Thai Dhupp and Princess Joy's Thai House Build

[Norton]

Brilliant thread TD. Narrative great. Keep up the good work.

[Slick]

8 cubic meters is a 10 wheel truck right? And that's about 800 baht a truck?

Not all that bad if it's a 10 wheel unit.

It's a high-sided 6-legger or low sided, smaller 8 legger

The locals in this area seem to sell based not on cubic meter but 6 wheel or 10 wheel truck. Or by the job. All includes a tractor.

FYI This was from my first build here and I had to dig way back to find it lol but this is a 6 wheel and at that time it was about 250 per truck:



And a 10 wheel truck and the typical tractor they use, can't remember the price but I want to say around 600 at that time and the dirt quality was considered 'good'

[beerlaodrinker]

Good advice rick, I do the same. Thai dhupp comes across as a genuine guy but perhaps with the rose tinted glasses going on? Either way I'm happy to be proven wrong
, I'm gettin a little bit jaded , sure hope he posts up his construction pics

No rose tinted specs being used here!

Sorry if you missed the first few posts... I made it clear that I had a lot of things to get in place before the build would start, not least of which was me completing my current 'day job' work contract in Abu Dhabi so that I can fully supervise the work in Chonburi.

Of course no 'construction pics' can be posted from Thailand if the build has not yet started and I'm not yet in place! Rest assured though that once it does start, you will soon get fed up of too many pics on a daily basis... I'm also a photographer and intend to capture this build from start to finish in as much detail as possible!

Ok sorry mate. My bad, crack on and no offense inteted,gotta take my hat off to anyone having a go

[yortyiam]

Don't venture into any of the construction threads much, but this one could be really interesting . Great style of posting you have, Thai Dhupp! Thanks for your considerable efforts. And of course, welcome to Teakdoor!! .

[Thai Dhupp]

Don't venture into any of the construction threads much, but this one could be really interesting . Great style of posting you have, Thai Dhupp! Thanks for your considerable efforts. And of course, welcome to Teakdoor!! .

thanks for the kind words and encouragement! I will try to keep it up all the way through to completion

[Thai Dhupp]

Good advice rick, I do the same. Thai dhupp comes across as a genuine guy but perhaps with the rose tinted glasses going on? Either way I'm happy to be proven wrong
, I'm gettin a little bit jaded , sure hope he posts up his construction pics

No rose tinted specs being used here!

Sorry if you missed the first few posts... I made it clear that I had a lot of things to get in place before the build would start, not least of which was me completing my current 'day job' work contract in Abu Dhabi so that I can fully supervise the work in Chonburi.

Of course no 'construction pics' can be posted from Thailand if the build has not yet started and I'm not yet in place! Rest assured though that once it does start, you will soon get fed up of too many pics on a daily basis... I'm also a photographer and intend to capture this build from start to finish in as much detail as possible!

Ok sorry mate. My bad, crack on and no offense inteted,gotta take my hat off to anyone having a go

Hey! No worries.. We are all friends here. I know I will learn a lot from the teak door members along the way and in turn I hope my thread will inspire and encourage others with home build intentions.

[Thai Dhupp]

Brilliant thread TD. Narrative great. Keep up the good work.

Thanks... Will try!

[Thai Dhupp]

The locals in this area seem to sell based not on cubic meter but 6 wheel or 10 wheel truck. Or by the job. All includes a tractor.

yes, Slick...so many ways to sell to us!! in Uk i have always looked at the truck size, but there are variations based even on the wheel plan. for example:

these are what we in the extractive industry (I used to be a quarry manager)call an 8-legger (4 axles, wheels each side, either single wheel or double, doesnt matter)


this one with a LOW body side


and this one medium-sided.

both the same 'floor plan but truck 2 carries a lot more than truck 1. there are high sided options too

same for this, a 6-legger:


Low sided


high sided

and even 4 leg trucks:


v small truck and small body


low sided


medium sided

its clearly crucial to ascertain the size of the truck if going on 'truck loads - or else, calculate the capacity in M3 and go with that for costings, or work out the area before and after , and then the volume delivered by survey (the more expensive way if using a total station, etc. )

In UK 6 leggers were traditionally referred to as '16T-ers' but you can see from the images that some 6 leg trucks will in fact carry 20T!

knowing the truck being used in the quote is v important. i shall be watching closely for the volumes delivered in May.

