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[newhomepages]

My wife and I have started to build a house in Bangkok. It is about 200 square meters (including decks and flat roof), two story, loft style tropical modern home made from concrete and masonry bricks. The cost (not including land) will be 2.6 million. We designed it ourselves and hired a contractor to do all the construction.

I hope people in this forum will be interested, and our journey into home building can help others doing the same.

My wife is from Thailand and I am from America. We both live in Bangkok full time now.

Pictures and stories coming soon.

You can see a 3D video on YouTube made from a Google Sketchup file of the floor plans here:

watch?v=d2AZeRnok7c

-Ed and Emi

[draftvader]

Will be curious how this pans out.  I really hope it works and that you have found a contractor like I have for my latest project.  Took 4 months of waiting and a 2 week delay to the project after day 1, but once they established themselves in the project they have been working hard 6 days a week.  Good crew with a level-headed crew-boss.  However this is the 1st contractor crew in nearly 10 projects that have actually been worthwhile.

I think I might hold them hostage in an empty room so that they don't disappear into thin air leaving me with "Of course I can do that" and friends!

[bankruatsteve]

Good luck!  Since you designed it yourself, you should be prepared to be VERY hands on supervision during construction.  Unless you have a very specific contract with your builder for end product, remember that YOU are the boss and suggest you review the many threads in this forum for things you need to keep on top of.

[newhomepages]

Thanks for your hopes and wishes of luck - I know we need it. Bankruatsteve, I have been going to the construction site every few days, but it is hard to be boss like as this is the biggest (in terms of size and expense) thing I've ever done. Our contractor has performed really well so far and has been very flexible by figuring out a way to incorporate almost every crazy idea we have had. So I feel we are in good hands. I think I will need to be a lot more hands on myself when we get to the finishing details.
Draftvader, our team has been working very hard and I like our contractor too, but am even more curious as to how it will pan out finally. I have heard so many horror stories.

Actually, the construction started at the beginning of April. I am just going to take a few days to catch people up here on Thai Visa and also learn about how the forum works.

Here is me trying to put a couple of photos in a post:

The first is a drawing overview of the land, part of an earlier floor plan, and the second is a photo of the the land from street level when we bought it last year. There was already a little one room building that had a tiny bathroom with water and electricity.

 a.jpg   72.76K   30 downloads
 2.jpg   154.67K   27 downloads

-EE

Edited by newhomepages, 2012-05-25 21:27:33.

[beachyman]

Looks.great. I've done some full renovations on my rental houses and you def. Need to be around at all time or the tiles will be sideways.

Good luck I look forward to seeing the pictures and progress.

Sent from my GT-P6200L using Thaivisa Connect App

[draftvader]

Agreed with those above.  It can be very useful to make sure you are around when they are going to start a new section of the project.  Once people are underway with a new section and you are confident you can relax a bit until the next section.  I have often found that workers will attempt to do a job rather than stopping, looking and discussing.  The problems is that, often, they get too far in before you realise that they have put the front door in the roof...or similar.

My present worker has had the foresight to wait until he can talk to me before attempting anything "outside the box".  He has obviously worked out that it is better in the long run because he won't get into trouble and can tell me that it was my stupid idea

Nice plans.  Also inspect every material delivery thoroughly, even if the delivery man looks annoyed.  It is easier to deal with the problem at that point as once they have dumped, they will run and getting them back is difficult and will delay your project whilst you wait.  Swapping of materials does happen here, like it does in the West.  However here it tends to happen without any communication with the client.

[Crossy]

Should be fun, we need more construction threads

Have you had construction drawings done or are you relying on your contractor?