Marmite.....at first the green was a shock but it grows on ya and now I quite like it. She asked my opinion about what colour to use and I told her to paint everything black! Her response was "fuk off ya idiot". To which I answered "asking me about what colour to use is like asking a Thai to drive sensibly, fuking impossible".
nigelandjan.....it should look like a page out of a catalogue as that's where she spent a lot of time reading and still does for ideas. We are located just off highway24 before Nang Rong as you head to Buriram from Chok Chai. So about 60kms from Buriram and about 85 kms from Nakon Ratchasima (Korat). If you do decide to visit PM me well in advance and I will give you directions etc. My advice to you now is start designing now, to build in a year. Get a plan drawn up and then try and envisage what you would want to do in that area. That will allow you to put things like power outlets etc in the right place. Already we are discovereing that we don't have an outlets where we need them. Also if you have any furnitiure that you want to keep and use in a new house measure it and build room for it. We forgot that our bed is 2m wide and now the distance between the windows where we want to put it is 1.8m. I suppose I could solve it the Thai way and cut 0.2m off one side and then put some blocks under it to replace the legs that would be missing.
If we were doing it again (building) I would get a Thai that I could trust (nearly impossible) who was experienced in building and emply him to work for me as a supervisor overseeing the project with "our" interest as his primary objective. Remember if you employ a builder his primary objective is to make money (at your expense) on the project, your primary objective is to get value and quality for your budgeted (not more) outlay.
Anyway good luck to you if you do build I'm sure you will need it.
here's some more pictures..............
the front yard, note the new colour of the steel work
another view of the same
and again
planted some trees outside the main bedroom
hopefully gonna be a hedge in the future between the front yard of the house and the shed. I told MIL she can keep it trimmed with scissors, she's already started to take over caring for the garden which means it will grow well and turn out fine.
the missus only got the people to put down grass on a small section so she could check out their work before getting them to do anymore. She was gonna put a Sala in the middle bit between the path and the driveway but I reckoned it would block out the view of the house so she's not doing that now. Who knows what she will put there.
a closer view of the trees outside the main bedrom
a different view of the house
a closer view of the grassed corner
the "gates". The main gate has remote control. She didn't want to spend the money for the remote but I asked her if she was willing (during the rainy season) to wait for it to stop raining so she could get out and open the gate? The big and the small gates together cost 50K and the remote 25K including installation of it all.
a view from the road
and finally starting to unpack some of the stuff we shipped over from Aussie 6 months ago.
I should say that I actually had a "hot" shower here last night, first time I have been able to do that in our own house in Thailand and it was great.
until tomorrow............