Jobs from the archive

Bathrooms, roof sheets, damp walls, workshop benches. These are the jobs behind the posts, photographed on site before the client ever saw the invoice.

Browse all field notes

Tiling

Midrand bathroom refit, quoted line by line

Where the adhesive, levelling and cutting waste actually went, and why the first quote was too low to finish.

Tools

Three 18V drills after one Highveld winter

Battery behaviour in an unheated bakkie, chuck wear, and which two needed repairs by August.

Repairs

Tracing damp on a plastered wall in Durban

Hose test, moisture readings, and the plaster sequence that held through the next rainy season.

The suppliers, yards and workshops behind these notes

Nothing here is sponsored. These are the counter staff, timber yards, tool repairers and material suppliers who let us photograph a job, check a spec sheet or stand in the queue with everyone else. When a post names a product or a method, it is because someone on a real site put it to work first.

Timber and board

Boksburg board merchant

Opens the yard early for bakkie loads and keeps offcut racks we can measure against. Useful when a cabinetmaker needs a straight answer on board thickness.

Tool repair

Pinetown power tool bench

Strips and services cordless gear for the teardown posts. They keep the worn brushes and burnt switches so we can show what actually failed.

Aluminium

Cape Town window fabricator

Walks us through profile grades and coastal corrosion issues. Their fitting crews let us tag along on a residential glazing install.

Plaster and damp

Durban remedial contractor

Handles the humidity side of the damp posts. They share moisture readings and render schedules so the repair sequence stays honest.

Tiling supply

Midrand tile and adhesive depot

Confirms coverage rates and levelling compounds for the quoting posts. They also flag which adhesives hold up on a screed that is not flat.

Guest trades

Electricians, plumbers, cabinetmakers

Working trades who write the guest notes and answer reader questions. Their names go on the post, along with the job it came from.

If you run a yard, a repair bench or a workshop and want your work checked against a real job, send photos and a short note to the editor. We credit the trade, not the brand.

Who writes KH Field Notes, and why it reads like a site diary

This started as a WhatsApp group where four of us swapped quotes, tool complaints and photos of botched plasterwork. The group got too long to scroll, so the useful parts moved here. Everything published is written by people who still carry a bakkie load on Monday morning.

We work across Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape, which means the advice has to survive both a dry Highveld winter and a humid Durban summer. A drill that performs in a heated showroom tells you nothing about a 6am start in Boksburg. A paint system that holds on a Cape Town north-facing wall may blister inland. We write from that split reality, not from a single city.

The people behind the posts are a tiler, an electrician, a cabinetmaker and a site foreman who between them have run small crews, chased late payments and rebuilt more than one quote after the substrate turned out to be worse than the client described.

How we work

Real jobs only. If a post has a material list, it came off an actual invoice, not a supplier catalogue.
Named suppliers, honest verdicts. We say when a product failed and what the repair cost in rand.
No sponsored posts. Nobody pays to appear in a teardown or a supplier comparison.
Reader questions get answered. Send a photo and a short description, and it may become the next post.

Who this is for

Artisans running their own books, foremen managing two or three crews, and workshop owners who quote, build and invoice without a back office. If you have ever priced a job at 11pm because the client wanted numbers by morning, you are the intended reader.