Thread: A "not so Grand Design" in Ubon Ratchathani

Originally Posted by mikenot

Leo #1 wasn't much help so I had to nip down to the shop to get a second and third opinion.

Were you blessed with any wisdom gained from your three friends?

Originally Posted by Topper

Were you blessed with any wisdom gained from your three friends?

Not really, but I can always get together with them again Cannot rush into these things you know. Gotta do it the Thai way ...form a committee, me , Leo #1,2 & 3, and have regular meetings.

^^^^ I think those foldable ones are great if the space is small. If the space is large (like the one from @peciacake, then a built-in one makes sense).

If you don't want to buy from a hardware store or online, you can prolly have one made for you. If you have a good welder, you/ he can prolly make one from aluminum or tubular steel.

Here in PH, many builders use "tubulars" but I don't really know if they're made of iron or steel. They're used for fences, gates, clothes hanging rods, etc. They come in different sizes too: 1x1 inch, 2x1, 2x2, 2x4, etc.

Originally Posted by mikenot

Gotta do it the Thai way ...form a committee, me , Leo #1,2 & 3, and have regular meetings.

as long as you don't invite that foreigner Mont Clare, you know what they say "Wine and Beer you'll feel......."

How much was the architect fee?

Originally Posted by malmomike77

as long as you don't invite that foreigner Mont Clare, you know what they say "Wine and Beer you'll feel......."

no South Africans invited, they will just want to talk about cricket and rugby ...2 sports that bore me to tears, almost as bad as synchronised drowning

Hi Mike, one of the items that wasn't properly planned for our build was guttering and down pipes. Due to other priorities (code for trying to teach SWMBO how to budget) I completely dropped the ball when it came to proper planning for guttering, down pipes and rain water harvesting. Ended up with a less than satisfactory outcome as a result.
If I may make a suggestion - start installation as soon as the roof is on and the soffits in, particularly the covered area / breeze way. The earlier it's done the better - the whole site will benefit when the rainy season starts.

The other point to consider is Thai's don't do guttering as well as what you'd expect given the climate. Tropical down pours are not well catered for from my observations. The choices for guttering are a bit on the skinny side as a result.
SGC make some decent UPVC stuff but the sizes are on the small side and would overflow pretty quickly. Bluescope do some good gal / zincalume stuff and it will last and last. But if the local Bluescope office isn't up to speed with it the quoting process can be pretty tedious.

Rainwater harvesting is definitely something I'd encourage you to consider, particularly given you've a good design, ideal for routing the down pipes into a couple of decent tanks. The way I see it water security is becoming an increasingly significant problem around Thailand - the more you can do to increase storage the better I reckon.

Keep the posts up mate - always look forward to seeing how it's progressing.

Cheers

Please keep it coming, Mike!

Originally Posted by mikenot

On the other hand, SCG claim their 6 inch glass batts have a R-value of 38, or over 6 per inch, so somebody is wrong. We have a choice of 1 inch (25mm) or 2 inch PU foam (at an added cost), or nothing and use batts. I'm tempted to go for the 2 inch PU, we can always add batts later.
Noise reduction during pouring rain is as important a consideration as heat reduction would be. Also, we are planning on a light grey roof which should help in heat reduction...

We went with white BlueScope Zacs pre-fitted with 25 mm PU foam for the roof, with the intention of monitoring the room temperature inside so we can decide whether to fit R38 foil backed fibreglass insulation at a later date. As it stands there is a strong likelihood we will insulate the ceiling - the room temperature is regularly 27 degrees by 2:00pm. The R-value of the PU foam on its own isn't high enough to mitigate heat transfer. From memory it was significantly lower than R38 fibreglass insulation.

We asked our builder to install the suspended ceiling so it would be easy to lay the rolls of insulation between the joists. Something must have got lost in translation as it is going to be a nightmare. We also added a 90 cm manhole in the ceiling so it is easy to get the rolls into the roof cavity, plus put a fluro tube up there to see what I'm doing.

Noise transfer with PU foam backed steel isn't a problem - noise from heavy rain doesn't intrude. Nor does the BlueScope roof suffer from the constant tick, tick, tick from expansion and contraction that other brands / manufacturers suffer from.

^ Be inyeresting to see now long before / if the blue scope delaminates?

^ coming on. I note the welds joining the lengths, i'd check them. Thais don't generally grind back for a clean weld and the joins can be awful. For me, i'd also get them to plate over the welds

oh and really check all the welds joining to the column rebar - apolgies if i'm teaching grandma to suck eggs but this is your roof and your security

^ The welder seems to be thorough at his job. He took a while to do the load bearing plates on the rebar, constantly checking and double checking levels. the wife commented to the builder about how long that job was taking, he replied that the welder was slow but very good at his job. OK, he would say that but I think he is right in this case.

