The restoration of this historic building as a Museum was approved by Heritage Western Cape on 11 June 2014!

The simple school building consisted of two rooms: A classroom and the schoolmaster’s office.

It was restored as-is without any external alterations.

The only addition was a two-metre wide concrete slab along the entire front of the building to act as a “landing” for the two external doors with a three-metre paved area right around.

The weathered and rusted corrugated iron roof required replacement. It was replaced with the same type and profile of roof sheeting.

Two magnificent external wooden doors together with their wooden frames were removed several years ago to prevent further weathering. These were restored to their original state and refitted. One door leads to the classroom and the other to the schoolmaster’s office.

The building had no glass windows, only two wooden shutters. Only one of these shutters remained. It was removed, restored and refitted. A second wooden shutter was made to fit into the existing wooden frame.

Internally, only two minor additions were included:

1. A traditional reed ceiling was fitted for isolation to limit the impact of temperature extremes on museum artifacts.
2. For security purposes, steel burglar bars were fitted outside the two shutters.

The weathered floor was restored and leveled out to enable freestanding glass cabinets to be used for exhibiting and/or storing museum artifacts.

This restoration plan was approved by Heritage Western Cape.

Restoration of this old school building was to conserve a heritage building of limited significance but of heritage value in the rural Witteberg landscape.

Plan

Elevations

(Page last updated 2021-03-09)