Her Own Worst Enemy

The woman with the warm woolly hat and socks, who is very nice and gentle and works wonderfully hard -- she never takes a break outside but brings food in -- has a habit of painting herself into a corner. She did it twice today, first by starting to pour the concrete by the doorway and working her way back to the window, then again on the roof, so now her footsteps are sealed into my house for all eternity. Not that it matters: the bathroom will be tiled and the roof needs to win no beauty contests, plus the dog also went for a little walk on the fresh cement.

Engineering Solution (update)

Ood's wise man suggested bypassing the problem of the temperamental wood by 'seeding' the concrete with styrofoam cubes instead, which won't have the strength to crack the cement by either expanding when wet or disintegrating. Still, the principle is the same: the point is to reduce the mass of cement and thus the weight.

When Ood came back with the styrofoam, he proudly reported that the styrofoam man told him everyone buys it for that. There's at any rate an extra i-beam under that part of the floor, so perhaps all this expense of brain power was unnecessary.

For the roof we've used something called Flex Shield, which is apparently used as a cheap swimming-pool sealant, because Ood felt epoxy was too expensive. It sets a nice light grey so won't retain too much heat from ze burning sun of ze tropics.

The Tilt

The house, as the subtitle indicates, tilts. This isn't much of a problem until you try and build a bathroom on the second floor, at which point the angle is so vertiginous that in order to counteract it and make sure the water flows down the plughole, the floor needs to incline like the red line:

That means that in the other corner, which hangs over the staircase with no visible means of support, we'd have to pour up to 15 cm of concrete. This they felt might be too heavy for the poor old house, so they sat and thought about it, wondering how to shave off an inch here and there by introducing an Escher print worth of steps. Here my nonexistent training in the building trade kicked in and I suggested we lay a lot of old wood on the floor instead and pour the minimum necessary concrete around it. Ood's wise man, the mad plumber, rejoiced, congratulated me several times, the dog (also present) relaxed with a sigh into a pile of brick dust, and so it was agreed. We'll apparently add some steel mesh to stabilize it in case the wood proves temperamental, and the problem's solved.

I felt like an engineering 'major' and have therefore decided to promote myself. The Principal's history, say hello to the Major.

Meanwhile the plumbing's all done. Notice the bathtub on the right (10,000 baht from one of Chinatown's last coopers):

And this will be the washstand (3,500 baht from a man on the road to the airport who makes things from old wood):

Really they work hard, fast and well, and Ood now has the sense to double-check before he does anything drastic, which is all I ask.

PS: Now I'm thinking bamboo would be even lighter, but maybe that's tempting fate.

The Great Pipe Mystery

We started the day on a brittle note when I told them to paint the blue pipes white because they hadn't asked me what colour to get. He said what do you mean? The only other colour is yellow, and that's for electricity. I said no, there's light grey, as you know perfectly well. He denied it. I insisted. He agreed to paint them. Still, it rankled, so I drove round a few hardware stores in the area and asked them if they had the light grey ones. The first one said no, they exist, but I don't know where you can get them; the second said no; and the third said they existed '20 years ago' but no longer.

Yet the first contractor I'd spoken to, who was a smart man with an even smarter wife, told me they do exist, are the same in every respect and cost the same. I even have a notion I've seen them, but where? Boonthavorn doesn't have them. Maybe they're a figment of my imagination -- in which case I might offer to put my imagination in the service of the Thai hardware industry and make a lot of people very happy.

Otherwise progress has been swift, held up only for a few minutes after lunch when Ood (the Leader) sat outside on the bench in quiet religious mania and refused to come in as long as the dog was in the kitchen. His squeamishness also extends to gutters, which he begged me not to install along the ledge on the top floor. After some probing it emerged that he has no experience with them and would have to get someone else in.

Their second attempt, much better:

P.S. One possible answer to the riddle: he now says the off-white pipes do exist, but they're rainwater pipes and thinner than the blue ones, which are drinking water pipes. But this is a country of convenient truths and agreeable facts (and none the worse for it), so I'm reserving judgement.

First Crisis

So fast were they that in the time I went away to buy some plates they'd managed to lay the big sewage pipe right in front of the first-floor window and insisted there was no other way. I said who the fuck wants a sewage pipe right in front of their window? No! said the Leader, frantic enthusiasm undimmed, his main concern is that I should be happy. I explained where it should run (past the ledge along the wall on the left), so tomorrow they'll do it again... Measure twice, cut once, have I said that before?

Here's their first attempt:

And here's the dog on the patio:

Stage Two

The tasks before us are here.

A lot of men and women arrived at 9 o'clock sharp and by lunchtime had cleaned the roof, led by their fantastically energetic, er, Leader. His only handicap is that he's a Muslim and can't be contaminated by my 'unclean' dog, which he's too polite to mention and therefore blames on his staff's fear of being bitten. The dog is delighted -- he loves human activity around him -- and has taken rather a shine to the poor man. The cats have decamped.

The plumber came after lunch and proved even more frantic than the Leader, and we spent some time screeching, figuring out how to put the shower controls together and arguing furiously about the question of copper pipes. Already a grumpy older fellow is digging into the wall where the sink will go, while an indefinable mass of others are swarming all over the house doing god knows what.

I'm sure it'll all go pear-shaped soon enough, and it's costing me as much as Nek took for the whole house, but I've seen this man's work (I found him in soi 25 where he'd just built a spectacularly tasteless place with shiny shit-brown parquet everywhere, which is difficult to do well), and behold it was--

--forgive me, he just came to say he'd replaced a door handle downstairs while the going was slack and is now off to buy bricks, bab nueng! I can't type as fast as things are moving. A teenager is digging up the patio, another is lining up pipes, a woman in a warm woolly hat and socks has hacked a hole in the wall for the wastewater pipe... (Of course the pipes are blue; I took my eye of the ball for half a second and 20 m of pipes arrived before I could remind him I wanted the light grey ones. Oh well, they'll have to paint them.)

Here's the bathroom:

Blue Sky at Night, Fisherman's Friend

Poverty has struck once again but the constant gardener is undeterred. My aim in life is to have a better ginger garden than the smoking area at Changi Airport. The groundwork has been well and truly laid with this 80-baht banana from Jatujak:

And this 60-baht ginger and her sisters, which attract a tiny species of wasp (click to see it horribly enlarged):

The walls will by and by be convered in teen thook kae or lizard's feet. I ordered 10 near Jatujak last week after my visa renewal ordeal at the mad government complex in Laksi, and then when I made my way back through the heat and smog on Saturday they'd forgotted to get them. I went home dejected but just on the off-chance asked the garden centre 100 m from the house, and they said sure, we've got plenty, 20 baht a pop. Sometimes there simply aren't the words:

From Tom and Mam come a couple of frangipani, which are branches that their landlady's factotum ripped off the trees (with his teeth, it looked like) and put in water. That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout? Indeed it has:

I'll plant a banyan tree in the bottom right-hand corner in due course, they root in anything; it may over the years bust that hideous wall, but they tend to be holy so there's nothing the neighbours can do but grit their teeth and worship. A sea almond tree in the other corner, I think, they also root in any ground no matter how stony.

Leo and Cheetah don't care one way or the other: