Thread: Roobarb's patch

Dead Metal, thanks for joining in. TD is an excellent source of ideas and inspiration. To be honest it's largely to blame for me embarking on this build.

I'll try to let you know the costs as we go forwards. At the moment the story is still in about 2009 or something so the prices are all pretty out of date. I'd guess that all in we sunk a bit under a million baht into buying the land and sorting it out, but I didn't really keep any record of it.

As I write this I realise one of the major drawbacks to doing this thread is that I might actually work out what we have spent on the project so far, which could be quite disturbing.

If you think I'm being deliberately vague with the prices then it's either I don't know, or it's that I don't want to know...

This particular part of the forum is meant to be about building rather than faffing about with filling land and the like, so I'm going to jump forwards to sometime around last November.

Having filled the land we'd decided to leave it time to settle, and this was a good excuse for doing nothing for several years.

Each time we would go back to stay with the in-laws I would wander off to have a look at the land. I'd generally pace around purposefully for a while and take some measurements that I would then either lose or find completely indecipherable when I got home. In an odd way the land was fulfilling its purpose of giving me something to do up there, but eventually even I realised the futility of planning without ever implementing.

Everything was beginning to get a bit overgrown.

View from the gate, my sweeping driveway had become a field:



We had at some stage had someone fill the south east corner of the land by another metre in preparation for eventually building a house. This was fairly rubbish soil and over time had shrunk to about 50 cms.

The photo below is taken standing on the roof of a car parked on top of the raised portion facing north east. You can still see the outline of where Fish Pond 2 was. That fill was pretty solid and probably only shrank by about 20 cms or so.



Looking south east from the raised portion:



Actually, let me see if I can get a video in from Youtube taken from the south east corner

No idea if this will work or not.

Good lord, I think it did.

I was going to be staying with the in-laws for a few more days. Enough of the dreaming. It was time for action...!

As Dead Metal pointed out above, TeakDoor is a great place for inspiration.

At the time I think that Wimpy was just reaching the end of his excellent thread recounting how he bought a village house and rebuilt it on his land.

That was the answer, we needed to send out a raiding party to relieve a villager of their house.

Now, if the truth be told, I was hoping that this would give us an excuse to tool around the countryside in the car for a day or two to fill some time and that nothing would come of it. We could then head back home, myself content in the knowledge that I'd tried to drive the project forwards but alas, time as ever had prevented us bringing it to fruitiuon. We could then resume the hunt when we returned a year later - and hopefully for the years after that. Everyone says that finding old wooden houses is tough, this had to be a good wheeze for further procrastination.

If you remember, when we were looking for the land the in-laws had done a great job of sourcing some options, and I'd rather forgotten how enthusiastic they could get.

The following morning we all bundled into the car and headed off into a village some 20 minutes away up in the hills. FIL got out and wandered up to the first person he saw. After a few minutes it transpired that the guy had an old rice barn that he didn't want. It was a simple little 9 post structure but with some decent floorboards. He wanted 20K for it.

"We'll 'ave that then".

Further enquiries unearthed a fairly old 12 post house just over the road, again with a decent amount of wood on it. The owner wanted 110K for that.

This is fun.

"Try 'em at 100"

FIL goes into negotiation mode for 10 minutes...

"Yeah, deal".

As I was really not planning on finding any houses I unfortunately didn't bring a camera with me so I can't show you what we bought.

A few days later the cash changed hands and some hardy fellows were sent off to take the buildings apart.

It's probably at this point that I should mention that I know absolutely nothing about building apart from what I have learned from the pages of Teak Door. One thing that did come to mind, as it had been mentioned on the site more than a few times, was that disassembled wooden houses left lying around had a tendency to gradually disappear, either because the wood gets nicked by the locals or because it gets eaten by termites.

The first problem could be solved by sticking the wood in the in-laws' back garden for a while, but that wouldn't stop the termites.

The only real option was to reassemble the buildings on our land. As we were going to do that we may as well at least make them vaguely inhabitable.

It's a slippery slope...

Interesting post roobarb , great to see someone having a crack at it.some talk about it while others such as yourself just get on with it ,nice one, look forward to more

...i'm enjoying this.

I have read elsewhere on TD that they soaked the timber prior to dismantling.
Is this the method you adopted.
How easy was it to dismantle, did you lose much. ?

So it was back to the font of all knowledge (yes, Teak Door's construction threads) to get the basics of how to build a house.

