We're gonna build

Yup, we've decided, and put a small token  downpayment on, the building of a new house... We liked the 4 bed house so much but the worry that it was a bit too small niggled us, so we are buing a plot accross from it, which is 2x the size of the 1st house, and building a house 50% bigger with garden and side parking, so that the car park area does not take any of the living space away.
Basically more living room area, larger kitchen, bigger bathrooms (with a bath in the main ensuite), a dedicated office, garage on the side and room for fruit trees and a veg patch.

Early days, initial talks and chat with both the land seller, the architect and builder.... but we agree. 

We are going to build our dream home.

We hopefully wll have it all done by October, and in the mean time we'll start buying things for the new home.

Exciting times ahead.

Ahthankyew

Bike was delivered today, they took a nice delivery photo, but for some reasons decided to obscure my face.... oh well

But its here its nice, need to take it easy for 1K to run it in, so no red lining, they delivered it with a thimble full of petrol, so 1st job was to find petrol, which is easy normally but with roadworks nearby its a bit of a trek around the houses to get to the station. Anyway the thimbleful made it, and it then took just under 300bhat to fill it, not bad at all.

I don't yet have full accident insurance though, and bizzarely I am still allowed to drive without it beign fully registered, but over the next week or two It'll take to get the paperwork sorted to get a full reg and with it a full accident cover....bizzare

It's no Shadow, but it is a nippy comfy scooter, so I think this will last me a while as long as someone does not run me off the road or pull out, or change lanes, or just run up my backside as is quite common here...

relax..relax, I'll be fine. I was properly trained in defensive riding, Im not going to be a lane switching numpty...yet.

Ahthankyew

We're going for it, twice

We have had a look at quite a few houses recently, and most of them have been dissapointing.. yesterday we went to see one we first saw on Youtube a year ago and totally fell in love. We still love it but, its not even close to being viable for us, depsite being a good size and lovely fruit tree filled gardens, it didn't deliver.. It smelled of damp and worse, turned out to be miles away from Chiang Mai town... closer infact to the neighbouring city of Lamphun.. a nice place but... not Chiang Mai

So.. we're exploring the build our own place more forcefully, as noted that almost perfect place is almost perfect, but the builder could build us our perfect place in the plot opposite it, with space for garden and a bigger living area and bedrooms as well as at least one bath in one of the Bathrooms...

So... we're going to go for it.. Meetings are being arranged next week to discuss how to proceed. Basically Jirawan buys the land (I'm not allowed), and we pay the builder to build. It will be within our budget and give us a lot of say over how the final house is built.. I don't like WC's next to the Kitchen for example (ugg), which are common here. We can dictate the lay out of both the Euro and Thai Kitchen, make sure we have a living room with room for nice big sofa's facing TV's and have good sized bedrooms for guests, as well as a purpose built office and nice terrace for relaxing in the sun.

It will be great. I'll update you on this as we go. And it will make for an interesting vlog.


Also I'm buying a new bike, well a scooter, but one big enough to handle my bulk and do a bit of longer distances.. the little 150cc's that are rife here tend to scream a bit when I give them a bit of welly. So I've gone for a slightly bigger 280cc GPX DZ3 SPORT. 

At a later date I might.... might get myself a more traditional bike bike, like a Royal Enfield, but really my cruiser days are over and I can't see myself buying a Hog or another Shadow like most of the old fat bikers here, so this will be the runabout when Jirawan is out with the car and a bit of nipping into town for shopping. 
The car is good, but its not like my little Kia, and needs the air con running full tilt all the time which guzzles gas, even though its half the cost here, we're using twice as much, so this will be a cleaner more economical runabout for me.

Ahh, as I type this I realise Im not going to get a comment from mum, telling me Im crazy to ride a bike here and to be careful....but Im sure she'd be happy to know I'm settling into how things are done here. Miss you mum.

Ahthankyew

Out door cooking

Cooking outdoors is a big part of Thai cooking, thats why many ex pat homes have 2 kitchens, one for the western tastes (hello) and one for the Thai's and their chilli mad cooking (have you met my wife). So even though we have a small kitchen here, at the rental house, we realised we needed to do more with our outside terrace, so we got some out door cooking stuff. Need to get some charcoal and gas/fittings.. They didn't come with them...strange.. But soon we can cook all the thai food we need without gassing the termites.

