A truckload of gravel (and money)
Lindl and I must have watched close to a hundred Grand Designs shows. I don't recall one that stayed on budget or on time. Our environmental consultant calls it the 3.2.1 rule: Building a house takes three times longer, is twice as expensive and you only want to do it once.
Stilkrans seems to be heading in the same direction. 🙃
The only way onto the plot is via a steep, completely overgrown servitude road that cuts through municipal land. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but because Wilderness falls under the Outeniqua Sensitive Coastal Area (OSCA), any clearing needs special permission from environmental affairs.
This department has been so unresponsive that we've been stuck for over three months. We finally got a meeting with them last week, only for them to tell us that our OSCAE application requires a peer review because the site is "tricky".
We're making progress, but it's glacial.
Meanwhile, our structural engineer finished the servitude's technical spec, so I could get a cost estimate. The slope is steep which means that we'll need retaining walls and a lot of fill to level the ground.
This will require truckloads of gravel. And money. My initial estimate on these roadworks is around R500,000 (~$30,000): significantly more than we originally budgeted. We might be able to tighten this, but it'll still be hundreds of thousands of rand.
Would we still have bought Stilkrans if we knew this upfront? Absolutely. I'm not rattled by it. We want to see Stilkrans exist in this world and we'll figure out how to make it work. It's clearly going to take longer and cost more, but hopefully not three times longer and twice as expensive.
Right now, it's pretty clear that we won't start building this year. Mid-2027 now looks more likely.
We're maybe stuck on the road, but we've made some great progress on the interior designs. We're now down to the last iteration. I'll share it once we have it finalised in two weeks.
Here's a peek of the deck for now.
