Building House in Kram

Time to start. The house ceremony is planned for first of November, but that doesn't stop the newly arrived workers to start digging. The soild was to hard to dig by hand, so the builder ordered in a digger. Here is a collection of pictures from the first digging day. Checking heights - very important Digging, the holes will be 1.5 meter deep. Inspecting There will be high piles of soil on the land Digger, Japanese quality. Packing sand at the bottom of hole. Frames for the first layer of concrete.  In Sweden we use polystyrene sheets instead. Concrete work. More inspections Checking height. There will be many holes. 25 platforms will be used to hold up the house. Some holes will have more than one platform. OK, first layer done in this hole. Quite a lot was done after just one days work.

The first labors arrived. The first mission is to mark out where the house should stand, fencing the building area and to start setting up temporary houses and toilets on the site. The arrival Marking out the building area Digging the hole for one of the temporary toilets (they also have needs). Toilet hole in the front, the first labor houses in the back. Walls are not set up yet. The first toilet is ready. Hope our house will look nicer than this.

The labor that will build our house is coming soon, we have to fix electricity for them! Monday: Entering the electric company (very near our land). we > Can you help us with temporary electricity while building our house? they > Yes, sure! Where is it and how does the pole look like? we > Like this.... they > That great, but you have to have the box and the wires (like the photo) in place before we can do anything... we > OK, do you know any electrician that can help us with that? they > No sorry, we don't! Later that Monday, we found an electrician that could fix it. Tuesday morning: The box and wires are there and we went to the electric company again and tell them... we > The equipment you asked for is in place! they > OK, we will go and inspect it. Thursday: Phone call from the electric company. they > Everything is OK, please come in and pay deposit for the meter and fee for setting it up. On hour later we payed t...

I found some nice pictures of the beach - 3 km from the land/house.

After following others that have built houses in Thailand and reading about all their issues in the building process like: Pre-paying contractors that leaves with the money Bad quality in the building depending on cutting corners or using cheap non-educated labors or sub-contractors. (Picture 1) Contractors stops the work because they cant pay the labors. Not following the building plan. We decided to find a way to minimize the risk of having the same kind of issues. Ang found a consultant company in Bangkok that could help us with exactly that, it was not so easy for a non-thai person to find this company because their website is only in Thai. After hiring them the following happened: They spend time to go through our blueprints and helped to find errors. They made an Excel sheet with all included material and labor work needed to finish the house (down to number of tiles and kg of concrete). This Excel should then be sent to interested contractors to get off...

The first version of the blueprint. About half of the house is one floor, the bedrooms are raised as a second floor with mostly open areas below (laundry and outdoor relax area). I guess there will be some small changes here and there during the building process, but in general this is the house. Even if it looks like that, we will not have any cars under the bedroom.

Before its possible to build, we need water. After talking to the neighbors, we realized that we have to wait for the community water to reach us, even if it's available a couple of hundred meters from the land — so we need a well! After our investigations we now know that there is quite a lot of water not so deep down under our land, so we now need someone that can help us to dig a well. Five happy diggers start the next day in the bright sunshine, they will dig down to the stone (about 7-8 meters) until we get enough water in the well. After finishing some days later there was now 3-4 m3 of water in the well. Digging a well should be done during the hot dry season, waiting until the wet rainy season is not a good decision. We had planned for October but changed us to April instead luckily.

We started prepare the land in May/April 2016 so that there should be at least one rainy season before we started to build. Everyone says that is needed so that the soil will be proper packed. After adding soil from 25 big trucks we also got help to get the ground slope down to the road to help getting rid of water on heavy rains. I here have some pictures of this event:

Before we could build a house we needed a plan. In Thailand there are a bunch of pre-approved house plans you can fetch from the local municipality (Thesaban in thai). After looking at these without finding any plan we really liked we started to google around on the internet for others. The house should be placed in Thailand and therefor it was important to find a house plan suited for the thai climate.  We found a very interesting site — it’s a company drawing complete plans with all documentation and blueprints, they then sell these for 5000 bath each. They do not do any changes or special solutions, just these plans. You will find a link below. We bought the plan for the house BP27, but was not completely happy with it, so we started to do some modifications and ended up with an own version. When we were done we let a thai engineer make the official blueprints and calculations on the changed plan so it could be approved by the thesaban offi...

The next time we where in Mae Phim/Kram we started to look for a piece of land to buy. To find land in Thailand on internet is really not the right way. Thai people doesn't sell land that way, the only thing you find is people trying to make a fortune in selling cheap land very expensive to foreigners. The right way is to ask around (in thai language). We asked beach restaurant owners, fruit sellers, in the coffee shop, hotel staff etc. In this size of a village, all of the above know someone that have a piece of land for sale. There was also signs on trees and bushes when you where driving around. The first land we was taken too (by a lady selling fruit from a motorbike) was perfect in all aspects except the price. It was far over our budget, so no deal there. We continued following men and ladies on motorbikes or in our car, but nothing was as good as the first one. We had to leave after a week without finding the land we needed for our house. 6 months later on my next...

My name is Kjell. Together with my girlfriend (future wife) Ang, we will start a story about building a house in east of Thailand. It started with many years of travelling in Thailand. We went south (Phuket, Krabi, Phang Nga, Trang, Hua Hin, Cha Am) and north (Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Nan, Pai) to find a place we want to live - without success. One day my mother showed me a clip from a newspaper - it was a small sleepy fishing village in the east of Thailand with name Mae Phim. After some discussions with Ang we decided to rent a car and find out this place - and here it was - a place to live. Mae Phim is the beach with 3 km of soft nice sand and clear water. The adjacent village is named Kram. Except from some small scale turism from Norway, Sweden and Finland the main turists here comes from Bangkok during the weekends or bigger holidays. You drive here from Bangkok in 2 - 3 hours depending on traffic and how fast car you have.