Apt Kitchen & Closet Installations Pty Ltd

There is a nervous system in your home that you almost never think about. It runs behind the plasterboard and through the ceiling void. It lives in the distribution board in the passage, behind a plastic cover you open perhaps twice a year. It terminates in the plug points you use without a thought, the light switches you press without looking, and the WiFi router you resent when it drops. It is the electrical and data infrastructure of your home. And in most South African houses, it is the most neglected, most undervalued, and most dangerously under-planned system in the building. I have written extensively about the hidden work in a renovation — the waterproofing beneath the tiles, the fall of the floor toward the drain, the void covers that conceal the pipes. All of it matters. But if there is a single part of the home that is more ignored than any of them, it is the wiring and the data cabling. Because unlike a leaking shower, a failing electrical system does not announce itself gr...

There was a time when galvanised steel piping was the natural — in fact, the only — choice for potable water in older homes. If you grew up in a house built before the 1980s, chances are that behind your walls, or running along them in exposed runs, there were lengths of threaded steel pipe, heavy and grey, coated in zinc, carrying water from a central point to the kitchen, the bathroom, and the garden tap. And in some places, that is still the reality today. In Zambia, for instance, copper piping has yet to fully catch on, and galvanised steel remains — to a large extent — the norm. Layer upon layer, however, the galvanised pipe was replaced — first by copper, then by polycop, and later by a host of modern polymer systems that have steadily claimed ground in the South African plumbing industry. And yet, even South Africa has yet to fully embrace the modern polymer systems that have entered the market. But knowing the societal uptake of new technology here — how quickly a good idea spr...

A practical guide for the woman who runs the household, holds down the job, raises the children — and would rather not pay someone R800 for a ten-minute job. --- I make my living doing this work. So you may reasonably ask why I would write a piece teaching you to do it yourself. The answer is simple. I would rather you trust me with the big things than resent me for the small ones. Because here is what I have seen, over and over, in homes across Johannesburg. A single mother — working full days, raising children, carrying every decision alone — calls a handyman for a job she could have completed in twenty minutes. Not because she lacks the ability. Because no one ever showed her. And because the fear of getting it wrong feels more expensive than the cost of a call-out. I understand that fear. It is the same fear I had as a young man, contemplating putting up a guardhouse at my sister's smallholding, but unable to work out how a spirit level was supposed to help me build straight. I...