[Thai Dhupp]

The first thing you needed to know is how land offices work. There are many back door deals made and you also need to be persist. When we went to our land office to have the name changed on the deed for our four rai to my wife's name, there was the same lengthy conversation about where the money came from. Luckily, the old man who sold us the land was a family friend and he supported the story that the money was my wife's.

The old man was told he could leave. Then more lengthy questioning with my wife when she was asked for another 30,000 to the officer to make it happen. My wife said she did not have the money. This went on a couple more times until the officer begrudgingly stamped the approval. Shaking down land owners seems to be the MO of land offices and you just got fed into that process.

Damn!...you too?
This Is Thailand?

lol I'm not (yet) used to it- I better get with the beat, I think!

Cos we have some other deals pending.

The arrangements with the OrBoTor were totally different, BTW. i will be telling this tale when i get down to the design and Plans - coming soon.

[Thai Dhupp]

ok... folks asked for construction pics.. so here they are!

yep, my little project, progressing nicely



Foundations all laid, and here's the scaffold in place for the walls - im using steel caging for extra wind resilience


...quite a lot of scaffold, actually


This concrete pour took a day, was pumped, and about 1800m3! hell of a floor slab, eh!?


here's the asphalt trucks waiting to lay the drive...you know - we mixed that on site, and not by hand either.


got the polystyrene in place for extra insulation before another slab pour... i told you it's a big project!


The access road is starting to take shape now...just in time for the rains to come and wash the foundations away (i hope not)


...and here, waiting for the final top slab shuttering to be fixed to 'bridge' the gap to that funny looking structure in the distance...odd... thats not on my original plans and it doesn't look very 'Thai'.


In fact... there seems to be a lot of roads on my plot, all of a sudden but... I hope the keen eyed amongst you notice... i insist on my building team wearing full coveralls and PPE. safety is No.1 ...who knows? it might even catch on...

OK... the 'day job' is progressing, and here's a few aerial shots to scale the sheer size of the project. Nearly 3 billion USD, and catering for an anticipated 30 million extra passengers a year.







In case anyone thought I was just 'taking it easy' over here in the sand pit!!
(bet this is one of the biggest builds to feature on the site... hope it's of a little interest to some of you)

oh... back to my build shortly - next up is how we came to the design.

[Dead Metal]

Thought I had been on some "big jobs" until I saw these photos , excellent, you got my attention/respect straight away.
I'm down the other end of the food-chain (chippy).
Looking forward to this thread especially as its by someone who really knows what he's on about.
"Hats off to ya guv" welcome to TeakDoor.

[Norton]

quite a lot of scaffold, actually

Strange bamboo species. No have Thailand.

[Thai Dhupp]

Thought I had been on some "big jobs" until I saw these photos , excellent, you got my attention/respect straight away.
I'm down the other end of the food-chain (chippy).
Looking forward to this thread especially as its by someone who really knows what he's on about.
"Hats off to ya guv" welcome to TeakDoor.

Thanks for the support Dead Metal, I know some stuff but no way I know everything - I am one guy in a very large project team. for sure I will be relying on some excellent advice from the guys on the forum along the way for this build.

Would love to 'borrow' some of this multi-nationality team for a couple of months to do the work in Chonburi!

'Theres goin' to be a raisin' (said in my best Mormon accent) springs to mind.

Indians, bangladeshis, pakistanis, chinese, filipinos, yes, thais too - all working like trojans here. i could definitely put them to use straight away!

Oh.. we are using both rock and roller here
and I am too old to fry (in the 50 degreeC summer heat)

[Thai Dhupp]

quite a lot of scaffold, actually

Strange bamboo species. No have Thailand.

LOL

...its different, but it sprouts up just the same!

[Radar]

hi Radar... glad the thread is useful. where are you building yours?

