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It's amazing what a lick of paint can
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When you rely on a single, 200 metre long stretch of
3/4 inch piping for your water supply your always going to have some
problems . . .especially if your pipe also has to run under a 50 metre wide
river estuary which happens to be in flood. The start of August bought
very heavy rains over the mountains and as such the usually calm river
outside our front door became more of a torrent. A torrent that swept
away all of the debris on the river bottom, leaving only sand . . which was
a god thing. But amongst the items washed out to see was our water
pipe . . .which wasn't such a good thing.
Luckily we have a 2000 litre
water tank which was full and as it was pissing it down we also had
plenty of rain water to use during
the few days it took for the water level to die down and us to be able to
connect a new pipe across the riverbed. The real plus side to all this
rain is that after the floodwater subsides and all the debris has been
washed out, the clean, clear river water is great to swim in.
During the first week of August our builders
concentrated on getting the bathroom tarted up. As we'll be living
there the finish needs to be better than if it was being built solely for
holidaymakers, therefore we've got the builders to do stuff slowly rather
than slapping on cement & tiles willy-nilly. Unfortunately having
them take a bit of time didn't automatically equate to taking more care, so
it took a couple of attempts to get everything up to standard.
By the middle of the month the bungalow
was virtually finished and the builders began to set about finishing off a
dozen or so small jobs that had accumulated during the room renovation and
which had been put off till the big jobs were finished. We also began
to plan where the new footbridge, to link the house to the land through the
mangroves would go and how much we could afford to spend on it. As our
finances weren't at their healthiest we went for a no frills footbridge; not
designed to last a lifetime but built so that it wouldn't fall to pieces as
soon as the first 'big-boned' person set foot on it.
Late August and a potential hiccup is
brewing - in so much as hiccups can brew - in the form of local government
officials and boys in brown who have been snooping round our neighbour's new
riverfront bungalows. Looks like we'll have to wait and see just how
much trouble he is in or more likely, how much it'll cost to get out of it
before we start to build anything else.
As Hugh Grant once said "Buggery
bollocks", a phrase which also happens to accurately sum up my sentiments at this
difficult time.
At the very end of the month we'd just
started building the new footbridge, which for the most part ran along the
path of a long since collapsed bridge that served the house when it was
first built. However, we didn't count on our neighbour, the Thai boss of
OK Diving, complaining this wasn't fair to him as he wanted to build a
bridge there too - even though he'd never shown any inclination to do so
until this day - and going into a whole "Build it here and I'll knock it
down", "I know lots of important people", "You have a black heart" rant
lasting for well over a couple of hours. It amused the hell out of our
builders who shared my feelings that the guy had lost the plot entirely and
was behaving like a small child whose Mum had told him he couldn't have any
more ice-cream. However, in the end we compromised and will reroute the
bridge in an attempt to stop the endless whining and to avoid making this
idiot our enemy.
Stay
at Baan Rim Nam
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