Adventures in Thai Life: death, karma, luck ...

[Smiles]

Wow ... where on earth did you find this thread? What were you looking for? I wrote it in 2013!

Well, while I'm at it, there was a denoument to the above story, so if interested I'll write here ~ in this old thread ~ for the newest regarding not one house but two ... also Karma, Luck, but thank god, no Death.

So this was the original plan (described in the opening post): to buy this house at a wonderful price (thanks Luck) and spend some time over the years to renovate it into a liveable structure. It needed a lot!

And this is that place, on one rai of land, out in Klog Charoen Village in southern Surin Province, fairly close to the border with Cambodia, deep in the heart of rice country:

Skip now to 2017.

On the right hand photo is the original house of which this thread (but not this post) was all about.

On the left hand photo is the house we ended up buying at the end of the day, four years later.





The original house still stands, but it's a bit of a mess, and we still are not sure exactly what we will do with it.

But the real story is the right hand home. Quite stately in a proletarian kind of way, it was built about sometime around 2015 by one of Suphot's huge tribe of nieces and her husband.
I had visited Klong Charoen many times . . . seen this house, had raucous Thai-style parties outside (and in) there, and even mentioned to Pot that this was a pretty damn nice house. It needed lots of renovations mainly for its ghastly tiling and paint work, but it had good strong bones. The parties were great, beer and whiskey flowing, morlum music ubiquitous and I made friends with his niece. She liked me, I liked her ... and that's important in my life.

Jump to 2016:

Lying around in our on-the-sea home in Hua Hin watching CNN and Trump spewing his 'anus horribilous' over everything he touches . . . and Pots phone rang. It was his niece, the same niece as above. The phone call was about half an hour and I was paying no attention. After hanging up I asked what that was all about. (He was always on the phone with his family.)

The conversation went something like this:

Me: "Who was that?"
Him: "That was my niece"
Me: Oh really. What about?"
Him: "She wants us to buy her Klong Charoen house?"
Me: "What? What? What? They just built it! How much?"
Him: "One million Baht"
Me: "Say YES, say YES!!"

And that dear readers, is the best way of buying a house. It turned out that his niece and her husband wanted to move to Bangkok and open a restaurant . . . myself pointing out that there is about 6 million restaurants in Bangkok made no headway at all, but after a few minutes of thinking I thought that here's the Perfect Storm: they wanted to open a business, but had no money. All their equity was in the house. So sell it. Sell it to us.
Back on the phone after another half hour we owned the house you see above.

Bottom line: we spent about half a million baht on the renovations. Pot re-tiled and painted the whole house in and out. I used a wheel barrow a lot! Here are some photos apre/renos. I love the place. The peaceful quiet out in the rice paddys is stunning in its own way.
We'll always live on-the-beach in Hua Hin. I love it there as well, the sea lapping at my toes, reading the hundred or more books I have on my tablet ... me and my "Leo yai", dropping into the only gay bar left in town and playing snooker with the boys there.

Our monster patio. I spend a lot of time out here and watch the huge bamboo trees dancing in the slow motion breeze.





Suphot and Mama.




Kitchen, laundry, our bar, beer fridge well filled.








Everybody happy ... ghastly shorts notwithstanding.


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