Me and my girlfriend also created a blueprint for a house in Thailand and paid local contractors (basically villagers) to build the house.
Thailand doesn't have, of course, very stringent safety regulations regarding houses. Actually I am not sure if there are any with regards to single family homes in villages. It's probably a free for all as long as the land has the proper usage title.
We build a pretty small, 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom house. We also have a large kitchen and an office room.
We'll probably build a new house in the future and apply some of the lessons we learned:
- Ideally we'd build a double stone wall that insulates better against heat in summer and cold in winter.
- As mentioned in the article, it'd be easier to have a shorter / easier path between parked car and kitchen.
- We decided to build a single story house, since it's easier to stay in once you reach old age. But now I realise it might have been nicer to have my office on 2nd floor, perhaps with a large balcony, so we have a good view of the mountains and such. When old, we ideally shouldn't need the office much anyways.
- We really forgot about adding a small storage room to the house. Just a room for things like the vacuum cleaner and such. Currently we keep it in our daughter's bedroom as our daughter sleeps in our bedroom every night anyways.
- We didn't really consider much how to protect the car against the sun. We did have a room to park the car under, but it's not enough cover for our pick-up that we bought after building the house. So we had to add a sail.
- Currently the kitchen is fully detached from our home. Now I think it's better if we'd build a small corridor instead. Since we open and close the door out of the house and into the kitchen many times a day, it's easier for mosquitos to enter the home. My girlfriend wanted a detached kitchen to prevent the smell of cooking food to enter the home. We should have added an extractor hood above the stove instead.
- For the next home we'd probably buy all materials ourselves, so the developer will not be able to receive any markup from buying materials and we can be sure we have use the best materials money can buy.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 11.9 ms ] threadHaving done all the interior work along with my family on my childhood home, I have to imagine that their experience was subtly different.
Thailand doesn't have, of course, very stringent safety regulations regarding houses. Actually I am not sure if there are any with regards to single family homes in villages. It's probably a free for all as long as the land has the proper usage title.
We build a pretty small, 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom house. We also have a large kitchen and an office room.
Some photos of our house can be seen here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/tvpPNxZkMWhZXayR2
We'll probably build a new house in the future and apply some of the lessons we learned:
- Ideally we'd build a double stone wall that insulates better against heat in summer and cold in winter.
- As mentioned in the article, it'd be easier to have a shorter / easier path between parked car and kitchen.
- We decided to build a single story house, since it's easier to stay in once you reach old age. But now I realise it might have been nicer to have my office on 2nd floor, perhaps with a large balcony, so we have a good view of the mountains and such. When old, we ideally shouldn't need the office much anyways.
- We really forgot about adding a small storage room to the house. Just a room for things like the vacuum cleaner and such. Currently we keep it in our daughter's bedroom as our daughter sleeps in our bedroom every night anyways.
- We didn't really consider much how to protect the car against the sun. We did have a room to park the car under, but it's not enough cover for our pick-up that we bought after building the house. So we had to add a sail.
- Currently the kitchen is fully detached from our home. Now I think it's better if we'd build a small corridor instead. Since we open and close the door out of the house and into the kitchen many times a day, it's easier for mosquitos to enter the home. My girlfriend wanted a detached kitchen to prevent the smell of cooking food to enter the home. We should have added an extractor hood above the stove instead.
- For the next home we'd probably buy all materials ourselves, so the developer will not be able to receive any markup from buying materials and we can be sure we have use the best materials money can buy.