Happy Friday!

Its Friday so I bought myself a present.  At 1200 by 900 unframed, I am not sure where it will go, but I will find space.  Another painting by the same artist is sitting in the gallery and I can hear it yelling at me half way across the island, so I might have to go back.

Finally! My house in the rennovator's heaven.

After all the stuffing around and the games with lawyers, authorities etcetera, I finally got access to the new house.  The final day was a bit nerve wracking.  We had to deal with the lawyers, the land office, the woman who thought she owned the house, the loan shark she had signed the title over too and actually owned the house, the woman's husband who has been taken for everything he had, my friend who acts as the name holder, and myself.  The final result was that the new house is sort of mine.  Sort of, because the Thai laws say foreigners cannot own land in Thailand, so the house is mine but is actually in a friends name with an iron clad lease that gives me total control.  So, as much as Thai law allows, the house is mine.

But that was just the start.  I think I have found a paradise for rennovators! Anyone who has done a rennovation in Australia should take note. 

Firstly there are no building regulations.  If you want to build something that will fall on your head, they will let you.  When it falls on your head they will shrug and send you off to be buried.  The builders cope with this by over engineering.  The houses are basically built of reinforced concrete and they are very solid. 

Secondly there are the tradesmen.  When they say they will come and give a quote, they actually turn up!  They give you a quote on the spot and the quote seems rediculously low if you have ever done rennovations in Australia.  You then ask the fateful question... when would you be able to do it?  They look at you stupid and say 'You don't want to start now?"

The result is that I have substantially rennovated a house in a week!

I think I have had a better experience than many due to the fact that I have had a local helping me through the process.  Somchai now gets called "The Foreman" and many of the workers are people he knows.  At the peak there were 15 people working on the house in a single day!

The worst  problem with the house was the room that had been created by glassing in the undercover car port.  In doing this they had created the worlds most useless room and an eyesore of an entrance, as these photos show.

 So the work started.  Given that the house is made of concrete, making "adjustments" means bringing in the jackhammers.  I had just got all the funiture delivered and you can imagine what sort of mess is created when you start jackhammering inside the house!  Some places literally ended up an inch deep in cement dust.

I have learned that you have to be careful when dealing with Thais in what is their second language.  They are likely to take you very literally.  When a tradesman started measuring the size of the living area to install an aircon, I said I did not want something that would "just do the job".  If theye were to err either way, err on the side of bigger and more powerful.

So this is the compressor for the Arctic Blast machine that arrived.  If I put it on full for more than five minutes it is possible that I might get snow on my couch!

At the end of the first day I had a door and window jackhammered out and a new opening in its place.

I also had half the roof removed from that ugly room.  What was a dingy grotto already started to look better.

After two days the roof was now replaced with a clear polycarbonate roof.

And the new entrance was framed and the steps in place.

Day three and the glass wall now has two big double sliders in it so that it can be opened right up.

 

The big trees were all starting to disappear out of the front garden.

I had power points in a lot of new places including the bathrooms (Thai houses never have power points in the bathrooms!)

There were six new ceiling fans installed, and the new Aircon was up and running.  The view from the living area was no longer a dingy corner.

4 days and the huge (10 meter) mature tree was gone over the fence with the help of a big crane, and a bed of plants from the back of the garden was transplanted along the front fence to give the place some privacy from the street.

Big trees leave big holes!

After most of the workmen had gone I took a few days to recover from the shock and the effort of keeping up with them.  Then I bought some pots and plants to finish things off a bit.  So now the common entrance to the house looks like this.

There are more plants to go in and a lot of growing to be done before it will "fill out", but the improvement is already worthwhile. 

The new entrance to the main area of the house through that room is a lot more inviting.

So the major work is done!  Ceiling fans supplied and installed through all rooms.  An Arctic Blaster aircon supplied and installed in the living area.  A raft of new power points and some new points for TV etc. The roof half removed off the "glass room".  A replacement transparent roof put in.  A second double glass slider supplied and installed in the front wall.  Remove an existing door and window and replace it with a new double glass slider.  Build new full width steps.  Insect screens installed on the external doors and the bedroom windows.  Five trees removed from the front yard including a ten meter monster.  Replanting the whole front fenceline. Painting and finishing around all the damage. 

