Twenty Drum Lessons a Week Behind a Door That Rattled

How the Cars Ended Up in the Driveway

When my husband and I bought our house in Garsfontein, the estate agent called the double garage "a real selling point." She was imagining two cars. I was imagining a drum kit.

I had been teaching drums out of a rented church hall in Lynnwood for six years, hauling a kit in and out of my car twice a week and apologising to the ladies who ran the flower rota. The garage felt like a gift. Within two months the cars lived in the driveway, the floor was covered in second-hand carpet tiles, the walls had egg-box foam I had glued up myself on a long weekend, and I had twenty lessons a week booked from Monday to Saturday.

What I had not dealt with was the door.

It was the original door from when the house was built, a big single sectional door that groaned when it opened and shook in its tracks when anyone so much as sneezed inside. I hardly ever opened it, since students came in through the side door from the kitchen, so I forgot about it. The door, it turned out, did not forget about me.

The Note Under the Wiper

The first complaint came in the form of a folded note under the windscreen wiper of my car. It was from Mrs Venter, who lives across the road and has a rose garden that has won things. It was polite. It said she did not mind music but wondered whether the "rattling and thumping" could perhaps finish before her husband's afternoon rest.

I went over with a tin of rusks to apologise and she invited me in, and from her lounge, with a cup of rooibos in my hand, I heard my student at the time, a gentle accountant who was learning for his fiftieth birthday, playing a very slow and careful beat. It sounded like someone was shaking a sheet of corrugated iron in time with him. Every kick of the bass drum set the whole garage door buzzing, and the sound came straight across the road.

"It is not the drums," Mrs Venter said kindly. "It is the door. The drums I can live with."

Kagiso

The second complaint came from next door, and it came because of Kagiso.

Kagiso was twelve and had been sent to me because his mother said he was drumming on everything in the house, including, once, the dog. He was small for his age, quiet when he walked in, and the loudest drummer I have ever taught. He did not hit the drums. He argued with them. In his first month he broke two sticks and a cymbal felt, and he apologised each time in a voice I could barely hear.

He had a hard year. His parents were separating, and the drum lesson on a Thursday afternoon was, his mother told me in the driveway one day, the only hour of the week he did not seem angry at the world. I believed her. He would arrive with his shoulders up around his ears and leave with them where they belonged.

The problem was that our neighbour on the left, a young man who works night shifts at a hospital, slept on Thursday afternoons. And Kagiso's Thursday hour, through that old door, sounded like a demolition.

The neighbour came round. He was tired and trying hard to be reasonable. I was tired and trying hard to be reasonable. We stood in the driveway being reasonable at each other while Kagiso waited inside, and I could see through the side window that he was sitting very still behind the kit, the way children sit when they think something is their fault.

The Weekend I Tried to Fix It Myself

I am stubborn, and I had spent a lot of money on the conversion already. So I tried everything cheap first.

I stuffed old duvets into the gap at the bottom of the door. I bought foam weather strip from the hardware store and stuck it along the sides, where it peeled off within a week because of the heat. My husband tightened every bolt he could find on the tracks with a spanner, and then got his finger pinched by a panel and said several things I will not repeat. I hung a heavy curtain across the inside of the door on a pole, which helped a little with the sound, made the room much hotter, and looked like the back of a school stage.

None of it touched the rattle. The panels themselves were loose in their frame. Every low note found its way into the metal and out the other side.

I started moving Kagiso to Saturday mornings, which he hated because Saturday was his week at his father's flat and he had to be driven across town. I started telling students to play softer, which is a sentence no drum teacher should ever have to say. I started dreading the sound of the gate buzzer.

Learning That a Garage Door Is Not Just a Door

It was Mrs Venter, in the end, who pushed me. She came over with a cutting from her rose bush, which I took to mean we were friends, and she said, "My dear, you have spent so much on that room. Why are you still letting the worst part of it make all the decisions?"

So I started reading. I had honestly never thought about Garage doors as anything more than a thing that goes up and down. I learned about panels and insulation, about how an old door can loosen in its tracks over the years, about rollers and springs and the rubber seal at the bottom that on mine had perished into something like old chewing gum. I learned there was a real difference between patching up what I had and starting fresh.

I spent an evening going through pages about Garage door repairs, trying to work out whether my door could be saved with new rollers and seals, or whether the panels themselves were the problem. My husband, who had by then forgiven the door for his finger, read over my shoulder and kept saying "Ja, see, that's ours" every time a photo showed something bent or rusted.

The Morning It Went In

We decided to replace it. It was not a small decision, and it was not a cheap one, but by then it was the only thing standing between me and a teaching practice my neighbours could live beside.

The day of the Garage door installation I cancelled my lessons and sat on the front step with a flask of coffee watching the old door come down in pieces. It looked smaller lying on the driveway than it had ever looked standing up. Mrs Venter watched from her garden with her secateurs, not even pretending to prune.

That evening I closed the new door, sat down behind my own kit, and played the loudest groove I know. Then I went outside and stood in the street. I could hear the drums, of course. You are always going to hear drums. But they sounded like drums, muffled and round, instead of like a sheet of metal being attacked. There was no rattle at all.

Thursday Afternoons Again

I phoned Kagiso's mother that night and asked if he wanted his Thursdays back. I heard her call the question across the room, and I heard him shout yes before she had finished asking.

The next Thursday I went next door first and told the young man from the hospital that if it was still too loud, he should come and knock and I would sort it out. He never knocked. A few weeks later he waved at me over the wall and said he had slept through the whole hour.

Kagiso still plays like he is arguing with the kit. But he is winning the argument more gently now, and last month he played a full song, start to finish, without breaking anything, for his father, who came to fetch him early and stood in the doorway from the kitchen with his car keys still in his hand. Neither of them said much afterwards. They did not need to.

Mrs Venter's rose cutting has taken, by the way. It is planted right next to the new door.