Building the House

Varakul Ross
March 13, 2024
Reading Time: 2 minutes

This is the story of how my husband and myself built our dream home. It’s located in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Being the entrepreneurial types that we are, we hired some local laborers and managed the build ourselves.

Table of Contents

Formwork and foundations!

With utilities connected, it was time to start on the foundations. We hired several laborers from the local village, got deliveries of rebar and wood, and began to make the footings and dig the foundation holes.

Prior to making anything, we stringed out the house room by room, to make sure everything was ok with the plans.

Concreting

The serious part of the build started 2 weeks in with the pouring of concrete for the footings.

Columns and formwork for horizontal beams

We hired some pre-made formwork and built up the lower part of the footing columns. After those were poured, it was time to fill in the soil, and build up the horizontal columns.

Horizontal formwork continues...

It’s now 1 month into the build, and the next week is spent finishing up setting up the forms for the horizontal beams, and pouring concrete.

Columns and concrete pour

The next week is focussed on building up the columns. First the rebar is made, then the forms are built, then the concrete is poured. After the concrete is dried and the forms are removed, we infill more soil to the level of the top of the horizontal beams. This is so a concrete floor can be poured later.

Building the roof

Due to the hot humid weather in Thailand, the to prevent damage from termites, the roof is built with metal.

Roof tiles delivery

It took us a while to find the roof tiles. As the roof was quite large in area, not many of the local shops had enough roof tiles in the color we wanted. We finally found them on the other side of the city.