The hood

We live in a neighborhood where most people live off the land, gathering their coconuts, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves and fish from the orchards and canals on their land, or even on government lands that they keep manicured and rich with fruiting trees in exchange for a few ingredients. The villagers here actually organize their land into irrigation canals with planted mounds of coconut, mango, banana and other trees. Some canals are overgrown with duckweed. The sign above says "no fishing."

Above, a lily in our little pond. It blooms in the evening and closes around the time of the late-morning sun.

I love this deep bluish-green bamboo grove. Our fledgling bamboo (which we transplanted from our last home) is a rich gold, with streaks of green.

We call this the green path because no one sweeps it regularly, so it is always overgreen with moss and covered over with a soft layer of bamboo.

The monitor lizard gets a bad rap because its Thai name, "hia" in Thai, is one of the greatest insults that can be hurled at someone, along the lines of f***er. So the polite name is "thua ngeun thua thong," which means the "silver and gold one," or voranus, which is its scientific name.

It lives on land and in the water. The old auntie who lives by herself next door calls it "ai kay," which can be translated to "that gator." It has apparently nabbed several of her cats.

We see about one monitor lizard a day. It's a shy animal, always dodging into the forest as we approach. It's quite cute when it's taking a leisurely swim (like above), tucking it's arms neatly at its side and gently swaying side to side, like I might do if I were pretending to be an underwater torpedo. When it is scared, it goes pretty deep underwater, and you can only follow it by following it's trail of air bubbles on the surface of the canal. 

Visitor

A visitor >>>>

from  the phasmatodea family ( if you know the specific name let us know)

With a baby on its back 

Bathroom

After months of mulling how to put up our sink, we found a nice cabinet with mirror at Wat Suan Kaew (an antiques market temple that supports homeless people) and then punched a hole into to fit the sink. The plumbing took Landry a good day of tinkering around with pipes.

Our toilet is half finished. The brick throne, with the wooden cap that Landry built, with a nice heavy toilet lid... which was surprisingly not easy to find in Thailand. Many affordable toilet seats here are light, cheap plastic. So we are now awaiting a stainless steel pipe that will connect from the throne to the 200-liter composting bin below. The idea is to use a bin for a few months, then switch out for an empty bin one, allowing the contents of the filled one to compost.

Moving forward

Oh ho, Dave's picture again, with a little marker over our little cabana.

The counter on wheels goes where we want and need. The schoolhouse doors that we bought at a reclaimed wood warehouse got a fresh paint of turquoise, mixed with a touch of black to give it less bop, more gravity... or gravité, if you want to be really grave.

We bought a bunch of mason jars to keep sugar, flour, granola, rice, lentils. We have to dump the toaster -- the timer is broken, and it is an ugly, one-use only appliance. Frying pan does the job and is cleaner.

A big green plant in the back corner of our house one day sprouted these pretty precious things! Alas, they toppled during one of the big rains. We look forward to seeing them again one day.

Rain, rain, go away: Monsoons end Nov. 1.

Dinner table

We needed a pretty dinner table and still had leftover wood, so this was another Landry carpentry project.

Chisel & jigsaw.

Uncle Preecha, our neighbor, helped build our house and is master of the jungle. Any questions about plants, reptiles and such, we ask Preecha. He helped Landry with the table.

Voil
à la table. The five pieces that make the tabletop were once one long piece of wood. Landry loves his circular saw.

This picture doesn't capture how the I-shaped beams at the bottom fit snugly into the chisel-cut legs. It's my favorite part of the table.

Granite kitchen counter on caster wheels

Our good friends gave us a slab of granite or some such stone that was left over from their kitchen renovation. We often sat and stared at the stone slab over the past year and wondered how we would put it up. We decided to use the leftover wood from homebuilding for our remaining projects.

K. Ting is one of the guys who helped build our house, and he just told us recently that his specialty is woodwork -- he builds traditional Thai long-tail boats. Landry had built counter 1.0 himself, but then decided to enlist Ting's help for version 1.1. Landry can now chisel. 

Counter 1.0 was painted white, but we decided to go back to the natural wood color with an oil stain to even out the various wood tones. Washing off the white paint was a dumb, unnecessary job, but at least we gave the white a try.

Landry did most of the work, but I was remiss in taking pictures.

Counter with the shelves for pots and pans on the bottom, and a drawer with smooth-as-silk ball bearing rails for the silverware, serviettes, etc.

Kitchen sink

We recently got a Black & Decker laser level, and were happy to find that we somehow managed to get the shelves up straight, even though a water bubble level doesn't help give an exact indication of what's straight.

The sink was also a pain to get straight, but we cut the pipes needed and it's good. We got a water filter for drinking water, and we put the wooden frame up to give the taps a home.

Above the taps, next to the drying rack, are two "pintos" -- which is how Thais call bento boxes. They are traditional Thai lunch boxes, one layer filled with rice, and the others with meats or veggies to eat with.

We are back

After three months abroad for work and play across five countries, we are back in Phra Pradaeng, the lush green in the center of the above photo (our friend Dave took this while landing at BKK airport).

Cats on our neighbors' urns that collect rainwater for drinking. The cats hunt everything around, including the snakes. One of the cats got bitten by a snake, and his face swelled up like a mooncake.

The coconuts in the backyard are low -- I can walk up to the tree and just chop one for a sip of the sweet nectar. Great root network to prevent erosion, but the mango tree, alas, does not have the roots for the banks of a canal and fell in after a week of heavy rain. More mangroves to come.

Kaffir lime next to our front door.

Coconuts in the front yard -- this is the view from our glass front door, and the first thing we see when we sit up in bed.

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

Click

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).