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Looks like the wood has
arrived |
The builders started off in promising
fashion, turning up at 7.45am on their first day of work and proved to be
a hard working bunch of guys who also had a few good ideas about how to go about
saving money on unnecessary expenses etc.
There are two ways you can employ
builders, one is to get them to give you a price for the entire job i.e. for the
total cost of materials and labour. You then pay them this amount and they
present you with the finished building with no further involvement form
yourself. The other way is to pay for labour and materials separately.
You have to get hold of the materials yourself for the builder to use.
providing you are happy to spend a bit of time checking out the cheapest places
to buy stuff and have a builder who is happy to explain what he needs and why he
needs it, as you don't want to end up ordering anything in excess.
Most builders now prefer to work on this
second method of employment as it cuts down on accusations of them wasting money
or deliberately ordering excess amounts which can be syphoned off for their own
use.
The initial estimate of taking a few
days to tart up the rooms always seemed a tad optimistic. As it happened
it ended up taking the workgang around 3 weeks to complete the renovations we
required. That doesn't mean it was costly as we ended up paying less than 200
baht per labourer per day and they were actually doing stuff whilst they were
here. But we treated them nicely, bought cheap fruit, bottles of Redbull,
put some music on, gave them drinking water etc. Doing little things like
that makes it far easier to add on extra jobs to be done for no extra cost.
We replaced all the windows in the
rooms, the ceilings in two rooms - one of which had already been done by our
neighbour but needed re-doing by someone who knows plaster. Unfortunately, as
the walls were made from wood panelling we had to use a semi-gloss paint on them
rather than a regular matt emulsion. This coupled with the varnished wood
used to add some 'country' feel to the rooms has led to the interiors being a
bit shinier than I'd have liked. It took several coats of rather expensive
paint to hide the panelling but in late June the walls and ceilings were
finished and we had the floors sanded and re-stained a dark brown, a shade that
goes by the description 'Oak' on the bottle. Our builder, being the nice
guy that he is didn't charge us any extra for replacing the bathroom windows and
sanding, staining and varnishing the bathroom floors.
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New walls, windows,
floor &
doors |
The final piece in the how to renovate
the rooms puzzle was what to do with the doors to the rooms. As you'll
have seen from the photo a couple on the main page of this section, the doors
were made of six hinged panels which folded back on each side of the door.
These added up to doors which were approximately 2.5 metres wide. However,
this type of door is impractical for a guest room, it would feel like you were
locking yourself into a large wardrobe if you had to bolt six solid wood doors
before turning in for the night. We had already asked a couple of people
about what I thought was a simple & possible solution, given the way the wooden
panel doors were constructed. That was to replace two central panels in
each door with glass and then bolt the 4 outer doors shut permanently leaving
two central doors for use by guests. This would allow a lot of light into
the room and also keep some of the original character of the house. The
people we asked had told us it wasn't possible to put glass in the existing
doors. We discussed other expensive options with our builder and it
appeared that whatever we did was going to cost a lot, I thought I may as well
mention the idea above, and to our surprise the builder said he could do it . .
. and a week later the doors were finished.
By the end of June we'd had a team of
five guys working for the best part of a month, they'd had a few days off, and
the work on the interior was just about finished. Time to move onto other work we had planned for them .
. .
Stay at
Baan Rim Nam
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