When talking about the ultimate price of a house there are umpteen variations which off course will all impact the ultimate price that you pay. Sometimes we just want to get kind of a ball park idea prior to launching into the investigation phase.

These houses here:
Oversize Cinderblocks, Raft Foundation
Aerated Superblock, Column Foundation
are presented as examples only, since they will give you the opportunity to examine the materials. It becomes much easier to develop your own BOQ when you see a baseline like this where all the materials are not the cheapest lowest grade that you typically find in the mass produced village developments.

The above example houses can be built for about 10,000 per square meter using a quality full service builder (be sure to be cautious when choosing a builder as pointed out numerous times at the coolthaihouse forum or for 7,000 to 8,000 in a self managed build. The area included in the calculation is the area under the roof (ie. it includes the eves area) which seems to be standard practice. Note that this includes the amenities within the house, such as granite counter tops, stainless faucets, water heater etc., which often don’t make it to the BOQ and the buyers are left to pay these line items separately.

By building the drawing into a model, we can slice it and dice it and see how things are going to fit together. Here is a slice with dimensions appended. And one nice thing about the 3d model, is all dimensions in the plan are associated…. what we change in one place will be changed throughout the entire model and the final produced plans that the builders will use (hopefully… ha ha).

The model can produce fairly lifelike images, frozen at a particular point in the design, to help us get a pretty good handle on how the thing will end up looking. It helps answer questions about room design that you normally wouldn’t notice until after the fact and you might have the thought…. ‘I wish I would have thought of that before!’. The renders are great tools for inside/outside detailed visualization to help make minor tweaks to the design prior to starting the project.

Another good one is the use of fly-throughs of the 3d model. These move away from the detail of the renders and move to the ‘how is it all going to gel’ phase. A good tool to get everyone on the same page. Potentially can be skipped in smaller projects, but required every time in bigger projects. With the fly-trough we take a camera throughout the 3d model and explore all of the most critical areas and record is as a short video as the following demonstrates:

The finished plan is of couse an important component of the overall design effort, but it isn’t yet produced during the conceptual phase. Only a rough plan is produced for verification prior to the detailed design phase, structural check and working plan. However, in smaller projects the plans produced in this phase can indeed be used as the build documents. The samples included are sections of the electrical layout and the wall layout.

This just goes to show it isn’t how much money you throw at a project that makes the ultimate difference in the results, it is being able to visualize the changes you want to make and then putting in place the resources and materials to accomplish the job right the first time.

Compare it to a pizza. What is a pizza anyway? Just some bread and toppings which must be correctly prepared by a skilled technician. Let’s say the talent is there to correctly prepare the crust, but the cook decides to save a bit on the cost of flour — eliminating some of it from the dough. Of course the pizza will suffer, and unnecessarily so since the savings to the cook is ‘just a little bit’. Most of the lower price house (just as it turns out) will have serious problems throughout, much like the pizza with insufficient flour. It is actually kind of a gross way to do business. That is why we decided to upgrade the building model.

As far as the Ms. Dozer method, first off the design is very detailed, including full electric and plumbing schematics. The design is fed into a third party rendering engine to produce life like images, so that the aesthetics of various design choices can be evaluated before the house is built. The rendered images are life like enough (unlike some other 3D software CAD images) that you can kind of a try it before you buy it. See what I’m talking about here: Example Render Set.

First the basic materials we use are either the aerated lightweight blocks (QCON or superblock), or the large oversize cinder blocks (the ones which are 14 or 20 centimeters across, not the ones you commonly see around all the time).

On to the build. The foundation concrete pours are not hand mixed, but CPAC ready mix cement is used. This type of pour will used (over the slightly cheaper hand mix) because it adds consistency and strength. The 280 KSC (kilograms per square centimeter) strength concrete is used and pours are certified (see a sample certification). The rebar requirements for the particular build at tested in a structural engineering program and a high safety factor is applied (slight overkill). There is a damp course installed to keep any moisture from rising up into the foundation elements. See some sample foundation pics and more foundation pics.

For the plumbing, only the thickest grade PVC is used. The Chang brand tube plumbing glue is used (as opposed to the glue which comes in the round cans – it is incredibly how many costly problems develop in plumbing due to bad glue joints). There is a grease trap to prevent the pipes from becoming clogged and septic system from becoming backed up. In the current project every plot has its own artesian deep water well.

For electric, the system is properly grounded and three wires are used throughout. No joints are taped, but the wirenut connectors are used. The conduit (you would be surprised at how many projects don’t even use conduit) is actually affixed to the electric boxes, switch boxes and receptacle boxes. Any wire run underground is one contiguous piece from start to finish. All receptacles are grounded.

The roof uses an ‘M’ shape truss system (on the first build: project 1), which is a cleaner design than the typical roof support (which utilizes intermediate columns throughout the build as supports). The sheet rock is cleanly affixed directly to the bottom of the truss system (actually no its not: I like the idea of this but we implemented a hung ceiling for practical reasons). The truss system, like the foundation rebar, is tested in a structural engineering program for load factor with a high safety factor applied. some roof shots

This list could go on and on, the general concept is that materials are methods are applied which are ‘best’ for the particular situation, not necessarily ‘cheapest’. Take the kitchen sink as an example. There are all kinds of prices which can be paid for a stainless steel sink, starting at about 2,000 baht, which is .015 mm thickness. However, for just 3,000 baht a sink of .025 mm thickness can be procured. It seems that things tend to get produced and sold in mass quantities here of a quality which ‘is barely acceptable’. Just by upping the budget a bit, the quality increases immeasurably. The 3, 000 baht sink is practically indestructible, the 2,000 baht sink will be dinged and dented within short order.

The current new construction projects illustrated some of these points. You can check out the photo journals of the builds here new construction photo journal.

The unique thing about these houses are that they are budget houses finished to a very high standard if you compare them to other budget houses out there. It is amazing to us how a lot of builders tend to think (and practice) just because it is budget it to be low quality!