EDITOR’S NOTE

Things have moved fast since my last ed’s letter. To condense a long story, the place we’ve been renting for the past three-and-a-half years came up for sale, and after giving it some thorough-yet-rapid thought, I decided to buy it.

Skip forward a couple of weeks and my offer has been accepted, my finance is just about arranged (just as soon as I’ve signed over my firstborn, given DNA samples for safekeeping in a vault somewhere, and promised the bank my undying love for 20 years), and we’re now thinking about how we’ll improve the place once it’s properly ours.

But when you get down to doing that, and you start scouring the web, Pinterest, homeimprovement magazines and talking to people with more design acumen than you, it all becomes rather overwhelming. In the beginning, we thought we’d paint a blue accent wall in the living room… Now our lounge floor is a minefield of about 3 000 tiny paint swatches, we’ve created multiple virtual images of our living space, revealing what different paint colours might look like, and that’s all before we realised that cladding the wall in reclaimed timber, or even wallpaper could be an option… And don’t even get me started on flooring options, new countertops, retrofitted insulation, shelving for the garage, upgrading the security, and deciding on doubleglazing alternatives for the windows and frames. You’d think that being Editor of Popular Mechanics might give me a head start, but I need to admit that I’m just as vulnerable as everyone else out there. Perhaps some of you who have walked this path before me will get in touch and share some words of wisdom. Please – I’m pleading with you – drop me a line at popularmechanics@ramsaymedia.co.za. And my same plea goes out to the different suppliers out there; I’d be intrigued to hear why your product is better than the rest. All the decision-making aside, this is an exciting time for us, and I look forward to sharing any home-improvement success stories with you that we might accomplish in the coming months. It’s also December, and time for a restful holiday. Thanks for your ongoing support of the magazine this year – we do appreciate it, and we look forward to what we’re going to achieve together in 2019 in the pages of Popular Mechanics.