As you all know there is a vast wealth of information here, but much of it was above my head. A common theme to the advice from most who had done this before was:

1) Have an architect draw up a plan
2) Get an accurate costing for all materials you will need
3) Speak to several builders first and see the work they have done before deciding on who to use
4) Get a detailed quote in writing stating what the builder would do and the payment milestones
5) Don't involve family members as if it all goes pear shaped then it can be awkward
6) The most important one: Be on site every day to check the materials and ensure the job is done properly.

It was all a bit scary but, given that we live overseas, point 6 we would have to ignore. This in turn meant that point 5 was going to have to be questioned. Points 3 and 4 were going to be reliant on who actually monitored the progress (see point 5 that we were going to ignore) and so were not terribly relevant. Point 2 would be useful but also largely irrelevant given we are ignoring point 6, so point 1 was probably not necessary either.

Sorted.

Originally Posted by Dead Metal

...i'm enjoying this.

I have read elsewhere on TD that they soaked the timber prior to dismantling.
Is this the method you adopted.
How easy was it to dismantle, did you lose much. ?

I did ask about the soaking and apparently they knew about this and did soak them first, although we were not there at the time. They took about three days to dismantle the 12 post house, I suspect the rice barn fell apart with a well aimed shove.

Did we lose much? I really don't know, other than its surprising how little amount of space the wood takes up when the houses are dismantled. My first reaction on seeing pictures of the dismantled buildings was that someone had nicked half of it. The in-laws were pretty protective of the whole thing so I doubt any light fingered types would have got a look in.

One thing that did surprise me was that the builder rejected quite a bit of the wooden sidings (is that the right name for the outside wall planks?) as being too thin, so that disappeared for some other use somewhere. The main bits I was after were the posts and the floorboards anyway.

Originally Posted by beerlaodrinker

Interesting post roobarb , great to see someone having a crack at it.some talk about it while others such as yourself just get on with it ,nice one, look forward to more

Cheers BLD, it was more by accident than design that we ended up building the house. Once committed it was a bit difficult to come up with a reason not to continue...

Originally Posted by Roobarb

He wanted 20K for it.

"We'll 'ave that then".

Originally Posted by Roobarb

This is fun.

"Try 'em at 100"

Nice. This thread is getting better and better, but leaving me eager for more, more pics... Very nice commentary too.

In the video, looked like a very pleasant breeze - beer, sala, bbq, breeze, could be very nice indeedy...

Originally Posted by beerlaodrinker

some talk about it while others such as yourself just get on with it

I hope you're not including me in that first group, BLD!

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

beer, sala, bbq, breeze, could be very nice indeedy...

Ah, yes, that's exactly what I had in mind, and oddly enough in exactly the same order of priority too.

The house is really more of a means to those ends.

We'll get into the pics shortly, I promise...

First of all the plans.

A few years back I found out about Google's Sketchup, again from these very pages.

I like Sketchup, and can spend hours happily knocking up designs for things. It makes it much easier to show a contractor/architect/designer what you want, especially when language can be a bit of a barrier.

I've used it for all sorts of things from small office renovation plans:



To factory layouts:



As a visualisation tool I'd really recommend it to anyone. It's free to download (at least I think it still is) and very easy to use.

The thought therefore was that rather than getting an architect, I'd simply knock up a design on Sketchup, print off a few photos of houses from TD (belated thanks to many of you who unknowingly contributed here) then pass the lot to a builder and let him do his worst. After all, the plan was to just do a basic village house style thing so nothing too complicated.

And so the first attempt at a design was pretty simple, many of you will notice remarkable similarities to Wimpy's house:



Two bedrooms and a small bathroom upstairs:



... and space for a small living room, kitchen and bigger bathroom downstairs



I couldn't remember what Wimpy ended up spending, but had the feeling it was around 500K so I reckoned that if we came in around that then all would be good.

It occurred to me that we had already bought both a 12 post house and a 9 post rice barn. All in 21 posts.

If we therefore assumed that we would raise the whole thing on a 16 post concrete frame in a 4 by 4 layout we can keep the ground floor open (lots of outside space) then use 16 of the wooden posts for the first floor, and a few others for doing the roof frame. Then just slap some walls on, down with some floors, bolt on a roof and we're all good. We had the walls and floors already. Just have to pay for a roof and we're there.

As mentioned previously I have absolutely no idea about building or architecture so to me the above logic seemed absolutely sound.

Things continued to get more carried away with extra extensions, but I was enjoying myself and eventually ended up with this:







Though I say it myself, I was rather impressed with it.