Ahthankyew

Did we? Actually?

Find a perfect forever home??? Wellll maybe, its certainly very close.. Jirawan and I went to go look at a house in Saraphi which to me seems like a more rural area than we are now but actually quite close to the local markets and a short car/scooter ride into town.
We saw a 4 bed house, partially furnished and part of a new area being developed, so more houses are going to be built next/opposite it.

The house itself ticks almost all our boxes, the space itself is fractionally less than we want, but not that much less.. And the price is 3.5M baht, which is about 100K... 100K for a 4 bed house.. its pretty awesome.. and gives us plenty of residual house sale funds to live off quite nicely until pensions pay out. We'd have to spend 1M or so getting an outside kitchen (Thai style) added, air con and fully furnished but thats still well within our max budget.. even below our mid budget.

So we're excited but torn.. Its too soon really to buy a house we still have to keep the rental on this place till Oct,  and there's that tiny niggle that its might be fractionally too small... (4 beds..are you insane.... no theres's still a matter of storage and stuff to consider).

So while we "could" put a bid in now, we are going to wait, since the builder informs us they will start another house next to that one in the next few months, ready around July/Aug... Now that fits in with our timeline for a new house.. and it will be fractionally bigger, not massive but fractionally.

So we are thinking this might be the approach we will take, we will also be allowed to make some tweaks to the build to accomodate our slightly odd needs,  lots of power in the office, network connections, a pantry, a western style kitchen and a purpose built Thai kitchen, and a larget balcony to sit and have drinks watching the sun go down.

We will see what transpires, but if the quality of this build can be maintained with just a smidgen more space without a massive price hike.. we may have found the perfect home... watch this space.

In the meantime I've been on a comforts of home hunt, and have discovered a pentiful supply of Pies, Bacon, HP sauce and huge Ribeye steaks... The freezer is groaning a bit under the weight of it all. but for easy 1/3 the cost of what it would be in NL I have steaks, pies, bacon, stewing meat, mince aplenty...oh and Cadbury's :D This will last months.

I am starting to enjoy myself a bit now too, there's been a sense of not quite knowing what to do with my days, but its getting easier.. I get up, when I wake up, not before, do a bit of coding work on the book stuff, check the forms, not much activity still, then we decide what we plan to do today... and we do it... no stress... its great.

Ahthankyew

A sense of purpose....

Yeahhhh that... its missing.. I am certainly enjoying getting up without alarm clocks, but my days don't currently have a massive sense of purpose. I have some support work to finish on my Book website, which is proving problematic as my nice new Mini PC while a very solid bit of kit, isn't quite up to the job of doing video edits... dammit, more money needed on a new PC soon.

But overall, yeah... I am finding the lack of purpose to be quite a factor.. As I get fewer and fewer emails from students (basically none) asking for help I find my need to check up on them, also reducing..

Its bascially called letting go...that sense of responsibility and need to help, no longer has a purpose in our new life and it is...honestly a bit scary.

The Book website needs to be my prime focus for at least the next month or so, starting to get readers contacting me... so I suspect once I get enough of them asking for help I will again have some purpose.. But overall..its quiet....too quiet :D

Ahthankyew

Last of the purchases?

Yeah I think I am getting a little too shopee happy. Its a great service and no doubt that things are quite a bit cheaper here than in NL but I need to start cutting back. A few hundred/thousand saved is still a few hundred spent.

But I am feeling good about my last, and not very expensive purchase, a new split slanted keyboard.. It does feel a lot less sensitive and less prone to random accidental key presses than the other I had.  

Theres something reassuring about a full size keyboard where you can press one button to print screen/calculator and scroll lock... much nicer, it doesn't have the reassuring click but it works nice.

Also my 2nd last purchase was a stream dock to help control some of my video recording and editing, I bought the really nice Elgato prompter from Amazon last week and it arrived a few days ago, awesome ... But the dock lets me contol the OBS display with 1 button presses instead of lots of clicking and ticking.

But that needs to be it... enough spending on things I don't need now, all the main things I use for coding/recording and music making are now replaced and in some cases enhanced. Time to take care of the pennies.

Ahthankyew