Category: Our New Thai House

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.
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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

Promenade

Earth, sky, sea, and rain
Is she coming back again?
Men of straw sneak a whore
Words that build or destroy
Dirt, dry, bone, sand, and stone
Barbed-wire fence cut me down
I’d like to be around
In a spiral staircase
To the higher ground
And I, like a firework, explode
Roman candle lightning lights up the sky
In the cracked streets trampled under foot
Sidestep…sidewalk
I see you stare…into space
Have I got closer now?
Behind the face
Oh…tell me…
Charity dance with me
Turn me around tonight
Up though a spiral staircase
To the higher ground
Slide show, sea side town
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Above is a partial view from the front of our new house. The view was a major reason why I wanted to build a house here in the first place. If you look closely, you can see the top of my university’s administration building (it’s a kilo or two away in a straight line, unfortunately, there is no road running straight there):
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Since you can see that building from my house, the reverse is also true, of course, and when this house was being built, I used to take my camera and a zoom lens up to the roof in between or after the Master’s classes I taught there. I would take photos of the workers dumping trash in the pond or peeing in my backyard and go confront the foreman with it later, saving the photographic evidence for when he swore in front of the developers that nobody would dare do such things (yeah, I’m pretty much the client from hell).
That roof was also my bug-out area when I needed a smoke or wanted somewhere to relax for a few minutes. The door to the roof was always open and it was often the coolest part of the building with constant breezes, even on the hottest days. You could look over the waist-high wall surrounding the perimeter of the roof onto the parking lot, which was green with all the old trees that make my university so nice to walk around, and the people and cars looked like miniature toys scattered across the floor… The nicest part about going up to the roof was that you were pretty much guaranteed your privacy. I went up there at least a couple times a week for six months, and saw maybe four other people in that time.
It’s funny what kind of thoughts go through your head when you’re looking at people you may or may not know from 16 stories up. I know what I always think of. But there’s a big difference between wondering what it would be like and actually stepping off…
Yesterday, one of our seniors jumped off the roof of the administration building and died. What this boy was thinking, I have no idea. The chances are, I don’t even know who he is.
But it still makes me sad thinking about it.