The nanny took the day off today and mommy had a meeting from the afternoon, so MAx and daddy stayed home and played all day. The highlight if the day was letting Max eat yogurt by himself on the front porch and then hosing it off afterward.
It’s been rainy recently but in between storms the sky can be quite dramatic. Here’s a couple shots from not too long ago:
Category: Our New Thai House
Third World Concrete Pump
That’s definitely footage from Thailand; that’s the distinctive paint job of a CPAC truck. We see this kind of bucket brigade all the time since they are building all around us.
Our New Thai House Part 4 – Roof and Walls
The Our New Thai House series must be finished before the subject becomes Our Old Thai House!
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By the end of this period in September/October of 2007, the house was 90% completed.
In some of the photos above you can see a transformer box on the power pole to the right of the house. It took me considerable effort to get it moved from there, but it was of course worth it. Most Thais think its a non-issue, but after I campaigned to get it away from my house, nobody wanted it in front of theirs, either. We kept bothering and trying to bribe the power company to get it moved, to no avail. The man in charge at the power company claimed, out loud, to be incorruptible. This was relayed to me second hand, as foreigners should generally stay away from such negotiations. The intermediary reporting this back to me and the housing developer was sure we had hit a wall. I, however, am a skilled listener.
When a government official in the third world says they can’t be bribed, it can mean a few things: It can mean they are newly elected to office and don’t know how things work. It can mean they are currently under investigation. It can mean whatever you want to bribe them for isn’t possible/available at that specific point in time. Or it can mean your initial offer was too low. What it absolutely does not mean is that the official cannot be bribed under any circumstance.
So we made a better offer. The price to get a transformer moved just down the street in rural Thailand, all-inclusive? 50,000 Baht (approx. $1,500 US). We split the cost down the middle with the developer.
It was worth every satang.
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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
Our New Thai House Part 3 – Groundwork
Timeline: End of July to mid-August 2007
The foundations have been set to floor level (one meter off the ground) and are being extended to roof level.
In this photo, our site is located at the four columns wrapped in wooden supports visible between the man in the blue shirt at the approximate middle of the photo and the first power pole to his right.
The beginnings of our house. Notice the use of eucalyptus as framework; this is standard building practice all throughout Thailand for all types of buildings. In other Asian countries, they tend to use more bamboo but there’s not so much of that here.
A couple weeks later, the eucalyptus framework has been replaced with cinder blocks, the stairs and pavilion have been added, and all foundations have been extended to roof level.
Ski mask welding in stifling weather, against a beautiful sunset sky. Most of these guys don’t bother with eye protection for arc welding. This guy sure didn’t.
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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
Sunrise from our back porch
Even with houses being built up all around us, the best views will remain.
Sunset from our stoop
Sometimes the sky here is so pretty it can make you cry. Even Max loved this sunset.
pink sky morning
The other day we woke up to a pink sky. Not just on the fringes, mind you, but totally and completely pink.
View from our stoop
In an effort to destroy the cattails, because her son is allergic to the snowy fluff it produces this time of year, the development manager instructed her minions to burn them. On a windy day. With gasoline.
Fucking oops.
Nam says that once they realized the fire was out of control and blowing towards said manager’s newly-erected wooden houses (as in, houses she built to live in herself) they called out all the workers in shouting distance to form a bucket brigade. That had no buckets.
Oops again.
Luckily, the fire eventually burnt out when the wind died down. I just I wish I could’ve been here to see it too, so I could educate the natives about a few things. Like how cattails were used by Native Americans for kindling (so maybe they should use less gasoline or something). Or by people around the world for food as well as down for stuffing. Or how cattails are being used in pilot “carbon capture” farming schemes. Then again, I probably would have just stood there laughing wickedly as the world burned just across my pond and attacked the intelligent beings who started it.
Luckily, the red-tailed pheasant-like birds seem to have returned and don’t seem to mind roosting in their newly-roasted environment. I need to get a photo of one someday I suppose…
Our New Thai House Part 2 – Foundations
When setting the first foundation of a Thai house, it is a common practice to hire a Brahman priest and hold a blessing ceremony. Enter Ajarn Chachawan (Ajarn is an honorific title equivalent to sensei in Japanese and pretty much nothing in English), pictured on the left in the photo below. He was also the announcer/master of ceremonies who did the morning ceremony for our wedding two years ago. He will also be supervising the installation of an animistic “spirit house” on our property this month or next. Truth be told, he’s pretty much our go-to guy for all our Brahman needs.
Clockwise from Ajarn Chachawan: Mother-in-law, yours truly, worker, Nam, worker in red shirt, worker in OSHA-approved safety flip flops (standard worker footwear here; they even weld and walk on roof support beams in them).
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The shot below was taken from the rear of our property (marked with wooden border) toward the pond and front of the (then future) house.
You can see the two foundations we just planted held in place with tripodal wooden supports. Tied to those foundations with holy-ish string are items of various significance such as banana tree branches and a woven reed fish trap with coins (Thai Baht) in it (we were warned not to put a lot of money in the trap since it would be stolen in the night. And of course it was.). In the holes for the foundations, under the two-piece (tower in basket) wrought iron assembly, we also placed items of various significance which we purchased/gathered a day earlier. This included a specific kind of unhusked “new” rice (that I popped over the stove like popcorn), leaves of a religiously significant species of tree (from a nice old lady’s yard – she also gave us seeds to plant our own trees with, but we lost them), special gold/silver/bronze painted bricks and cedarlike stakes that we purchased at a Buddhist goods store, plus a few other things that escape my memory (at one point I had the list we used for shopping but I lost this as well).
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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
Ancient Photo Generator
Use this ancient photo generator (in JP, but a cinch to use) to give your photos that certain Edo look. Here’s the results using a photo of the plot where we built our house from my post the other day:
