Glass kitchen and outdoor shower

 

We designed a glass enclosure for our kitchen downstairs to keep out mosquitoes and other unwanted slithery critters. A crew arrived just around 8 am for the window installation.

 

 

For the front door of the kitchen, we designed a double sliding glass door. The sides are also double sliding glass doors to allow for cross ventilation.

 

 

At 6:30 pm, they were more or less finished. The two thin trees in front are called moke, and are used around Bangkok as a nice hedge, with fragrant white flowers that dangle downward. We planted them a few days ago; let's see how they look in a few months after the monsoons begin.

 

And finally, after two visits to the metropolitan waterworks office, we got hooked up to the water main.

 Finally, a shower, making our house comfortably livable. We'll add a few finishing touches to the outdoor shower, and will also try to create a simple solar water heating system to up the temperature of the water just a notch.

BangChak

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Shelves

We're building storage space now, and starting with a little organization of tools and materials so we do less searching and more building.

The closet and shelves for our clothes.

Preparing the lower level of our shelves, attaching the pipe stand.

Lower tier done.

Attaching the top tier.

On a tree in front of our big glass window, the little crook of a branch to the far left is a lookout perch for our bright blue kingfisher friend, who visits regularly. We plan to buy books on the birds and flora of Thailand. In our other house in central Bangkok, the only birds we see or hear are magpies, sparrows, pigeons and the koels. In our jungle cabin, in addition to the kingfisher, we've seen a green-billed malkoha (like this here and the second and third pictures here, too).

Building a box for the shower

Phase II

The picture window in Landry's office/darkroom.

Our shrunken pond here, with some dirt filled in around the periphery.

For the time being, we have an outdoor kitchen.

We may hang bamboo screens for privacy. The plan is to glass it all in, with sliding glass doors and mosquito screens.

Our composting toilet barrel will go here.

The cement foundation under the stairs cracked because the side of the ponds was eroding, eating away at the earth around the foundation.

We have some mangroves with good roots along the canal in the back to hold back the earth, and we need to plant lots of grasses -- lemongrass and vetiver.

Also, speaking of strong roots... At our place in Bangkok, we raised a sickly little bamboo plant that grew quite large and healthy over two years. It took us several hours of digging, tugging, pushing, cutting and scraping to unearth the bamboo rootball, but we did it! Our lovely gold bamboo (with delicate green streaks) will move with us to our jungle cabin.

Outdoors and under the house

We have started phase II of construction at our cabin in the jungle. We are shrinking the pond with a retaining wall, which we will cover with some vines or some such. The pond (here are some pictures from last May) did not have a lot of plants around it to prevent erosion, so erode it did, doubling in size over the past year of rains and threatening to steal away the earth under the stairs at our entrance.

We have a six-meter footbridge, so we no longer have to sneak in through the neighbor's bridge or inch along the muddy sides of the canal to get home. Now to grow hedges and plants to better define our grand entrance.

And (drumroll)... we are building our traditional Thai kitchen under the house -- the area known in Thai as the "tai thoon." Most Thais living in homes on raised stilts keep their pigs and chickens in the tai thoon, as well as their outdoor cooking area. When their kids grow up, the pigs move out to make way for the adult kids' room.

The tai thoon, underneath the house, is typically cooler, and it is where Thais spend the hot tropical days. Also, as I learned from the Barefoot Architect, it is typical in the tropics to build the upper floor first with a good sturdy roof to protect from the rains, and then when budget permits, expand under the house with a floor and walls.

2.40m Desk

Old wood, new bathroom sink

A little over a year ago (before we bought the land for our house), Landry walked by the neighboring recycle guys' shophouse and saw a bunch of old wooden window shutters. We bought about 17 from him, used several for the house, and had one leftover. Deciding that we wanted to try to use as much reclaimed and recycled material as possible, we used the last shutter as a countertop for the bathroom sink. The back of the sink is leftover rosewood (also reclaimed) from our flooring. We're now hunting for some elegant legs for the bathroom counter.

Our builders are homebuilders, but not furniture makers, so when they made the bench at the bottom of our loft stairwell, it looked raw, unfinished. We trimmed and filed the edges of the bench and then put a finished edge on it.

Sinks

We are in the process of figuring out how to put up our kitchen and bathroom sinks and we would welcome any advice. I have always wanted a ceramic kitchen sink and thought I would only be able to find overpriced antiques. Fortunately, we found one on the sanitary goods street near Chinatown. It was made in Thailand and measures approximately 30 by 50 cm and about 30 cm deep.

We're thinking of putting the kitchen sink on a simple metal frame, so we can show the ceramic body, and then put the tap into a small extended counter-like area that would jut out behind the sink and would serve only to hold the tap.

Because our house has only one layer of wall, we do not have a place to hide pipes or to hold taps. This is also why we chose the metal piping for the electricity.

We're looking now for a solar water heater. We plan to have hot water for the shower and the kitchen sink.

This is our bathroom sink -- small and simple. It's light enough to hang from the vertical beams of our walls, we've been told, but we're still thinking of adding some sort of pedestal.

We're trying to do this on our own, but it often feels like we're trying to reinvent the wheel. Any tips or advice? Add your comments.

Piped water coming

Our neighbors have always bathed with the local groundwater and drunk rainwater, but all that is about to change. The municipal water main is coming. Just yesterday, the superstrong worker dudes used long poles with cylinders on them to dig deep holes into the clay (Bangkok earth is clay) next to the "road" next to our house (actually a sidewalk-sized road that permits only pedestrians, motorbikes and bicycles). They then hoisted up these 6-meter long cement polls and dropped them into -- ploop! -- into the holes.

With the cement pole balanced perfectly on this cart like a seesaw, it is rolled into the forested inner reaches of our neighborhood from the main road (a real road for cars, about 150 meters from our house).

These were not here Friday and were all dug and put in place Saturday morning, before noon, which is when we arrived. The workers will then pour a cement block with a half-moon cradle for the water main pipe to rest in.

Painting finished

All the wood surfaces had to be painted -- for aesthetics and to protect it from termites and the monsoon season mold. For the months when it rains a lot, our laundry does not want to dry on the line, and everything gets moldy, even framed artworks.

A view of the back of our house.

Alisa's birthday at the house

This weekend we celebrated Alisa's birthday at our house. Takako brought beautiful homemade kimonos ...

We brought the camera obscura 

Putting up the fan and electric system

October 9 was a big day for us -- we got our first glimpse of our ceiling fan up. We actually bought this fan before we planned the house and designed the house around it (see here, our balsa wood model of the house as we were still in the planning phase). We were staying with an antique fan-collecting friend in Vietnam and fell in love with his Dutch chrome ceiling fan, so we ended up with this small souvenir.

Trying out the rotor.

Because many traditional Thai houses have only one layer of wall, they have nowhere to hide cables and electricity systems. Most have white electric cable stapled along the walls and ceilings, but we opted for metal piping.

Light fixtures from Chinatown in Bangkok.

The switch panel for the fan was another Chinatown find, but this one was sitting in the window covered with dust. The shopkeeper showed us a new plastic one, and we opted for this metal box instead -- high-tech with four fan speeds. We went back to the shop a few days ago, and the ghostly dust footprint of our fan control panel is still in the shop window, amid all the other electric switch knickknacks.

One of the bathroom lights.

Alisa playing with Folk and Fah, the kids who live next door.