Our New Thai House Part 1 – Picking a Plot

I’ve put off posting proper photos of our new house since we decided to build it, that is, for the better part of a year. What can I say? We were busy getting it finished (this is a home builder’s joke – a new house is never finished).
Getting this house built took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears… We really honed our powers of persuasion, pleading, and cajoling. I learned how to effectively threaten someone in Thai, and Nam learned that being visibly pregnant is a great way to have people do things for you. We both learned that government officials in charge of the positioning of power transformers, who knock away a hand offering an envelope and loudly claim to be unbribable, are merely asking for more money. Life lessons, these.
If I had tried to blog about all the problems we ran into during construction of this house, all of you would have stayed away for the duration, believe me. There was simply too much to bitch about, so I ended up breaking a lot of scrap wood and taking it out on random tailgaters instead. Life is sometimes too crappy to effectively document, anyway.
I have so many photos for this particular subject, I’ve decided to break it up into several posts, which should be generally chronological. I hope you can enjoy reading this series as much as I will writing it.

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Coming to Thailand in October of 2006 to live in a house I helped pay for in advance ended up not working out real well. This was due to a certain insufferable alcoholic-in-law who treated himself to our house before I moved here from Japan. My wife and I therefore decided to move out as soon as possible.
We searched for houses and apartments alike, debating whether to rent or buy. We searched all over Mahasarakham, which is a large area, and sometimes, for comparison, we would even look in neighboring towns. Our search took us all up and down the banks of the Chi river, since I wanted to live close to the water (a sort of compensation for living in dry country). To make a long story a bit shorter, we could find no suitable houses and no suitable land on which to build a new house.
In mid-2007, I revisited a new neighborhood just starting to be built between my university and Nam’s. One of the lots was situated right in front of a natural pond (with some reinforced banks). We fell in love with the sky and decided to build a house there.

END OF PART 1

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Our New Thai House entries:
Our New Thai House Part 1 – Picking a Plot
Our New Thai House Part 2 – Foundations
Our New Thai House Part 3 – Groundwork
Our New Thai House Part 4 – Roof and Walls
Our New Thai House Part 5 – The Blessing Way
Landscaping Our House – Before and After