Sep 24, 2013

Building a House Vietnam Part 2

Construction started yesterday on our 98m2 house in Cu Chi province, an auspicious date provided by the monks in District 7. Chi is managing the entire process and fairly nervous about getting the whole thing right. Here in Vietnam you only pay the builder for construction per m2, absolutely no materials are included in his costs right down to the bricks and cement. Luckily out in Cu Chi, with many of the 12 aunts/uncles still around, Chi has plenty of contacts including a materials supplier who will do everything apart from roof tiles for us. This guys has his own factory which manufactures outside tiles (you know those terracotta ones ubiquitous in this country). After the deal, we get a stone table and chairs (you also know the type) for the garden.

The construction crew are tied to a contract which denotes when payments are made and dependent on certain stages of the house being finished. One of Chi's Uncles will be observing the crew (2 main builders and 4 labourers) everyday, filling out an observation form on their progress. It's due to be finished by Christmas. Let's see about that.



6 comments:

minhchau said...

Dear Jon,

Thank you for the return of experience because it is not easy to build a house in Vietnam. You have to be vigilant and monitor everything all the work.

Anonymous said...

Is it easy to hook up electric grid and water supply?

Anonymous said...

Good luck on the house Jon. Hope there are not "surprises".

Unknown said...

Etching something onto a new ground, and a foreign one at that from your previous disposition. Well, nothing beats that. Building stuff out of scratch and charting new terrain at the same time should be interesting. Hope you've got this thing mapped out well, the blueprints of it and stuff, with all the proper tools. Both the software and hardware of it, heh. I guess we can really only wait and see.

Yolande @ Co-Construct

roby8185 said...

we just finished refurbishing our appartment. Luckilly this is in Linh's mum house and they have plenty of contacts for these things. Sure, we could have done all by ourselves through expensive shop, and surely we could have argued more about the detail ... we're pretty happy now.

Linh's took on the whole follow-up with me being in vung tau ... she was clearly not too assured .. She was taking care of her shop at the same time ... stressful time! :)

Good luck!

vietnam visa said...

so good