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

I hope you're not including me in that first group, BLD!

Yes. pull your finger out betty.

Great little thread in the making here, keep it coming, I think ill start checking in at TD again!

good luck with the build

So, a bit more detail on what we are going to attempt to knock together over the coming months

The ground floor (from the north):



Going from left to right -

- Kitchen (with outside kitchen in front)
- Don't know what you'd call the next bit - breakfast room perhaps - with folding doors to the ground floor verandah
(I feel like I'm writing estate agent's blurb here)
- Front door with stairs up to 1st floor
- Downstairs bathroom
- Outside dunny for unwanted guests


First floor (from the west):



Going from left to right:

- Bedroom 3
- Living room area to the front with balcony
- Bathroom
- Stairs up to loft area
- Bedroom 2
- Master bedroom with ensuite


Top floor (from the north):



The idea here was that the top floor area would be a galleried overflow for kids to sleep in etc, assuming that it didn't get to hot up there at night.

More importantly I wanted the roof area to be as open as possible to allow for ventilation. There's generally a bit of a breeze where we are so having opening windows in the gables means that we should be able to get a flowthough of air most of the time. This I hope will also be helped by having the large opening doors downstairs and the open stairwell. The easiest way to get to the windows in the gables is to be able to walk to them, hence putting a proper floor up there.

For ventilation reasons the wall that is shown in the top floor above the master bedroom was taken out in the final plan. It only ended up in the first plan as it was a case of 'I wonder if I can draw a wall in here on Sketchup - Oooh, yes, I can').

There were a few other changes that were made as we went forwards (the stairs, the downstairs bathroom layout, the windows facing the verandah, roof over the first floor balcony) but basically this is what the builder was given.

Now the more technically minded would realise that there is no scale to this thing. The reason for this was I was too lazy to try and add one, but the excuse I gave was that I wanted to make sure that we maximised the use of the existing wood we had. If the posts were 11 feet high then there was no point in making the ceilings 9 feet and lopping 2 perfectly decent feet off the end.

As I write this I rather cringe in embarrassment at the admission, but we left it up to the builder to work out the best dimensions to go with. The only guidance was I wanted between 3 metres and 4 metres between the upright posts (if in doubt then the larger the better) and minimum 3 metre ceilings on the ground and first floor.

Originally Posted by sunsetter

Great little thread in the making here, keep it coming, I think ill start checking in at TD again!

good luck with the build

Thanks Sunsetter, good to have you aboard...!

It was about in February this year that we finished the highly technical evaluation of the various builder's proposals and agreed to go with the guy who we had met buying his vegetables in the market.

I wanted to get him to start right away. Pick the nearest auspicious date, pay a bit more if it's going to take the monk a bit more research to find a closer one sort of thing and let's get going.

The builder though had different ideas. He said that he was just finishing off another house and didn't like trying to run two jobs at a time so could only start in April.

Whilst this was a bit frustrating, ultimately when the house was built/finished didn't really matter to us. More importantly however it was actually quite reassuring. He seemed to have some pride in his work.

Did he want any payment up front as a deposit?

Not really, just 50K or so when he started to get the ball rolling and then the rest spilt into three payments of (I think) when the roof was on, the walls were done and when the house was completed. Any variations are agreed and paid for on the spot - well, within week or so.

All seemed too good to be true.

Originally Posted by Roobarb

He had a look at the pictures and reckoned 150K or so for the small one and 430K for the big one (labour only).

Can this gent come down to NN and work???

That's a nice house, that's gonna cost bundles, looks like a 2 million + house to me...

Keep it coming, Rhubarb, no custard here...

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

Can this gent come down to NN and work???

That's a nice house, that's gonna cost bundles, looks like a 2 million + house to me...

Keep it coming, Rhubarb, no custard here...

You might upset your in-laws a bit if you bring someone else in to spend your money Betty. All those brownie points will quickly wash away...

Kind of hoping it's not a 2 million + house as I'll be stuck out here for a good while longer trying to pay for it if it is.

There's not really a budget per se but, not including buying the old wooden houses, the aim is to get to a basic finish at a bit over a million Baht (materials and labour). So long as the thing doesn't fall down or get eaten by termites over the coming years then we can fiddle around with tidying up stuff and complete it to a standard that we choose when we need to.

I really have no idea what it's going to end up costing (other than it will be more than I told my wife). If it gets too much we can always down tools for a year or so whilst we lick the financial wounds.

My take on it is that we've got an opportunity to have a crack at it. If we don't give it a go then we will never know...