Not much progress from lunchtime, but bright and shiny in the evening sun :

He took ages getting this perfect before tack welding it in place

Originally Posted by mikenot

The welder seems to be thorough at his job

Our welding started off a bit hit and miss - had to show them how to use a slag hammer and a wire brush to de-slag the welds.
Once they got the hang of using them the welding was impressive, with good penetration and continuous seams, unlike the cocky shit I see that passes for a lot of Thai welding.
What was most pleasing was seeing the Welders grinding out and re-welding poor welded sections they considered not up to scratch.
Also used plenty of cold gal to finish the job.

OK, perhaps I was a bit early with my praises for the head welder. He did n't read the plans properly and welded a beam that wasn't meant to be there, and didn't have some that should have been. But he did see the first mistake himself and fixed it up, and the other was probably due to the ambiguous plans mentioned above. No big deal, they had only tack welded so far and it only took a couple of hours to fix up.
The boss has had extra welders on site for the last few days, he wanted to get as much done as possible before the 40 degree heatwave forecast for the next 3 days here in Ubon. He even climbed up and did a bit of welding himself ! The final welds were done on the outbuilding, and started painting over the welded spots today.

They also put up the shuttering to fill the gap between the top of the column and the load bearing plates.

Anyway the roof frame is just about finished, a few braces to put in, final welds to be done and then painted.

We had a meeting with the rep from the roofing supplier the other day, and the wife changed her mind about the colour when she saw the samples in the sunlight. Our original choice of light gray was "too bright" she says, now she wants a slightly darker shade. I told her brighter = more reflective and cooler but the science was over her head, after all she did leave school when she was 12 back in the bad old days. Oh well, after my working life spent slaving over hot stoves in commercial kitchens, often in outback and rural Australia, the heat here doesn't worry me that much, she feels the heat more than me so "som nam na".
As you can see in the pic above the roof panels arrived this afternoon. Those ones are just over 13m long, and I wish we had arrived a bit earlier to see them delivered on the pickup:

.

We have a roof ! I got to the site at around 9.30 and saw this :

The team had obviously done this plenty of times and had the routine down pat, and the main roof was soon up and screwed down. Then they split into 3 teams and did the two verandah roofs and the outbuilding at the same time, so the whole roof was done by early afternoon. Much quicker than tiles !
We perhaps made a mistake in buying the guys a couple of bottles of lao kha as the next day K.Ae rang to apologize that nobody would be working on site, as the welders were "sick". I found 5 empty bottles of rotgut, so they must have bought a few more too !
While the site was empty I climbed up their scaffolding to have a look at the roof fixings, everything seems tightly screwed down. The top surface of the roof was too hot to touch but the foil on the underside of the PU foam was barely warm, just ambient temperature, so the PU foam must be doing it's job in preventing downward heat transfer.
Today (Saturday) there were a couple of guys painting the welds, and touching up some of the tack welds. I would have thought it easier to do that before the roof went on, as there is not much room under the roof in some places ! But it seems the guys think it is easier to crawl along the beams rather than climb up and down the scaffolding.




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Thanks for the update, it looks like it's going well.

Originally Posted by Topper

it looks like it's going well.

Good that you are around, Mike

Originally Posted by mikenot

10 days later and it's been a case of two steps forward, one step backwards...twice.

Standby for many more but in time it will get completed. Just a matter of how much time.

"We also had to remind the guys to paint the welds with cold-gal BEFORE they put soffits and cladding over them, it's no good just painting one side of the weld."

The benefit of being on site Mike.

Progressing well mate. Keep the updates coming

Another brick in the wall....

"The first load of AAC blocks turned up last week, 1600 of them, so I was hoping that the wall crew might be starting work this week. No such luck"


A pleasant surprise this morning, the wall crew had turned up in force.
9;30a.m. this morning :

After the glacial pace of progress lately today saw a major acceleration, with 4 sections of wall going up at a time, one woman measuring and cutting the odd sized pieces needed, another guy mixing buckets of AAC mortar and a young kid carrying blocks from the pallets to the work areas.

Of course, things didn't go completely right after the boss went to visit another job I was having a well deserved rest from my landscaping work down the bottom of the garden when I noticed that work had started on the back wall of the kitchen, and that apparently a doorway was optional as they had laid blocks all the way across where there was supposed to be a door. I got up to fix things just as one of the other guys came over to correct the error. Ah good, no need to be the meddling customer. But then they put the doorway right up against the post, not 60cm across as per the plan, so I did have to get up after all. Showing them the plans just got blank looks so I measured 60cm from the post and scratched marks on the floor..."pradoo tii nii" (door here).
Luckily K. Ae came back then and things were sorted, we also went through the other door locations.
When we came back later in the afternoon I noticed something else I wasn't completely happy about.
One wall of the main bedroom is supposed to join the side wall as highlighted in yellow:

The side wall has already been built : I'm told, translated through my wife, that they will drill holes in this exterior wall for rebar attached to the interior wall, personally I would have interlocked the blocks of both walls for added strength. I would certainly like the bit circled in red done that way so yet another 3 way talk between me, the wife, and the builder is coming. i did try with Google translate but that don't work too well on a building site!
In other news, the roofing crew have only a few bits of cladding and fascia to do and they are finished at long last.