Wow, you guys are trying to be helpful to an extremely lazy farang who does not go to lawyers.

I thought I drew a line under the topic with my last post but since you seem so interested, let me tell you some more.

With the proviso that Ubonjoe's comment above, once again, seems most apropos.

We bought the property in November, paid 300,000 Baht for 1 rai+1 ngan. All we have is a certificate of sale and a pledge by the head of the village.

We did this consciously -- at least a layman's consciousness -- knowing that we were trading low prices for security. The first thing the wife did was have the whole area fenced because she explained to me (Mr. Anti-fence) that it would be a good move in the negotiations with some future government land department who would sweep through in the future and adjudicate land titles.

If it was OK with the wife I was willing to roll the dice. I may well be dead by then anyway. The wife has a house in the nearest village where she can retreat under the most adverse cicumstances.

I mean is there any chance that they are going to roll in with a bulldozer next month and throw her in prison for building the house?

Today's action was what I think more representative. We took the 4 photos of the house to the Mae Faek sub district office as part of the path to getting a house number. The guy looked at them, said "Oh yeah, you guys live out on the road going out to the dam. Everybody knows about that house. Here is the OK stamp, take this paper and go over to the San Sai office and they'll give you a number."

We can wait; we are having fun; jai yen yen.

Piece of cake. We were in and out of the San Sai office in forty minutes.

We are house number 288 in village 3 of subdistrict Mae Faek.

Wife got a new blue book and transferred her residence from her old house.

The precipitating event for this flurry of activity was a conversation with the woman who brought two young men to cut back our tamarind tree. She said she had a house number without having a chanote. The wife had not thought that possible. With that hint and my need for a residence for immigration she pulled it together fast.