Thread: Roobarb's patch

First time I've seen this thread, thanks for your effort, it looks brilliant.

Originally Posted by terry57

First time I've seen this thread, thanks for your effort, it looks brilliant.

Thanks Terry, glad you've enjoyed it so far...

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

Maybe 100,000 per rai for decent land.

At least 400k per Rai outside of Udon.

OK, so we're going to skip July and early August entirely for one very simple but highly annoying reason and that is that my computer hard disc decided to pack up on me in August and I had not backed it up for a few weeks. The camera is still up in Chaiyaphum and the photos may or may not still be on it. It's either a matter of waiting for the next six months for the next time I'm up there in the hope that I didn't delete them, or we simply jump forwards a bit.

What are we going to miss?

The concrete pour and that upsets me as, having been mincing around worrying about bathrooms, having a big truck on the thread would be a suitable injection of testosterone.

Actually, I'm going to borrow the truck from Nigel's thread:



Thanks Nigel

Mine looked very similar but had a a red eagle on the side.

It was not like this one:



It was much bigger and looked more purposeful. Like one of these:



From what I'm told, it managed to get in there, dump it's load and then escape without getting bogged down. There was none of this sort of nonsense:

It's been a while since I have lived in Thailand and, whilst I'm sure that the Siam City Cement company has been around for a while, I've never really clocked their logo until now.

The first thought on seeing the truck was that they had sent the cement by post:



+



=

^ From the last post it's clear to me that I'm avoiding the next bit as, having left the builder to it, we are about to move back into the murky world of crap, low resolution photos again.

The photos will improve as we go on but for the time we are stuck with the digital equivalent of a pinhole camera. I suspect that it was done this way to hide as much detail as possible so as to stop me phoning up and trying to change things.

Actually, to digress a second, I just Googled 'Digital Pinhole Camera'. They actually do exist, albeit not commercially:





They produce images a bit like this:



Aaaagh, more avoidance.

OK, next post we're back to the build.

So other than the concrete pour and completing the roof, the other major item that had been going on was planking up the first floor walls:



There are not a lot of photos of people working on the site for the simple reason that the place was built by an initial crew of five people, with a few extras drafted in when needed.

The numbers dwindled throughout the build, firstly with the welding fellow successfully taking himself out of action for a while, then a couple from Petchabun who were a part of the team decided to throw their toys out of the pram and flounced. Of the original crew we ended up with just the builder and his elderly mother on site.

But in fairness we were in no rush so we left it to him to get himself sorted out. Progress was still pretty good all things considered:

Hi Roobarb,
Good on you, for keeping the builder and his elderly mother on the job..
" do it once and do it right" Good chippies are hard to find anywhere, looks like they are doing a good job, to me..and you of course.

Will be a fine home when finished.

Cheers

Biff

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

Originally Posted by Roobarb

Siam City Cement

The big fella used to wholey own them, but sold a large part of SSSC (known in Thailand, unsurprisingly, as 'boon nok') too a large Swizz cement company (Holcim?). I worked for them for a while, with their SMT, they were totally corrupt and useless, massive funds being sucked out by the corrupt managers, virtually all ex-Chula yellow shirters. It was amazing to me how the company survived. The health and safety concerns were from a different planet, on site deaths were, I believe, the highest in the world of any cement plant... But, they had all the big contratcs, all the drilling rights, never got sued...

Sort of makes me wish I was there for the pour. I'm now worried there are bits of some cement-works Somchai mixed up in it all.

We'd better call in the saffron mafia. Keep any potential pii at bay...

Originally Posted by biff

Hi Roobarb,
Good on you, for keeping the builder and his elderly mother on the job..
" do it once and do it right" Good chippies are hard to find anywhere, looks like they are doing a good job, to me..and you of course.

Hello Biff

I didn't have much choice about keeping the builder and his ma, if they had left then we would have been rather stuffed...

All in all they were doing a decent job of it. Honestly it could have been a whole lot worse and my feeling was that we would be better off to get the house up and done to a standard that the builder was at least confident about achieving well rather than trying to push him to go further which would probably be an expensive mistake. The thought is we can slowly rebuild it either as bits fall off or when I decide that I really can't live with some of the results.

We were lucky with the builder as, whilst he was getting close to being out of his depth on this project (his style was more the sort of houses that we had dismantled to make this thing), he plodded along doing the best he could without us being around, and 90% of the time seemed to make the right decisions. He kept the crew small as he was quite keen to try and keep complete monkeys off the site. This was not always successful although in fairness to the guy his pool of available talent is a bit limited.

There were a few screw ups which only became obvious when the house was completed. More of that anon...

Originally Posted by Roobarb

Originally Posted by helge

Originally Posted by nigelandjan

Paint it, , the TP are hovering over the keypads.

Originally Posted by Roobarb

If they had a crack at yours they will have a field day over mine...

Nah; don't worry

Most posters sense in which construction threads constructive criticism is welcomed

I have no idea how to respond to that Helge...

Is it a veiled criticism of my thread, or am I merely being overly sensitive in thinking so and it's actually a crack at Nigel?






Yet oddly enough I would welcome the criticism as whilst my thread represents the compromises I have made for my circumstances, others may be in different circumstances but want to do something similar. For me it may be criticism, but for those reading this, and that's who this thread is for, others' comments could well be constructive.

.

