Louise and Gary's Excellent Adventure: May 2013

Firstly, an important bit of news. We found out on Tuesday that our house won’t be finished as early as we thought. They’ve put the finish date around January 2014 – a bit longer than I expected.

We flew out of the Gold Coast on Sunday night at 9.25 pm and arrived in Kuala Lumpur at 4am local time (around 6 am Brissie time). We had a 3 hr stopover in Kuala Lumpur and then arrived in Krabi at 7.30 am local time (10.30 am Brissie time). We went straight to our apartment and dropped off our bags. We decided to have a bit of a rest and then went to our house site. This is the first time I’ve actually seen the house and WOW. It’s big!!! I love it – it’s going to be so spacious. Gary and I might need an intercom to chat with each other J Here’s a few pics I took to share.

The front door

Looking from the doorway of a bedroom into the lounge and thru to the kitchen.

the hallway leading to the master bed room. There will be a ‘linen’ type cupboard on the wall to the right in the pic

this is on the opposite side of the linen cupboard – 3 long windows looking out into a garden area

looking out the window of the master bedroom.

looking from the door of the master bedroom to the dining area on the left and the lounge on the right.

this is from the master bedroom window. That’s all national park out there so we won’t lose the view.

from the lounge room door to out the back – master bedroom on the left – dining on the right.

A savage guard dog they left guarding our house

Work Place health and Safety might have a problem with this one.

side of the house – 2 windows are the bathrooms in the spare rooms – bit at the back is the bathroom from the master bedroom.

the front of the house from the road.

On Tuesday we slept late as we didn’t get much sleep on the flight the night before. We had a crying baby in the row behind us and twins of about 2 y.o. in the row to the side of us. They were mostly good but the one in the row behind wasn’t L. We had a meeting with Holger, the Project Manager to discuss a few things we saw at the site. The study and the pantry have been switched around – this is because they can’t fit the laundry and extra bathroom on the side of the house as planned and now they have to be on the end near the dining room. This means that the pantry window would be removed and we can’t have that removed as that room needs ventilation, so they switched it around. Wish we were told before they did it but that’s the way they work here. It looks ok but we’ve asked for the door to the pantry to be moved because we now have to walk into the study to get into the pantry. Not sure if it can be done as they’ve already done the walls, but they’re going to try because we didn’t know about it so didn’t have any input. We’ve got a meeting with the builder onsite on Thursday afternoon to chat about these changes.

After our meeting we went grocery shopping to Tesco Lotus. They’re a British supermarket chain and they have a large store in Krabi town. It’s huge and I think we’ll be able to get everything we need from there. There’s another one here called The Big C which we’re going to check out on Thursday afternoon after our meeting.

On Wednesday we picked up a lady we met here – Nong – and she helped us with getting papers from Immigration so that Gary could get the car registered. The people at the immigration office don’t speak English very well (which is kind of silly really as most of the people who go there probably don’t speak much Thai) and well, my Thai is a little rusty :-) as in non existent – well, I lie, I can say hello (Sawadee Ka) so Nong came along to give us a bit of a hand with the language barrier. After we got the copy of the papers, we went to Toyota and now the car is registered. We have to wait 3 days for the number plates to arrive so we’re driving around with none at the moment.

Well, today's Friday and I finally get to actually post this on the blog. We got the internet connected in our apartment this afternoon - Finally!!! I'll add the last 2 days activities below.

On Thursday morning we finally got to the beach for a swim. It was high tide and a little rough so the water was churing so it was full of sand and shells. It was warm though and we paddled around for about half an hour. We met Holger and the builder, Somjai, on site in the afternoon and went through each room and discussed how it's all going etc. We're ok with the changes they've had to make and they were ok with our changes. We still had the issue of the roof tiles so the 4 of us went to a couple of building places (kind of like Bunnings) and we had a look at some other roof tiles. The problem was that they will only do a 'run' of 10,000 tiles each time and if they don't have the orders for that many tiles, they won't do the run. We only need around 4500 tiles so we have to wait for others to order them for them to be produced and they don't have those orders at this time. We found another tile we like, but would prefer our first choice, so Somjai is going to call them a few times in the next 2 weeks to see if they can be ordered, and if at the end of the 2 weeks they won't be doing them, we're going to go with our second choice. We could keep waiting but Somjai doesn't know how long we would have to wait and it could go for months. We're running behind schedule as it is because of these tiles, so we'd really like them to get going again. So they'll be working on site over the next 2 weeks just doing the things they can until the tiles are delivered then they'll be full steam ahead again.

Friday has been a lazy day so far - mainly because we've had to wait for the internet guys to come to set it up. They couldn't give an exact time - a 'somewhere between 12 & 5 pm' - sounds a lot like Telstra to me :-)

That's all the news for now. We'll probably have a lazy weekend and get back into it next week. Hope all is well at home.

Louise