Resa

Thanks! HCMC it is! 

Hi, I would like to visit a place that is just a bit more entertaining. Any information if the 1 year non immigrant visa based on marriage is easy to get in other places such as Hong Kong or Tokyo? 

Oh actually one more question. Do we need to show all of this every 90 days? So basically the 400.000 will be frozen on my account as long as we do this I guess.

Cheers man! Awesome!

Awesome thanks a lot! Nothing else besides the documents are necessary right?

Im married to a Thai but we have our money in shared accounts. Basically her account and I have access to it.

Can we simply transfer 400.000 THB to my account a few weeks before reporting to immigration?

So far I simply left the country every 90 days but we want to start with the reporting now.

Anything else we need to sort out?

Wife and me look for a small cheap place as weekend home when we visit Chiang Mai. We visit frequently and want to get a small place with space to park the car somewhere. The size doesnt matter. Its just a place to sleep. It should have a decent Internet connection though but I guess thats not an issue anymore all around Chiang Mai.

We like the Nimmahemin area for its choice of food but because we have a car we are flexible. We would like to be close enough to be at the ring road within 15 minutes (considering the traffic is normal).

The area towards Doi Saket looks kind of nice but it would be great to hear suggestions from all of you who really know Chiang Mai.

We get very conflicting information right now. We have an 80m deep well, with quite some fluoride and iron but the water that comes up is clear.

One guy says:

well -> whole house filter 1 (carbon, manganese) -> whole house filter 2 (resin) -> stainless tank -> pressure pump -> house (for shower and so on)

And another guy says:

well -> stainless tank -> pressure pump -> whole house filter 1 (carbon, manganese) -> whole house filter 2 (resin) -> house (for shower and so on)

And a third guy says:

well -> some sort of aeration unit so the water gets some oxygen -> stainless tank -> pressure pump -> whole house filter 1 (carbon, manganese) -> whole house filter 2 (resin) -> house (for shower and so on)

From reading other threads here this might make sense?

well -> basic single cartridge sediment filter -> stainless tank -> pressure pump -> whole house filter 1 (carbon, manganese) -> whole house filter 2 (resin) -> house (for shower and so on)

But with the last solution do I still have enough pressure to move the water to the house? (It does not have to get up any floors, its all on ground level).

Would be fantastic if we could get some recommendations what makes sense and what not.

We bought some land near Chiang Mai that is surrounded by Lamyai / Longan trees. We build our house about 20 meters from our neighbors land. We spoke with him and he told us that he uses the insecticide abamectin and the fungicide carbendazim once every 2 month on his trees.

We are a bit worried about this and our health. Can anyone with some knowledge about this please give us some advice? They do not use the real nasty stuff like Praquat here at least but I just did a few hours of research on this and dont know how to judge this situation. We dont want to screw with our health but love the land. How serious is ths?

Thanks a lot Crossy. How we keep the generator safe is the next problem. We might hire a guy to stay with it at night but even that might not mean much.

We still dont have powerlines and start building. We want to get a generator anyway and our builder said we need a 5kw generator for powering the pump that gets water from our well. We need this water for curing the foundation.

So I need this generator in the next 2 days. Im in Chiang Mai. Any advice where and what to get?

Later on the generator should also work as a backup for our regular power supply.

Trogers how well is it running? Any major hickups to open close it or still smooth like on the first day?

The folding door is similar to the one I linked to, just made from aluminum

http://www.aledman.net/folding-doors-folding-patio-glass-doors/bi-folding-doors-glass-and-wood/

We have two 4m x 3m openings towards our garden. Today we spoke with our architect who also takes care of the building and he said he can get us either aluminium sliding or folding doors for more or less the same price.

http://www.aledman.net/folding-doors-folding-patio-glass-doors/bi-folding-doors-glass-and-wood/

Anyone has experience with them? Are folding doors any good? We thought we might also get folding mosquito nets that fold to the other side.

Ackybang, thanks so much. If you happen to come to Bangkok or Chiang Mai anytime soon, let me know. I d like to buy you a nice dinner and a couple of drinks if Im in town.

We will finalize the deal more or less tomorrow. We will let him do foundations, plumbing, roof (colorbond with boltless fixings) and walls (double layer red brick) for sure. He seems to be a great guy and has worked with some people who are also in this forum before (and was recommended) so Im optimistic.

I read the and coolthaihouse forums since some time and yes indeed amazing information.

Thank you very much!

Langsuan Man, what jobs do you think should be completed by the main builder in your opinion?

That's a textbook description. I feel like I really get it. Awesome!

What parts of the house do you think are most crucial / hardest to pull off right?

From my understanding and research foundation and roof are the most important parts of the house. So maybe I just let them do this?

We also build at an off grid location, will have to dig a well and overcome a few more hurdles but yeah I have time to do that.

Where did you build if I may ask? We build near Chiang Mai.

Ackybang, thanks for your input.

He comes much recommended and has built his own hotel that is a bit similar to our design. All 4 guys we saw today have said the same things and approved our design. It is pretty straight forward.

The thing is we will be at the building site every day anyway, so we plan to more or less direct the work ourselves so this part wouldnt be a problem. Our problem is that we are missing someone like a foreman. I guess I could read the plans but for example have no experience in measuring the land to say where exactly the foundation should go. So without knowing what a subcontractor can exactly do I dont know if we can pull this off on our own or not.

Hi Steve,

we build a modular villa. So the first house is basically our living room. We just want to take this step by step to get used to building. It is a complete custom design but rather simple. It has a sloped roof and pretty open floorplan. Custom aluminium windows and sliding doors.

We have different payments for different phases of course. My only worries are that the house somehow disintegrates lol so my thinking was let the architect and his guys do all the structural stuff and we get our own guys for the finer things.

Yep for the roof we will go for glasswool insulated white colorbond with proper overhangs to keep the heat in check.

We are pretty sure we go for a certain architect who also offered us to build for us. We calculated the costs of building on our own before and all in all come out at 900k THB. His offer is 1.5mil THB.

This is the first time we are building and even though I did lots of research already I feel it might make sense to let this first house get built by someone with experience (we will build two more houses after that). My wife and me are now considering to let him build the bare minimum.

He takes care of:

# Foundation

# Roofing

# Plumbing

# Walls

We (subcontractors we hire directly) take care of:

# Tiles

# Electrics

# Bathroom and kitchen fixtures

# Windows and sliding doors

# Painting

Do you think that makes sense? What would you let the builder do if you are new to this and what would you do yourself with subcontractors?

We would like to keep our costs reasonable because we spent a bit more than planned on the land and also got to buy a new car.

Thanks, yeah on another house building forum people also said q-con can actually hold decent loads if you use the right fixtures.

We have met 4 Thai architects / builders today and everyone recommended us to go for red brick double walls instead of doing the walls with q-con blocks. Their main arguments were that double walls protect better from the heat, are stronger to put up built in furniture and that the weight doesnt really matter in our first one storey house.

We are about to let one of them do the drawings for our house and have to make a decision. What do you guys think? I was really set on using the 20cm q-cons but not sure now...

No surprise there is nothing about houses for rent in Phrao online. We plan to head up and ask our future neighbors and see if we can find a place this way.

We need a house for rent for 6 months to 1 year while we are building our own place.

Any recommendations or ideas how to find a decent place up there would be awesome!

We crunched the numbers, compared the features and have no idea which one we should pick.

The price is the same after discounts from Toyota and the features are almost the same. Toyota seems to have a USB port Isuzu doesnt have... uhm yeah!

Toyota hilux 3.0 g 4wd vs Isuzu vcross 3.0 VGS z prestige navi

Seems like its really just personal preference.