Eight Years, No Mortgage, and a Wife Who Counted Every Block

A reader writes:

Dear Editor,

My wife says I should write this down before I start telling it wrong, so here it is.

Sandra and I got married in our mid-twenties. I drove a delivery truck and she worked in the accounts office at a hardware store, which, as you will see, turned out to be a blessing. We rented two rooms from a lady in the next district. We had a small piece of land that my grandfather left me, properly transferred, thank God, with a title and everything. What we did not have was money, and we did not want a mortgage. Sandra’s parents lost their house when she was a teenager, behind a loan they couldn’t keep up, and she said very plainly she would rather live in two rooms for ten years than go through that again.

So we decided to build with cash. As it came. Block by block.

I want to be honest that it was Sandra’s plan more than mine. I would have taken the loan. I was young and I wanted a house to show people. She sat me down with an exercise book and wrote out every stage: clearing, foundation, columns, walls to window height, walls to belt, roof, windows and doors, plumbing, electrical, plastering, tiles, painting. Beside each one she wrote a guess at what it would cost. Then she divided our savings by that number and said, “This is how long it will take.” It came to about seven years. It took eight.

The first year we did nothing but save and clear the land. My cousin brought his machine one Saturday for the price of diesel and lunch. The second year we did the foundation. I remember standing on that slab in the evening with the sun going down, and it was the size of a large room, and I said to Sandra, “It looks so small,” and she laughed at me and said all foundations look small.

After that it was payday by payday. Every month end I drove to the hardware (Sandra’s hardware, where she got the staff price) and bought whatever we could afford. Some months it was forty blocks. Some months it was two bags of cement and a length of steel. Some months, when the truck needed tyres or somebody in the family was sick, it was nothing. Those months were the hardest. You drive past your own walls, grey and roofless, with bush starting to grow up inside what should be the living room, and you feel like the whole district is laughing.

They did laugh a little. People asked when I was going to finish “that church” I was building. One man at the bar told me I would be an old man before I slept in it. I am not proud of how I answered him.

We had arguments. Plenty. The worst was in year four, when I wanted to buy a second-hand car and Sandra said the money was for the roof. I said I was tired of living like a poor man when I was working hard. She said we weren’t poor, we were patient. I slept on the settee for two nights. We got the roof on that December and I have never been so glad to lose an argument.

We had help. A mason from church did the plastering for a price I am still embarrassed by. My brother in England sent money for the windows one Christmas without being asked. Sandra’s father, the same one who lost his house, came every Saturday in year six and helped me run conduit. He didn’t say much. I think it meant something to him.

We moved in during year seven, before it was finished. Bare concrete floors in two rooms, no paint, the kitchen just a sink and a gas stove. Our daughter was three. She learned to walk on that concrete. The last year was tiles and paint and a proper kitchen, bit by bit, while we lived around it.

Now it is done, more or less. Nothing fancy. Three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, a verandah where we sit in the evenings. We owe nobody. When hurricane season comes I am frightened like everybody else, but I am not frightened of a letter from the bank.

I don’t write this to say everybody should do it our way. It cost us. We lost years we could have been in a house. There were times our marriage was stretched thin. Prices went up while we were saving, and some stages cost nearly double what Sandra had written in the book. Some of the early blockwork I would do differently if I did it again. And I know people who took a mortgage and are perfectly happy.

But I will tell you what it taught me. It taught me that my wife is wiser than me about money, and that I should have listened sooner. It taught me that slow is not the same as failing. And it taught me that nearly everything good in that house has somebody else’s hands in it. Every time I pass the windows I think of my brother. Every time I switch on a light, I think of my father-in-law on the ladder.

Sandra still has the exercise book. The last page says “Paint – done” in her handwriting, with the date, and underneath she wrote “Thank You, Lord.” That’s all.

— Desmond, St Elizabeth

Editor’s note

Thank you, Desmond, and thank you, Sandra, for the exercise book. Building in stages with cash is how many Caribbean homes have been built, and your letter shows both its rewards and its costs. Two lessons stand out. First, a written plan, stage by stage with realistic costs, turns an overwhelming project into a series of achievable steps, and makes it easier to say no to things that would derail it. Second, no house is truly self-built. Gratitude for the hands that helped is part of what makes a building a home. Anyone considering this route should still get proper plans, approvals and professional advice on structure, so that the slow build is also a sound one.

Reader letters may be edited for length and clarity, and names and identifying details are changed.

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