The tale of renovating a room in Thailand, now I have been meaning to renovate this room and whole floor actually for about 6 years, a couple of years ago I gave some of it a quick coat of paint so basically nothing has been done to it in over 10 years, so it's a bit of a mess.
Now these first 2 photos show where my main area of initial work will be, ie the balcony, the window area and those 2 horrible corners, as you can see the curtains don't fit, no idea why, also a few of the hanger bits have torn away, the right hand sliding window doesn't slide, the wall on the right hand side is covered in crap that needs throwing away, the Buddha table can stay but that's about it.
Being a professional in this field I am allowing myself 4 months to complete the initial work, yep us builders know how to drag out a job, on this thread you will learn how to bodge things up and get away with it, and how to use old crap and get away with it.
So first off in the 2 corners I shall make some fitted units to go there, this will hide the fact the curtains don't fit and also give more cupboard space.
Thats is a damn ugly curtain rail, shall hide that with some wooden frontage and stick a couple of lights behind it for some soft uplighting.
This lot of electric and speaker wire cable will all be hidden by the new units, the switch can be fitted to the new unit.
Next we move out onto the balcony, time it was made to look nice again, so a panel needs to be put in to hide all those cables, to the right I will build a trellis and stick some climbing plant there, that cable running down the wall goes to a wall light, I might put that in conduit as I have some laying around.
The whole balcony needs stripping of paint and repainting.
Yep, all that old paint has to come off otherwise the new paint will just fall off come the rainy season.
Going to need some soapy water and a scrubbing brush to get the black stuff and distemper off of this.
So the first job was to get the right hand side sliding window working.
Jam something underneath the window to take some of the weight.
You got 2 holes at the bottom on either side, the lower holes are the holes where you can adjust the wheel height, you need to raise the wheels as you want to take the whole sliding window out, only takes a couple of turns with a posi screw driver.
In this picture you can see like a ridge, both panels have these and when the windows are closed they interlock, slide the window open a few inches, lift up and out, you may have to push the wheels up one at a time to get them over the ridge on the floor.
Give the wheels a good clean up, spray with oil, make sure they spin and aren't broken, replacements are about 80baht per pair and can be bought at any glass shop if needed.
Push the window back into the top frame and then forward onto the bottom frame, probably have to push the wheels up with a screwdriver to get them over the ridge, take the weight off the wheels a bit with your screw driver and adjust the wheels down, now you got about 4mm to 5mm of useable adjustment, you don't want the aluminum scraping either at the bottom or top, you also don't want the whole window being able to be easily lifted out, so adjust the wheels down till you start feeling pressure, take out your supporting screwdriver, slowly slide the window checking both sides top and bottom and adjust some more if necessary.
Right, thats my window fixed, well balcony door to be exact.