Originally Posted by
mikenot
G’day Khun Bogan, I am formerly from the Hunter Valley, not too far from your old haunts. That’s a nice bit of land you have there, great views. I reckon you made a couple of good decisions by sticking to common Thai design concepts and by having the main bedroom on the ground floor. A lot of people would have wanted the main bedroom to have the best views from upstairs but when you are building a retirement home we have to accept that sooner or later those stairs are going to be too much effort !
Personally I would have done the kitchen layout a different way as I think it’s going to be a bit gloomy and lack ventilation. I would have left off the lower wall as shown on the plan to give easy access to the doorway (leading out to the wife’s herb garden with all the essential chilli and basil etc ? ) but let’s wait until we see the final product.
Without going in to more financial details than you want to, was your contract for an all in price or for labour only and you buy materials ? We are hopefully building our retirement home in Ubon next year, I think I have a good handle on material costs but will have to wait until we move there to start getting some labour quotes. From reading older threads the labour to material costs vary between 25% and 50% of material costs.
Anyway, best of luck on the rest of your build, keep those posts and photos coming, Mike.