Every reader submission goes through the same route: we read the note, check the photos for enough detail, and ask follow-up questions if a costed material list is missing. Posts that come out of this usually take two to three weeks to appear, depending on how many site questions are already in the queue. If your job is still open, say so in the message and we will keep the details vague until the work is signed off.
Send your note, photos and any rand figures to the editor. Plain phone shots from site are fine, as long as the problem area is visible.
Email the editorOr call the workshop line on +27155504205 during weekday hours.
Not sure whether your question fits the blog? Look at the kinds of jobs we cover, or see how we structure a full write-up in our field notes format. Anything urgent about a live site is better handled through direct contact.
Every post on this site comes out of the same working sequence: a reader sends a question or a photo, we check it against a real job, then we write it up with the numbers and the mistakes left in. Here is the order things actually happen in, and where the delays usually sit.
Step 01
Reader intake
Most messages come from foremen and workshop owners between Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. A tiling quote that keeps losing to cheaper bidders, a drill that dies on cold mornings, damp creeping up a plastered wall. We log the question, ask for site photos and a rough material list, and check whether we have done something similar in the last year.
Step 02
Site check
No post goes up on theory alone. If the topic is adhesive coverage on a wonky screed or battery behaviour in an unheated bakkie, we measure it on a live site or in the workshop first. That is where the costed material lists in rand and the tool teardowns come from, including the parts that did not work.
Step 03
Guest input
Trades overlap more than most quotes admit. Before publishing, we send the draft to a working electrician, plumber or cabinetmaker for a read. They usually catch the assumption that would have embarrassed us on site, and their notes get folded into the post rather than bolted on as a separate opinion.
Step 04
Write-up
Posts stay tight: what the job was, what it cost in materials, how long it took, and where the plan fell apart. We name the conditions we worked under, because a Durban humidity repair and an inland winter repair do not follow the same sequence. If a job needed an engineer instead of a handyman, the post says so.
Step 05
Follow-up
Once something is published, the replies come in. A supplier turns out to be unreliable, a torque setting was wrong for a specific chuck, an invoicing approach worked better with a deposit clause. We update the original post and note what changed, so the archive stays usable rather than frozen.
Before you send a job photo or a question, a few working definitions. They exist so nobody reads more into a post than is actually there, and so the same terms mean the same thing across every entry on this site.
A post is written from a job that was actually done, or from a tool that was actually used through a season. Where a figure appears, it comes from a supplier invoice or a measured site quantity. Where it does not, we say so instead of guessing.
A method that works on a Cape Town face-brick wall may fail on a Highveld plastered wall in July. Humidity, frost, coastal salt and load-shedding schedules all change the answer. Treat every note as tied to the region and season named in it.
Material lists show what a job consumed at the time it ran. Supplier pricing moves, wastage varies with the substrate, and your labour rate is your own. Use the lists to check your own numbers, not to copy a figure onto a client invoice.
Electricians, plumbers and cabinetmakers write under their own trade and their own name. Their method is theirs, and it may differ from how another artisan on the same street would approach the same repair. We do not flatten those differences out.
Photos and questions sent to the editor may be edited for length and clarity, and may appear in a later post with the sender's trade and town noted. Send the whole wall, not a cropped corner, or the diagnosis will be wrong.
Nothing here replaces a site inspection, an engineer's report or your own compliance obligations. Structural movement, gas work, fixed electrical installations and anything touching a municipal connection sit outside what a written note can settle.
Questions about a specific post, or a correction where a method did not hold up on your site, go to info@kh-demo.com. Corrections are published rather than quietly removed.