

I moved into my own place on move number twelve, and I have decided that twelve is where the counting stops. The first night I did not have a bed set up yet, so I slept on a mattress on the floor of a flat that belonged, at last, to me and the bank rather than to a man who would not fix a geyser. I lay there in the dark and listened to my own building settle and thought about all the years I had assumed this was not for people like me. It had been for people like me the whole time. I had just never done the maths, never looked properly, never let myself believe that ordinary apartments in a city I already lived in could actually have my name on the deed.

I still catch myself, sometimes, standing in my lounge doing nothing, just being aware that no notice is coming. When something breaks now, it is mine to fix and mine to keep fixed, and I have found, to my surprise, that this responsibility feels less like a burden and more like dignity. Eleven moves taught me how to leave. The twelfth, the one I chose, taught me how to stay. And if you had told the woman taping up that box on the floor that within a couple of years she would own the walls around her, she would not have believed you, which is exactly why I am telling this to whoever is kneeling on a rented floor right now, quietly counting.