The Spray Booth Our Father Built, and the Day My Brother Asked to Be Paid Out

The smell you cannot describe to anyone who did not grow up in it

There is a smell that lives in a panel shop and never fully leaves your clothes. It is thinners and primer and the warm dust that comes off an angle grinder, mixed with the coffee my father used to leave going cold on the parts counter. I grew up in that smell. My brother Wynand grew up in it too. Our father opened the shop in Boksburg in 1986, in a face brick building on a corner where the tar always seemed to be melting in December, and he ran it until his heart gave out on a Tuesday afternoon in 2009 while he was leaning over a Cortina bonnet.

He did not leave a will that made any sense. What he left was the building, the equipment, a spray booth he had built himself out of parts he begged and welded together, and two sons who both thought they knew what he would have wanted. For fifteen years after that, Wynand and I ran the place together. I did the books and the customers and the insurance assessors. He did the work with his hands, and he was better at it than our father ever was, though I would never have told him that to his face in those years.

We were not the kind of brothers who talked about feelings. We were the kind who could stand next to each other for nine hours without saying more than pass me the 13 spanner and where is the masking tape. That worked, right up until the morning it did not.

The morning he said it out loud

It was a Thursday in March. We were standing near the roller door with the kettle going, and Wynand put his cup down on the workbench and said he was done. Not done for the day. Done. He wanted out. His wife had family in George and they wanted to move down to the coast, open something small, get away from the smash and grab at the robots and the load shedding that had cost us thousands in ruined jobs when the compressor died mid spray.

I remember I did not say anything for a long time. I just looked at the spray booth, our father's spray booth, and I felt something go tight in my chest. Because the moment he said he wanted out, I understood that one of us was going to have to put a number on all of it. On the building. On the booth. On the fifteen years. On our father.

And I already knew, the way you know these things in a family, that whatever number I said would feel too low to him, and whatever number he said would feel too high to me, and that we were about to become the kind of brothers who do not speak at Christmas.

The old resentments come out of the cupboard

Here is the ugly part, because there is always an ugly part. The moment money came into it, everything that had been sitting quietly in the cupboard for fifteen years came out.

Wynand reminded me that I drew a bigger salary in the lean years. Which was true, and which we had agreed on at the time because I was the one who had signed personal surety at the bank, but that context had somehow evaporated. I reminded him that he took six weeks off when his back went and I ran the floor with two casuals and nearly killed myself. He said I always thought the business was more mine because I sat in the office. I said he always thought his hands mattered more than my head. We said things across that parts counter that I am not proud of, with a customer's Polo sitting there half masked, waiting for a door that neither of us felt like finishing.

The thing nobody tells you about a family business is that the machinery and the stock are the easy part. The hard part is that the business is also a ledger of every favour and every grudge, and none of it is written down anywhere except in the way two brothers look at each other.

Learning that a feeling is not a number

For a few weeks we tried to do it ourselves. That was a mistake. Wynand had a figure in his head based on what he thought the building was worth, which was really based on a house that sold down the road, which had nothing to do with a light industrial property with a two ton spray booth bolted into it. I had a figure based on our profit, which was really based on my fear of the bank. Neither of us knew the first thing about how you actually work out what a going concern is worth. We were two panel beaters arguing about accounting like two accountants arguing about panel beating.

My wife was the one who finally said it plainly one night. She said, you two are never going to agree because you both think you are arguing about money, but you are actually arguing about who loved Dad more and who worked harder, and no amount of shouting is going to settle that. What you need is someone from outside who does not care about any of it, who just looks at the numbers.

That was the first time I properly went and read about valuations and how a business like ours is actually assessed, and I realised how far off both our guesses had been. It was not one number pulled from the air. It was the property, the equipment at real depreciated worth, the maintainable profit averaged over years, the client book, the insurance panel relationships that took our father two decades to build. All of it weighed properly.

Bringing in someone who did not care about our father

We agreed, eventually, and it took a hard week of agreeing, to bring in independent people. The relief of handing it to someone neutral was bigger than I expected. When the valuators came through the shop, they did not care that the booth was our father's pride. They measured it. They asked about the compressor age and the downtime records and how much of our turnover came from two insurance companies, which was a risk I had never wanted to admit out loud. They looked at the lease value of the corner site. They asked questions I did not know were questions.

It was strangely healing to watch. For fifteen years the shop had been a monument to a dead man. For three days it was just an asset being measured by people with clipboards, and somehow that made it possible for Wynand and me to stand next to each other again.

The number, and what it cost that was not money

When the report came back, neither of us loved it, which I have since learned is the sign of a fair one. It was lower than Wynand hoped and higher than I feared, and it landed in a place we could both live with because it came from people who had no dog in our fight. The fact that they were certified valuators mattered to me more than I expected, because when Wynand phoned his brother in law in George, the man who had been quietly filling his ear with bigger numbers, Wynand had a proper document to point at instead of my word against his.

I remortgaged to pay him out. It stretched me and it still does. But I kept the shop, and I kept the booth, and I kept the smell.

The part that surprised me is what the fair number did to us as brothers. Because it was arrived at honestly, neither of us can say the other one cheated him. That accusation, the one that ends families, was taken off the table before it could be made. He got what the place was worth. I paid what the place was worth. Our father did not get to referee it, so we found someone who could.

Wynand is in George now. He fixed my youngest's bicycle when they came up in July, in my driveway, and we stood there in the cold not saying much, passing tools, and it felt like the old shop for a minute. I told him the booth is still going. He said he knew it would be. That was as close as we get. It was enough.