Certainly not a crack at your build or thread

It's hard to judge a build from pics

Details like tiles and the placing of windows/doors, which can hurt your eye are just..details

If you are happy, then all is good

Even with incorrectly placed bearing part, you seldom see it torn down/redone

I have wasted 34 years of my life in construction and had 4 builds done in Thailand, and still only advice I can offer,(has been repeated over and over on TD ) is: Be there


Yes the crack was at Nigel, and I shouldn't have, but :

He kind of provoked it

Originally Posted by helge

Originally Posted by Roobarb

Originally Posted by helge

Originally Posted by nigelandjan

Paint it, , the TP are hovering over the keypads.

Originally Posted by Roobarb

If they had a crack at yours they will have a field day over mine...

Nah; don't worry

Most posters sense in which construction threads constructive criticism is welcomed

I have no idea how to respond to that Helge...

Is it a veiled criticism of my thread, or am I merely being overly sensitive in thinking so and it's actually a crack at Nigel?






Yet oddly enough I would welcome the criticism as whilst my thread represents the compromises I have made for my circumstances, others may be in different circumstances but want to do something similar. For me it may be criticism, but for those reading this, and that's who this thread is for, others' comments could well be constructive.

.

Certainly not a crack at your build or thread

It's hard to judge a build from pics

Details like tiles and the placing of windows/doors, which can hurt your eye are just..details

If you are happy, then all is good

Even with incorrectly placed bearing part, you seldom see it torn down/redone

I have wasted 34 years of my life in construction and had 4 builds done in Thailand, and still only advice I can offer,(has been repeated over and over on TD ) is: Be there


Yes the crack was at Nigel, and I shouldn't have, but :

He kind of provoked it

No worries fella...

I wish I was able to be there for the build as things could have been done a lot better, or at least I'd like to think they could have been.

If I was building a house to live in long-term, especially knowing what I know now, I'd certainly want to be there every day. In retrospect on this one I also wish I'd got an architect involved, had the job planned and the materials cost estimated properly too (although it may have stopped the project dead in its tracks if I knew what this was going to set me back before I'd started).

I'm happy with what I'm getting simply because I know I couldn't realistically expect any more. In fact I have been incredibly lucky to have a builder who just got on with it and did the job he was meant to to the best of his ability. With some of the horror stories on here it could have been a nightmare.

Your advice to all remains absolutely sound. Be there or beware...

Originally Posted by helge

I have wasted 34 years of my life in construction and had 4 builds done in Thailand, and still only advice I can offer,(has been repeated over and over on TD ) is: Be there

Nonsense!

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

Nonsense!

Always exceptions

And you are an easy going type of guy, so probably happy if your house is build on the correct address

Don't cry when your house ends up like this one, 555.
On a serious note, a site manager who can actually communicate in English is really helpful I guess. Just tell the guy that if something is not build according to plan he won't get paid.

Originally Posted by Koetjeka

Just tell the guy that if something is not build according to plan he won't get paid.

The result of that is the immature little pricks walk off site and you never see them again.

Originally Posted by Marmite the Dog

Originally Posted by Koetjeka

Just tell the guy that if something is not build according to plan he won't get paid.

The result of that is the immature little pricks walk off site and you never see them again.

It could be either a blessing or an absolute pain in the ass.

Pick your battles wisely...

And so the planking up of the exterior continued (and I do apologise for the quality of these pics).

Photos of the back of the house, the rear bedroom in the foreground:



Another shot of the rear bedroom. The single pane window in the corner looks into the upstairs living room area.



The master bedroom is on the right of the photo below with door to the kitchen below:

Continuing the stroll around the house, the master bedroom (kitchen below):



... and then the en-suite behind the bedroom. I was actually rather pleased with the large window, and had the loo placed directly opposite so I can bask in the morning sunlight, enjoying nature's glory as I, well you know.

Work had finally started on the front door area too.

When I asked the builder why he hadn't built it along with the rest of the place he said that he didn't know what dimensions I wanted. To be honest I didn't have a clue either so we went for 10 feet by whatever distance the pillars were apart, then an extra five feet for the front door overhang.



The guys appeared to be busy trying to get the front door frame in straight.



It was nice of them to make a bit of effort here, the front door was definitely one of the straighter door frames in the house.

It's a sort of weird batch of pics this, but I'll do the best I can with it.

So walking in through the front door, the study area is to the left and eventually the stairs will be here. The end wall appears to be crying out for a bit of render:



Inside the kitchen looking at... a wall with render I guess? This is facing roughly towards the front door:



The rendered wall is the one at a funny angle to the rest of the house which has left us with the rhomboid kitchen. Nothing exactly wrong with having a room that is less than square, it's just a little less conventional than perhaps I was hoping for.

... although TIT so perhaps it is actually quite conventional?

And then wandering out onto the downstairs terrace and looking back into the house towards the kitchen:



... and then one from the back of the house looking onto the terrace.



I know it's difficult to picture at this stage (actually I should say 'imagine', it's perfectly easy to picture if we had used a decent camera), but I'm looking forward to the end result on this. This will probably be the main lolling around, beer drinking area during the day.

And then going upstairs (well climbing up a ladder as we don't yet have stairs).

Looking down from the first floor to where the front door will be. The stairs will eventually be against the wall on the left:



The triangle of wall under the front door roof will eventually be glass. It seems a real shame to plank up the rest of it though as I do like the view out to the trees and the splash of colour that they provide.

I did toy with putting two large, triangular shaped fixed smoked glass windows in instead of the walls - smoked glass so that they are less obviously windows when you look from the outside. It would make, at a glance, a sort of leaf wall which would be pretty cool as there's stuff all else you can do with that area. It's one of those things that had I been on site I would have done, but I wasn't so it got put on the 'too complicated for now' list. .

How difficult could it be to retrofit? The walls are wood after all so five minutes with a chainsaw, insert a wooden frame, some glass et voila.

All is not lost, a potential project for the future.