We Were Twenty-Six, Terrified of the Word Mortgage, and Tired of a Landlord Who Painted Over Mould

The landlord painted over the mould again

The thing that finally pushed us was a wall.

We were renting a small place in a complex we could not really afford in a suburb we had chosen mostly because it sounded nice when we told people where we lived. There was a patch of black mould in the corner of the bathroom, low down near the skirting, and every few months the landlord would send a man to paint over it, and every few months it would bleed back through the fresh white paint like a bruise coming up under skin.

I stood looking at it one Saturday, six months into a lease we had renewed without thinking, and I said to Thabang, "We are paying someone to hide a problem from us instead of fixing it. And in three years we will have nothing to show for any of it except a better relationship with mould."

He was quiet for a while. Then he said the sentence that started everything. "Do you think we could actually buy?"

The spreadsheet and the fear

We did not know. So we did what people our age do, which is we built a spreadsheet and let it frighten us for a month.

I am twenty-six. Thabang is twenty-eight. We both work, decent jobs but not glamorous ones, and the word "mortgage" had always sat in my head next to words like "root canal" and "audit". It was a thing that happened to older, more organised people. People with garages. People who owned lawnmowers.

But the spreadsheet kept telling us something inconvenient. Our rent was already the size of a bond repayment. We were already paying a mortgage, just somebody else's, on a place where we could not even fix a mouldy wall without asking permission.

The fear was not really about the money, when we finally dug into it. The fear was about commitment, about tying ourselves to one place, one bank, one decision, at an age when everyone tells you to stay flexible and keep your options open. Buying felt like admitting we were becoming the older, more organised people, and some part of me was not ready to let go of the version of us that could just leave.

Why we looked east

We started looking, cautiously, at the far edges of our budget, and everything affordable was either very far out or very run down or both.

Then a colleague of Thabang's, a woman who had bought two years earlier and would not stop talking about it, told us to look at the newer lifestyle developments. She lived in one of the apartments in Pretoria East and kept describing her weekends in a way that made me quietly jealous. A pool she did not have to maintain. A gym she did not pay extra for. A gate and a guard and a sense that she could go to sleep without checking the locks three times.

Pretoria East was not where I had pictured us. It was further from the city than I wanted and closer to Thabang's work than mine, and we had a proper argument about it, one of those arguments couples have about geography that is secretly about something else entirely. Mine was secretly about whether moving there meant we were giving up on the exciting, central life I had imagined for us in my twenties.

The fight in the car

The fight came to a head outside a show unit.

We had driven out on a Sunday to look, and I had been difficult in the car the whole way, snippy in the way you are when you are scared and pretending to be picky. We sat in the parking area and it all came out. I said it felt like settling. Thabang, who is more patient than I deserve, said, "Settling for what? For a place we can actually own, in a life we can actually afford, that does not have mould we are forbidden to fix?"

I did not have an answer to that. So we went in.

The show unit that did the arguing for me

I wanted to hate it. I was ready to hate it.

But it was bright, and it was new, and nothing had been painted over. The taps were the taps. The walls were the walls. There was a small balcony where you could fit a herb pot and a chair, and I stood on it and imagined a Sunday morning there with coffee, and something in me went quiet.

We walked through the wider development slowly. We looked at a couple of the Pretoria East apartments that were still finishing, and I stopped performing my objections and just let myself picture it. Us. A weeknight. Both of us home. A place that was ours, where a repair was a decision we got to make and not a favour we had to beg for.

By the time we walked back to the car, the argument had quietly ended. Not because Thabang won it, but because the place had made his point better than he could.

Doing the boring, terrifying grown-up parts

The next part was not romantic. It was forms.

We got our finances looked at properly, which was humbling. We discovered a small store account I had forgotten about that was quietly hurting us. We closed it. We stopped eating out for a few months, which nearly killed a couple who both like restaurants more than they should. We got pre-qualified, and the number the bank came back with was both smaller than I hoped and bigger than I had feared, which is apparently how these things always go.

We kept looking at property for sale Pretoria East for weeks, comparing, second-guessing, lying awake, until one unit came up in the exact development we liked, on a floor we liked, at a price that made the spreadsheet stop screaming, and we looked at each other over the laptop at eleven at night and just knew.

The first night in a place with no mould

We moved in on a Saturday with the help of two friends and a bakkie we borrowed and a lot of takeaway to pay them in.

That first night we did not have curtains yet, or a couch, just a mattress on the floor and two boxes and a kettle. We sat on the mattress and drank tea and looked at the bare walls, our bare walls, walls that nobody had painted over anything on.

"We own this," Thabang said, testing the words.

"We own the bank's version of this," I corrected him, because I am like that.

But I knew what he meant. And when I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth that night, I looked, out of nine months of habit, at the low corner near the skirting.

It was just a wall. Clean and new and ours. Nothing bleeding back through. Nothing hidden. And I stood there, twenty-six years old and no longer terrified of the word mortgage, and I felt, for the first time in years, genuinely at home.