All done basically in a week and at a total cost of around 200,000 baht, or the equivalent of about $7,000 Australian.  And that included the cost of all the materials and components such as the aircons, doors and fans!

Now just an electric gate to go in and some new orchid houses to be installed.  Pictures will follow!



Thai Muang National Park

I went up to the Thai Muang National Park on a tip off from a friend that there were epiphytic orchids up there.  This is on the coast of the mainland about 40 kilometres north of Phuket island.  This particular area was one of the worst hit by the Tsunami as it had absolutely no protection and the land is very flat.  The question was whether much survived and how the area has recovered.

Firstly there was this beach.  I know there is no such thing as a never ending beach, but must be close!

Just inland were these huge metal parts that seem to have been left behind.  Looks like a winching system of some sort, so maybe it was for loading boats or something similar.

The area is covered in paperbarks and there were large areas like this where all the trees seemed to be almost the same size.  My guess is that this is post Tsunami regeneration.  In amongst them there were just a few much larger trees I am supposing were the few survivors.  Throughout this area there were no epiphytic plants, again suggesting regeneration.

Some areas seemed to be a bit wetter and these had some more diversity, but still most of the trees appeared to be regrowth.

The soil is almost pure sand, which I imagine would make it relatively easy to uproot the trees.

There were a number of larger trees that had been knocked down, but still had roots in the ground and survived.  Some of the branches are developing into new trunks.

In other places you could see the outline of large trees that had been knocked down and not survived.  Their outline is shown by the lines of epiphytic shield ferns that are now growing on the last remnants of the trunks as they rot away.

There is clearly a lot of replanting underway to try to help with the regeneration process.

This species of tree was clearly regenerating well and was now flowering and hopefully will set the seed that will help in the regrowth process.

In some places you could not stop long enough to take pictures because the moment you were not moving the ants attacked.  It seemed if you kept walking you were fine, but the moment you stood still they would start climbing your legs and biting.  They build their nests by dragging the leaves together using living chains and then binding them in place using silk extruded by their larvae.

I finally found an area that seemed less damaged and the trees were more mature, and there I started to find epiphytic orchids.  Interesting to see how these managed to grow on trees that continuously shed their outer layers of bark.

The orchids were almost always growing in a natural scar or crevice in the tree trunks, and the orchids roots seemed to help bind the bark in place.  The strategy did not always work and there were a few places where you could find remnants of orchid plants on the ground still attached to sheets of shed bark.

Further on, close to where the path went back to the beach I found another area that appeared less damaged.  Closer to the water there again seemed to be more different species of trees growing, and with them, more orchids.  There were many dead trees though and as their dead bark dropped, orchids were being dropped with it.  Here you can see how the orchid roots were binding the dead bark in place, but it looked like the environment would win out at some point.

This little miniature orchid was just holding on.

These were totally exposed high up on the dead tree branches.  So much for the myth of orchids being tender plants that need super care to survive.

There were a lot of cases of bark scattered around the base of the dead trees showing that large numbers of orchids were now dead along with their hosts. 

The scary thing for the orchids was that I did not see many examples of young orchid plants.  While the trees appeared to be regenerating, there was not a lot of evidence I could see of the orchids coming back.  Possibly the orchids seedlings were still small and not easy to see up in the branches. Hopefully there will be a small population of mature orchids still present to seed the trees as they become more mature.

One plant that was regenerating was these beautiful cycads.  These plants grow exceptionally slowly, so there are very susceptible to catclysmic damage.  I found a few trying to regenerate from the old trunks.

Some that were in protected pockets obviously survived well, but there were still a number of dead trunks to be seen.

But seedlings were to be found suggesting the species would survive, given a few hundred years to get back to a fully mature population.

At the end of the paths, it opened back out onto the beach, and after the other part of the beach had been deserted, this part was almost crowded.

There were people fishing, swimming and the beach obviously doubled as the highway with mopeds running up and down contiuously.

I made it back to the car with my wrecked legs screaming 'enough' at me, and got back to the gate to the park with about 15 minutes to spare before they closed the gates for the night.  If I had been caught and forced to spend the night there, I could think of worse places.

Bulbophyllum lasiochilum 'Black'

The latest of my orchid species to come into flower.  A prolific little beast, so far this little plant has a total of 12 buds/flowers developing.