Sorry for the delay but Internet down last couple of days. We will build in Phon-Ngam which is near Kut Chum & Yasothon. Hopefully by year's end a start can be made.

[Thai Dhupp]

hi Radar... glad the thread is useful. where are you building yours?

Sorry for the delay but Internet down last couple of days. We will build in Phon-Ngam which is near Kut Chum & Yasothon. Hopefully by year's end a start can be made.

Hi Radar, thanks for the reply, starting before year end? yeah... you and me both!

[Thai Dhupp]

DESIGN

or... how we ended up with what we plan to build



Yes..this was me over 2 years ago, with blank paper, doodling the idea for the house..

We had the land, so now it was time to decide what to stick on it!

Me, I'm traditional, i like old, original stuff with history, I'm not too enamoured with modern western 'boxes' but... I do like modern creature comforts. I wanted a place that went with the traditions of Thailand but was constructed from bang-up-to-date technologies, or as near as I could afford, and with modern materials.


This was an early layout - I saw it being modelled on the traditional cluster of three building blocks, around an open verandah.

Not long after this sketch, I realised that to get everything in that I wanted, I would need two floors



Here is an early sketch (done during the Client Progress meeting!) and you can see I am already leaning towards the Ayutthaya-style roof - basically I'm looking at the best bits from that and the Lanna style.

I was looking at all options, so I considered this too, as the ready-made option:



Nice though it was, I wanted some slightly more substantial walls for better insulation, and TBH i wanted this to be 'all my own work'.

I did take some inspiration from designs that could be had in the bookstore:



This one gave me the idea for the master bedroom suite 'wing', with en-suite and dressing room / walk in wardrobes, etc.

The stair detail was also adapted into my plan, albeit next to kitchen, not 'living room':



As W started to write down what we wanted in the home, I kept thinking 'how am i going to turn all this into usable plans that mean something?' ...that got me looking round on the internet for easy-to-use floorplan programs.

The first one I tried was 'HomeByMe' and on the face of it, it was super-easy to use. I spent some time with it, designing the accurate floorplans:



The problem came with output. I wanted to send my effort to my autoCAD engineer here on the 'day job' to tidy it up, add the architectural scales and symbols and out put it as a DWG file. All of that was not possible!

Damn! back to the drawing board - literally.

Next was 'AutoCAD HomeStyler' which was also relatively easy to use for me. Surely this was compatible?

This was my attempt at the first floor, when using it:



OK... not too bad - I have no CAD training. There were out put problems with this too, but by using file type conversions, we were able to get it into something semi-usable for AutoCAD, and my draftsman turned out some basic plans, for conversion into a complete 45-page set of working plans in Thailand.

I don't know, I did not think my design was that difficult. or complicated?

It's basically three buildings. Building 1 and 2 are connected together. A verandah connects building 3 to the 'complex' ...but complex these drawings surely aren't.

Armed with my efforts, we went to see the engineer in the OrBorTor office. We had previously been in contact, and he said he would 'easily' be able to do the job. Great we thought. We left the plans I had done, and a great many answers to a great many questions of detail he asked.

And I went back to Abu Dhabi, feeling pretty pleased with myself. We periodically checked in, and were told, Ok no issues, not completed yet, butwill start the following week and will be done for when I go back to Thailand (in August 2016). Right up to a week before , he was still saying 'no problem'

Can you guess what he said with 3 days to go before the flight?


hmmm... hmmmm. Got it in one. He had not done ANYTHING AT ALL and could not do it. I had one of those moments in life, don't happen very often, when I literally stared at the phone in disbelief.

I was chomping at the bit to get to that Land office.... luckily Princess Joy calmed me down, and said, there must be a reason for it, blah blah, let's go there and find out what happened...

and in the next post... I will tell you what DID happen! (sometimes, a cloud can have a silver lining)

[fishlocker]

I was maybe a little bit stressed out about building a house on the farm. Thinking back the conversation went like this. Girlfriend "We could build a house in Laos.
Me"How much? "
Girlfriend, "Not much "
Me "ok"
Then it became difficult. They asked " What you want build it from."
I thought for a second, the answer seemed obvious, "wood." They did ok, no complaints and the price was right. That was over ten years ago. The place works but is still not finished. The upper is like being in a barn and that's ok as I will maybe finish it if and when I'm there to see it done to my liking. You could say that I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

Good luck with it and try not to sweat the small stuff.

