I Built Our Family House in Ibadan From a Flat in Lagos

The land in Ibadan was my father’s last gift. He bought the plot in 1998 and held on through three governments, two recessions and one family dispute, and when he died he left a paper folder with the deed, the survey plan and a note in his small handwriting: “Build when you can.”

It took me nine years. By then I was working in Lagos, living in a rented two bedroom flat in Yaba, and commuting through traffic that made Ibadan feel like another country. My wife, Bimpe, and I had two children, a modest savings account, and a plan so vague that we described it only as “someday.”

Someday arrived in the rainy season of a long, difficult year. Our landlord raised the rent for the second time in eighteen months. Bimpe stood in the kitchen with the letter, looked at me, and said, “We are paying for a house that will never be ours.”

I thought of the folder in the wardrobe.

The plan

I am not an architect, and I did not want to pretend to be one. I found a young architect named Seyi through a friend, a quiet man who worked from a small studio in Bodija and who asked, in our first meeting, a question no one else had asked.

“How do you want to feel when you open the front door?”

I had expected to be asked about bedrooms and parking. I did not have an answer. I said something clumsy about space, and he wrote it down.

Over three months, we drew a house that fit the plot, the budget and the climate. It was a two storey building in the heart of the compound, with deep verandas on three sides, cross ventilation through every room, and a double height stairwell with a long window that would catch the morning sun. The kitchen faced east. The bedrooms were upstairs, away from the road. At the back there was space for a small garden, where my father’s mango tree already stood.

Seyi was firm on the verandas. “In this heat,” he said, “the veranda is the first room of the house.” I did not understand him until much later.

Building from far away

The hardest part was not the design. It was the distance.

Ibadan is a two hour drive from Lagos on a good day. On a bad day, it is four. We had a contractor, a man named Mr Adebisi who came highly recommended and who had built three houses in the neighbourhood. He was honest, careful and nearly impossible to reach, because his phone signal on site was poor.

For two years, my Sundays were the same. I woke at five, drove to Ibadan with the children asleep in the back, and spent the morning on site, walking through rooms that did not yet exist. I learned to read a foundation. I learned the names of materials: sandcrete blocks, rebar, lintels, screed. I learned what it means when a mason pauses and rubs the back of his neck.

I made mistakes. In the first year I paid for a delivery of cement that never arrived. In the second I approved a change to the window openings without checking the structural drawings, and Seyi had to calmly redraw an entire elevation. Twice I lost my temper on the phone, and twice Bimpe took the handset away and apologised on my behalf.

There were months when nothing happened because I had no money. The walls stood half built, rain beating on exposed block. A neighbour, an elderly retired teacher, began leaving small bunches of ewedu leaves on our site gate as an encouragement. I never learned why.

The staircase

In the second year, during a particularly bad stretch, I almost sold the plot. Bimpe and I sat in the car outside the site on a Sunday afternoon, rain on the windscreen, and I said that perhaps my father had left me an impossible gift.

She said nothing for a while. Then she opened the door and said, “Come.”

We walked inside. The stairwell had just been poured. It stood in the middle of the house, raw grey concrete with no handrail, with a tall rectangular gap where the window would be. The rain had stopped, and the late sun was coming through that gap in a long diagonal bar across the stairs.

Bimpe climbed to the third step and stood in the light. She did not say anything. She just looked down at me, and I understood why my father had held on to that land for twenty years.

I did not sell it.

Moving in

We moved into the house in March, two years and four months after the foundations. It was not finished. The back garden was mud. The kitchen counters were temporary plywood. We had no curtains, so Bimpe hung bedsheets.

But on the first morning, I woke early and walked down the stairs in the quiet. The sun came through the long window and fell on the same step where she had stood. I opened the front door, and Seyi’s question came back to me: how do you want to feel?

I felt relief, slow and total. I felt something close to belonging.

What I would say to anyone building from afar

Hire someone you trust to be on site when you cannot be. Pay for the drawings properly, because the cheapest mistake is the one you catch on paper.

Visit often, even when it is exhausting. A site that is watched is a site that behaves.

Do not skip the veranda. I sit on ours every evening now, with my children’s schoolbooks on the steps and the mango tree dropping leaves. I understand what Seyi meant. It is where the house meets the world, and where the family sits when the day is done.

And keep the folder. Mine is on a shelf in the study, the deed still tucked inside, with my father’s small handwriting on the note. I added a line underneath, in my own: “Built.”