What NO ONE Tells You About Building a House in Thailand’s Countryside

Overview

Join us as we share our journey of building a home in Phetchabun Province, Thailand. Learn from our experiences and discover valuable tips for constructing your own home outside major metropolitan areas like Bangkok, Chiang Mai, or Phuket. We’ll cover essential insights, including finding a trustworthy builder, ensuring they’re comfortable with the design, being hands-on throughout the process, and treating the construction team like family. These takeaways aim to guide you in navigating the unique challenges of building in rural Thailand. 

Key Takeaways

  • Vet your builder thoroughly: In Thailand’s provinces, builders aren’t licensed or bonded. Get trusted referrals, review their past projects, and meet homeowners they’ve worked with.

  • Stick to the builder’s expertise: Avoid overly complex designs. Adapt their proven templates (e.g., adjust dimensions/finishes) for faster, conflict-free results.

  • Stay hands-on (even remotely): Join material/appliance selections via video calls. COVID lockdowns forced us to build via FaceTime, leading to costly post-quarantine fixes.

  • Treat workers like family: Share meals (e.g.,noodle soup), host Friday beer-and-chicken BBQs, and build trust. Years later, our builders are still friends.

Transcription

Hello, I’m taping today from our home in Phetchabun province. And I wanted to talk about the lessons that my wife Par and I learned as we were building a home here and some takeaways that hopefully you’ll find helpful if you’re thinking about building a home in Thailand, and especially if you’re thinking about building a home.

outside of major metropolitan areas like Bangkok or Chiang Mai or Phuket.

So here are the four takeaways that, that we think might be helpful to you. The first one is you know, builders are not necessarily licensed and bonded here, especially up in the provinces. And no one’s going to come by from the government and inspect the home building process and make sure it’s up to code and safe and so on.

And again, that’s, that’s our experience here in the provinces. So. The first takeaway is your due diligence on your builder is everything. And I think there’s two aspects to that. The first is getting a referral from somebody you trust. Somebody that’s already built a home in Thailand and especially in the province.

That had a good experience and it’s building a home of similar quality to the home that you want to build. So in our case, we had a friend of a friend in Los Angeles, who had built a home here a few years prior to our building our house. He raved about the builder. And then the second part of the diligence is meeting the builder.

Which we did, and going out to a few of the projects that the builder has already completed and if you can, talk to the homeowners who are there just to, you know, get a sense of and, and confirm that, you know, what he’s saying to you is true and he’s able to deliver on what he’s talking about. I think the second takeaway is.

Have the builder build something that he’s comfortable doing. You know, when I started this process, I hired an architect and I had sort of this dream home that I wanted to build. And I showed these plans to some local builders here in Petchaboon and they wouldn’t touch it. They thought that it was too complex and they didn’t want to fail.

Either to have a conflict with us or just not be able to deliver on what I was asking for. So when we met the builder that built our house in Petchaboon, I actually asked him to show us a portfolio of things that he had already done. And he showed us one design and we really loved it. And you know what?

We changed some of the dimensions. We changed some of the finishes, but this was a home that he was comfortable designing and building and engineering. And that his foreman and crew were comfortable building and executing on. So, at the end of the day, we came out with a great result. I think in part because this was not new ground, but this was something that our builder was familiar with.

The third thing is to be as hands on as you can. and go out with your builder, foreman, crew when they’re picking materials or appliances and so on. Our experience was that we started the home, the monks came out, we put the first pillar in the ground. In January of 2020, my wife was going to come back and do some of these things, be more hands on in April of 2020.

But as you may know, we got locked out of the country, right? COVID shut down. Our ability to access Thailand. We actually ended up building our house on FaceTime. And by the time we got here to do the punch list in October of 2020 and go through that awful 15 day. Quarantine, there were some things we needed to change out, things that we just couldn’t really get a sense of until we got here and saw them firsthand.

And so I think a good thing to do is to talk to your builder, find out when they’re going to go out and, and look at. Materials or appliances, and sometimes your builder in good faith is going to want to find the least cost alternative, and sometimes good isn’t good enough. You want, because this is your home, maybe a slightly higher quality or a different finish because you’re going to be living here for quite some time.

I think the fourth takeaway, unlike many Western countries, is that You know, my staff or people that are performing services for you over a period of time become more like family than workers on site. And if you treat the team that’s building your home as family, I think you’ll come out with a better result.

So what does that mean? If you’re going to Tlatnap, the outdoor market, picking up some lunch. Pick up some extra bowls of goutiao, some noodle soup, and bring that from time to time. On a Friday afternoon, after, you know, a hard week at work, particularly if you’re building your home over April, May, June, when it’s unbelievably hot here, you know, bringing out some six packs of beer, and a few buckets of ice, and some, you know, gaiyang.

We get gaiyang here locally in Weishanburi and some kaoniao. I guess host a little party for them to kind of relax and finish the week, I think goes a long way in building trust and building that relationship so that as the construction goes forward, they’re not just building a house, but they’re building a house for someone that’s treated them like family, and they’re going to treat you in the same way.

In fact, we’ve remained friends with some of the people that have built our home, Lothi’s, many years later, four years later. So that’s our takeaway from building a home here in Petchaboon Province. I hope this was helpful, and if you like this video, please share, like and subscribe, and thanks for watching.

Take care.