ED’S LETTER

As we speak, I’m typing away sitting at our living room table with my constant companion at the other end during these past lockdown months – my teenager – doing her matric schoolwork. That makes it the second issue of VISI done remotely … and it also marks the second wave of home-improvements for the Smith household. It’s been a thing, right? Sounds like everyone has spent a large part of lockdown thinking of ways to re-imagine, revamp, and redo their homes.

For us, it’s mostly been about colour – an instinctive response, I guess, to the sameness of lockdown. Wave One was more of a painting and artwork thing. From a blank-canvas white, one wall got painted pink and another grey … and that resulted in a major rehang of our art collection.

We started to grow things too. A bunch of new indoor plants provided a softer, greener accent and, out the back, lettuce and spinach grown in big clay pots have been both plentiful and delicious. And then things got serious. Cue a major chuck out.We owned way too many things.

Clothes, bedding, and boxes of assorted “stuff ” got donated to charity. A big old white chalk-painted teak cupboard was sold on Facebook marketplace and replaced with a bright yellow Pederson + Lennard server below a newly installed skylight. Suggestions were even made (but politely declined) that I should sell one of my bicycles. The end result is a brighter, greener and less cluttered Cape Town City Bowl cottage that has not only been a fun and cost-effective project, but has made lockdown a bit more bearable. No doubt you have your version of that and I trust VISI once again provides some inspiration for what to do next.