This is what my wife has always said: If you have the money/time/knowledge, buy a plot of land and have your house built. I live on a muban that was built in 2010, when we bought the house. The workers were Cambodian, so what did they care? The muban was - as is often the case - built on a rice paddy. I had the grass - on 3 sides - dug up and had my own Thai builder lay tiles on the 3 sides - one at a time, with a sand base, rebar wired into a grid, 8 cm of concrete (concrete mixer truck) and the tiles laid when the concrete had set. However, we still had/have cracks and gaps all around the base of the house, which I have filled in periodically. The owners who didn't do what I did - and just left the grass - have it much more serious. I won't bother including pictures, but in some cases, the house looks like an island surrounded by sunken grass. Also, around a year after moving, all 4 external walls of the house developed hairline cracks all over. My wife - who used to work in the office of a large national house-builder, said that they used "80% cement, meaning that the other 20% (of the cement) was sand. These cracks were potched up by the same Cambodian workers who built the houses, hence the repair lasted around 2 years before all the same cracks returned. I got my wife's nephew, who was then aged 17, to do the job again under my supervision. It took him about a month and as payment I gave him my Ninja 300 motorbike. As for the plumbing, I have dealt with all the burst underground pipes myself. (All the weak joints eventually failed due to my installing a pump). As for and electrical, my wife's brother - who is a real electrician - rewired where necessary and replaced most of the circuit breakers, that were underrated and kept tripping. The guy next door, who bought the house with a mortgage from his bank, had to have the top of his roof replaced; we got those builders to do the same repairs to my roof for a few thousand baht.