[Thai Dhupp]

I was maybe a little bit stressed out about building a house on the farm. Thinking back the conversation went like this. Girlfriend "We could build a house in Laos.
Me"How much? "
Girlfriend, "Not much "
Me "ok"
Then it became difficult. They asked " What you want build it from."
I thought for a second, the answer seemed obvious, "wood." They did ok, no complaints and the price was right. That was over ten years ago. The place works but is still not finished. The upper is like being in a barn and that's ok as I will maybe finish it if and when I'm there to see it done to my liking. You could say that I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

Good luck with it and try not to sweat the small stuff.

Thanks FL... you are right of course, but the frustrating thing is... he basically wasted 7 MONTHS, when we could have got someone else to do it. I believe, and hes a nice guy, helped us since this incident, that he was ALWAYS not going to be able to do it, mainly through work commitment. In all we 'lost' over 8 months to peeps who told they could when in fact they could not!

For me, when you add that delay to my situation with regards to still working, away from the build site, its then more difficult to make other arrangements for progressing the build in general.

[Thai Dhupp]

I was maybe a little bit stressed out about building a house on the farm. Thinking back the conversation went like this. Girlfriend "We could build a house in Laos.
Me"How much? "
Girlfriend, "Not much "
Me "ok"
Then it became difficult. They asked " What you want build it from."
I thought for a second, the answer seemed obvious, "wood." They did ok, no complaints and the price was right. That was over ten years ago. The place works but is still not finished. The upper is like being in a barn and that's ok as I will maybe finish it if and when I'm there to see it done to my liking. You could say that I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

Good luck with it and try not to sweat the small stuff.

BTW...did you do a thread for your build? I looked but could not see one..

[Radar]

I look forward to your next post with mounting interest. Having decided to build in Phon-Ngam I undertook research on everything I could find about constructing a home as I have no knowledge whatsoever on how to do this. I started with the American site "House Plans Helper" then to a free house design software application "Sweet Home 3D". Went on from that point to plans that my Sydney engineer mate thought would be good enough to take to Thailand for an architect/builder to prepare "official" plans ready for approval. Still doing the odd little update of course.

[Thai Dhupp]

I look forward to your next post with mounting interest. Having decided to build in Phon-Ngam I undertook research on everything I could find about constructing a home as I have no knowledge whatsoever on how to do this. I started with the American site "House Plans Helper" then to a free house design software application "Sweet Home 3D". Went on from that point to plans that my Sydney engineer mate thought would be good enough to take to Thailand for an architect/builder to prepare "official" plans ready for approval. Still doing the odd little update of course.

Yeah... For inspiration and just plain and simple 'how to do stuff' there is a wealth of information on the excellent house build threads on this ( and other) Thailand forums. I have read so many of them, before I became a member, and always incredible tales of triumphing over the adversity that is 'building in Thailand'!

I went the opposite way to you for the design... I knew what I wanted, I drew it, I modified it, it was MY design ( with ideas from others). Only then I formalised it and then gave that to an external person to turn into a set of Thailand plans that could get approved with a building permit.

[Thai Dhupp]

DESIGN part 2 - what happened next...

Well, we got off the plane, got the hire car, and high-tailed it to Bo Thong. I was calm but I was disappointed and I wanted some good reasons.

We entered the OrBorTor Office, and there he was, my draftsman-that-wasn't, at the desk, greeting us like nothing had happened!

10 minutes of convo with PJ and he looked a bit shell shocked. He came out from behind the glass counter, to the waiting area where I was sat. full of apology, TBH I crumbled a bit because he seemed genuinely distressed (im not going to say 'for the trouble he'd caused', LOL).

He explained he was simply too busy with the full time job (I can relate to that, but there again i don't go round making promises I KNOW i cant keep), so that left us with no one to do the job.

