Thread: Building our Retirement Home in Nan Province

Hi Folks,

I've been reading several threads on Thai home builds including the outstanding thread by Thai Dhupp and have been inspired to create one myself and share our experience of building a home near Pua in Nan province. We purchased the land in February, moved to Thailand and Nan in May and commenced the build in mid-August. I'll focus on posts that bring us up to the current build status over the next day or so and then post major updates twice a week until complete. At this stage our builder is suggesting a move-in date towards the end of December. Looks possible.

But first, a little about myself and the Thai wife. I'm an Australian about to turn sixty. I'm an IT/Change Management professional within banking and aviation fields and in the last decade have lived and worked in Australia, Singapore, UAE and the USA. I am not retired, just half way through a two year break that has seen us travelling quite a bit and now wanting to build our eventual retirement home. My Thai wife is an ex-nurse, we've been together for more than ten years, married for eight and she is now just on the wrong side of forty. She quit working five years ago when I moved from Singapore to the UAE and has proved very adaptable to life in other countries. While she has a permanent visa to live and work in Australia, we've decided our future is in Thailand and after a couple of years searching for a location we liked in northern Thailand, we found land in Nan province. We prefer mountains, forests, green and streams; we are not city or beach folks.

That's all for now. I was going to post a photo of the land but appears I need to research how to do that first.

Kind regards,
BoganInParasite (BiP)

Welcome to the Teak Door BiP and good luck with the build.

Looking forward to see your plans and build photos.

Thank you David. Working in the pics, may be too much of a newbie to post those yet.

Welcome and good luck with your build. Seems you have things well sorted in your life.

Welcome to the forum. Looking forward to your build thread. Thai Dhupp's thread is comprensive and one of TD's most recent.

Suggest you use imgur for your pics. Best way to get pics posted here.

Welcome BiP, looking forward to your story, there's quite a lot of sound advice in posts and some really knowledgeable posters so you'll likely be in good hands.

Thank you NamPikToot.

Originally Posted by NamPikToot

Welcome BiP, looking forward to your story, there's quite a lot of sound advice in posts and some really knowledgeable posters so you'll likely be in good hands.

Thank you Norton. Thanks for the imgur tip. Have created an account and album there and loaded a selection of initial photos. Not quite sure if there are some further hurdles to jump through before I can post photos, I'm a newbie here.

Bogan
Welcome and I hope you soon learn how to post pictures as I prefer them to words, although words are needed to explain the pictures.
As an IT professional it shouldn't be too difficult to learn how to do it but then again being an Aussie!

If you need help I am sure there are many people here who will tell you how and if I can do it must be easy as I'm an Aussie also.
I must admit it is so much easier to post pictures now than it was when we built our house back in 2010.

I don't use any photo sharing apps such as suggested like imgur, I just post them straight from my PC. The only issue I have is resizing as I can only do 1 at a time in "Paint" and then only post 1 at a time to here.

I also believe you have to have a minimum number of posts before you can post pictures so just post crap like others do to build your numbers.

Anyway looking forward to seeing your house unfold here.

Cheers

Thanks ootai. I'd prefer to post photos direct as well and may move to that way but initially I'm going to try imgur. And yes, it would seem I need to earn the right to post photos so will persist with a few text based posts in the meantime.

Best of luck, BiP... you will need it along the way!

You are off to a good start by posting the tale here on TD - lots of really helpful, useful advice to the inevitable questions you will have.

Between us all here we have most things covered, so... bring it on!!

Oh.. and thanks for the compliment - I hope i can keep it up 'til the end, and the end (of parts 1 and 2) is now in sight. parts 3 - 6 still to come though!

You need to get your post count up before you can post pics

Hi Thai Dhupp. Firstly congrats on your build and thread. I'm in awe and only up to page 34. Probably spend most of Sunday exploring the rest. I enjoyed my three years in Dubai although mainly because I was in the quiet company of my wife and she living with me for the first time. Most of the things I hated about Dubai, others did as well. What others loved, I generally hated as well. Strangely enough, I'm being hounded by a headhunter at the moment for a consultancy role in Abu Dhabi; it may prove tempting so I would leave my wife and the builder to finish the house.

Seems I do need to establish a bit more of a track record here before I can post photos.

Bogan
The reason I don't like photo sharing sites is that if the picture is deleted from that account then it disappears from the thread here.
If you go back and look at the old threads that used photobucket there are now no pictures.
In my threads the pictures are still there because I actually put a copy of the picture into a Teakdoor album.

Mind you back then it was a headf**k to put pictures on here.
I always remember a thread that a poster called setaputra started and he couldn't figure it out, lots of people tried to help him but he just got more and more angry and eventually quit the forum over it.
Keep posting, go to the Teakdoor Lounge threads and post stuff.

hey Bip, I am probably the least savvy IT guy on here but photos are now easy. You have them in your documents? So see the icons above, click the one that looks like a movie or tv. Up will pop a menu. Saying insert image, from computer, choose file, taking you to your files, then upload. Its easy.

Welcome through the halls, Bogan.

Anticipating your continued home build threads.
Best to ya.

Cheers.

Originally Posted by BoganInParasite

Not quite sure if there are some further hurdles to jump through before I can post photos, I'm a newbie here

You will need 50 posts. Easy to get.

Thanks juehoe, I originally specified Q-Con blocks as I was interested in the insulation (external walls) and sound reduction (for inside walls) characteristics. Our builder Mark was less keen and admitted neither he nor the build team had experience with them. We had a long discussion about the house design and the orientation and direct sun exposure of the external walls. What we found was that the east wall was largely shaded by teak trees in summer and the 1m eave, there was no direct sunlight on the north and south walls and that the main exposure was the west wall which had no tree cover. So then we looked at the west wall and found the greatest direct heat transfer issue were the large windows in the master and bedroom 3. The wife and I were not prepared to compromise on those. At about our third discussion we agreed to use the red bricks, bump up the aircon BTU capacity by 2,000 BTUs and added the 1m level 2 floor level extensions on the east and west external walls to give a little extra shade to level 1 wall. You can see them on the image below. (I'm sure there is an appropriate name for these extensions, anyone care to let me know.) At the time we were in discussion I thought I read online that Q-Con walls were quite inferior to red brick walls in terms of carrying static loads such as kitchen cabinets, etc and that was in my mind as well. Subsequently I've read they are okay for those types of loads, and again I've read there sh*t at it. Someone must know for real but since I've already made my decision to go for red bricks I've no incentive to delve deeper. And one last point, I never compared the overall material and labour costs between the two options, it was not a cost based decision. Regards, - BiP

Originally Posted by juehoe

Very good and informative thread - thank you very much!

I may have missed the subject in one of the many posts: But what was the reason to choose the read bricks instead of Q-Con (or similar). With Q-Con you can build much better walls and even faster and they cost only a litte more than a wall with read bricks.

Above - More bathroom plumbing going in. This is the team foreman.

Below - One of our lovely ladies today. Hold their own on the cement mixing, bricklaying and cement and brick delivery activities.

Above - Mark the builder and his onsite supervisor. Looking to where the kitchenette will be on level 2 and into the bedroom 4 ensuite.

Below - Level 2 living room view to the north.

Above - Looking the 8m length of the living room towards the north.

Below - Completed roof.