20 hours ago, nanglong218 said:

My main criticism of Thai house construction is the capacity of a concrete beam to span more than about 4 metres. This governs the size of your rooms, but worse, leaves you with a concrete column bang in the middle of your living room

No it does not govern the size of your rooms. I have my main living room at 8m by 5m. All you do is double up on the steel for the cross beams to support your roof. If it is the roof support you are talking about?

On 8/14/2018 at 6:39 AM, Rally123 said:

No it does not govern the size of your rooms. I have my main living room at 8m by 5m. All you do is double up on the steel for the cross beams to support your roof. If it is the roof support you are talking about?

Agreed, my main living room is the same size.

With the cavity wall there is little evidence of pillars, only 3 can be seen in the bedroom corners.

On 8/10/2018 at 3:37 PM, HHTel said:

Mine's a two story house so a roof overhang doesn't work for shade.  Talking of cavity walls, every wall in the house both upstairs and down are double skin.  Not quite sure how that happened but it does mean there are no visible pillars.

Mine is also two storey; the downstairs is not very visible in the photo because of vegetation.

On 8/13/2018 at 7:24 AM, nanglong218 said:

My main criticism of Thai house construction is the capacity of a concrete beam to span more than about 4 metres. This governs the size of your rooms, but worse, leaves you with a concrete column bang in the middle of your living room which I'd bump into at 2am when off to raid the fridge.

I'm not qualified so don't slap me down too hard. I would be looking for a more elaborate roof support system to avoid this.  Aircraft hangars don't have this problem.

Hi there Nanglong... speaking as one who is currently completing a build in ChonBuri,  I worked with the Engineer,  OrBorTor office and builder to create one of the rooms at approx 7m x 7m square by enlarging where required to achieve the correct support. I have no columns in the room itself.

My builder didn't bat an eyelid when I asked for the middle section of the two story house to be 5m wide. And yes, from the engineering plans it appears just extra reinforcing steel is going to be used for those spans compared to the 4m either side.