Just at that very moment, in walked a couple of thai gents. one was kitted out in an official looking uniform the other smart casual and he was not saying anything, only watching everyone. The atmosphere changed immediately.

For a start, my engineer / draftsman look... scared.

I thought...police or military. PJ knew better, and had worked out that this was..THE OrBorTor himself. Wei's followed, and he asked what the issue was? The look of terror in his engineers eyes told me...whatever, do not tell this guy what happened.

All the while we are chatting, staff are passing, bowing slightly or Wei'ing. I noticed a silence had fallen in the admin office next to reception.

We explained we had been 'let down' by our draftsman (obviously not mentioning our friend in the office). No problem, says Mr OBT... I'm sure we can do it here!!

LOl fair play to the engineer, he stood up for himself and explained his already overloaded workload.

OK, says OBT... we cant have falangs getting held up for building etc. We want to encourage more into the area. so... just get the plans drawn up ANYWHERE and we will pass them straight away no problem and issue the building permit. Hes looking round. everyone is nodding agreement. even the admin staff who were not even in the convo but were clearly hanging on every word.

Smiles all round, he offered us coffee, he only had to glance up towards the office and two of the girls rushed off to make it.

Then he sat down next to me , whipped out his... camera-phone and said he wanted a selfie-style snap with yours truly. No probs said I, He took a couple, I also took a couple. Then the engineer said, why not get a group shot outside? Off we trooped... me and she, him and Mr. Silent-smart-casual.

We are lining up and the silent one was also in all the pictures.

i had to know.

Who IS he, i asked her

oh.. thats his BODYGUARD, came the reply!

uh? yes.. and.. he has a gun, so watch out!

OMG!

Apparently, the OBT also has bulletproof glass in his car, because some of the planning decisions don't go the way of big business, and 'accident s' happen, right!?

and here's me thinking we were going to move to sleepy hollow...

so..final part of design in the next gripping installment..

Oh, and I want to ask a question tomorrow also, so stay tuned. Thanks everybody..

[Norton]

sleepy hollow

Beware the headless horseman.

[jonnyenglish]

I believe that, like branches of banks and immigration offices, land offices vary wildly from district to district. Some are overloaded with applications, others are tricky, others are straightforward and helpful. Luckily, the office here in Sankamphaeng is the latter (well, at least from my experience it was).

Interestingly, I started off thinking I wanted a very similar style of house and layout as yours... Ayutthaya-style roof, separate rooms as buildings connected by covered walkways, raised up, with a traditional design, but using modern techniques and materials, I even looked at companies who offer to make up buildings in wood as you did.

Was very interested in this company:

Knock Down Houses


Whilst working out my building costs, I saw that they could design a bespoke house, supply materials and construct it for about 30-40% more than if I was to do it all myself, plus when I saw this design, I thought it would work really well for me with some modification:

Manihi House

I deliberated the pro's and cons, and in the end went with my own design with some guidance from my builder.

Certain factors came into play which greatly affected my ideas of what I wanted;

Finances: The more complex the construction the more cost, that Ayutthaya roof design alone would have doubled my build cost.

Land space: Although I have over 2 rai of land, it's an odd shape, which restricted what I could do. I was also very aware that my house would be visible from way across the valley, so scrapped the idea of a tall building.

Materials: I have lived in several wooden houses in Thailand, none of them have been ideal for a number of reasons and although they look amazing, my missus and I agreed we wouldn't live in one again. So, a wooden house was out as an option, (that said though, we may build a wooden guest house on our land at a later date, as they are a really nice design feature in the landscape).

New vs Old (or is that young vs old?): The missus really doesn't like old things, old styles etc, and has seemingly only made an exception with me Even if it's a new build, but with an old design flavour, she wouldn't go for it.

Weather: The idea of a Balinese style house, or a house where you walk through the garden/outside to get from one part to the next has always been an attractive proposition, and we have rented several houses with this theme over the past few years, all of which have been badly executed to the point of being annoying enough to move out.

Anyhow, enough of my waffle.. I'm really interested to see how your build develops, as it seems that your inspirations and plans are what I had initially envisaged, but had to abandon.

Cheers for sharing. JE