So on the 21st of november was the house-warming-party of Pedro’s house. I don’t think the pictures need a lot of comment from my side.
We had about 35 guests excluding the goat on the grill.
Sure we had some Lao Hai and the legendary Mr. Sai himself is preparing it.
Kaelyn and Runar built a small cart-board Pedro who will watch the house while the real one is gone.
Pedro moved into his new house! It is not finished yet, but the roof is on. We made the floor a few days ago, so he took a long machete with him and moved in! Tomorrow is the house-warming-party. Don’t miss it! On the picture below, you see us preparing everything to put in the concrete-floor. For the roof, we used corrugated iron, but Pedro wants to grow passion-fruit from below over all the house to keep the heat away. Mr. Thi said, he will have to make his peace with the tree-snakes!
On the terrace in our house, we made another concrete-floor. The other half will remain the Beach.
Our new voluntiere moved in. We had a big fat rat annoying us during the night-time, so we got now Mummy-cat named Mora and her three little horses. I thought our cats at home would be crazy, but these ones are wild in the meaning of the word. They really eat everything. A few weeks ago they left a present for me in front of my bed. A colourful gecko longer than my hand!
Sabaydee. We started to make the entrance nicer. Kaelyn, Andi and me had different ideas, so out of an half a day project became a five day project. Everything is finished now, but I couldn’t take a nice picture now in the dark, so I just give you some from the building process and you can start to imagine what it looks like.
Kaelyn started with a nice mosaik design and Andi made the bench.
I hope that I can upload tomorrow another picture of the finished result. Also for Pedro’s house. There is only one week left to finish it, but the roof is on!
So today Goe, Maan and Pedro brought the log for the center-pillar of the new house. It looks quite impressive now and they are looking forward to build the roof. The last days I just prepared paint for the renovation of the house we built before, so the work was relaxed, but not very dramatic.
Goe, Gunnar (sorry Runar) and me are very proud to present the new bottle-straw-design, we made in the last two days. It is now the new eye-catcher after you open the front-door. Three meters high and two meters wide.
Pedro’s house is growing pretty fast! Goe from the Phoudindaeng village joined the building team. I am very happy with that. He was helping about two month, building our house last year. I think he is now the most skilled lao Mudhouse-constructor. Even if he has no idea about that!
Enjoy your weekends you lucky westeners!!
So we are back in the mud-pit! I arrived on the farm a week ago and everything is going on very well. The house is in a good shape. No severe damages and it will take about two weeks to finish it. After that, we will start to make the interior nice. I was thinking about an information point on mud-house-buildings downstairs, were it is still nice to hang out during the days. We will also build a place to cook on the terrace and even a herbal sauna is in discussion. Upstairs we moved in with five volunteers and we are enjoying the evenings on the balcony. Big sorry to Eddy the Railer. They had to enlarge the balcony and the roof to protect the walls from rain.
The house from the front right now with the huge new balcony. They had to remove the balcony-door because they needed to build another pillar. Soon I will plant banana-trees in front of that ugly wall. For sure.
The bath-room is about to be finished. It just needs a now coat of paint.
The interior upstairs:
We also started to build another mud-house. This one will be much smaller and round. The project is managed by Pedro from Spain and I help him everyday to get things started. After ten days we could could start yesterday with the brick-lane.
Sabaydee
So Eddy “the Plainer” also booked his flight for autumn. Great feeling. What exactly will be going on at the farm is in the discussion right now. Please join. Definately we will continue with working on the house, but I will do some research for my thesis too, what actually means that I want to spend a lot of time with the people in Phoudindaeng. I want to get an idea what it means to be young in Phoudindaeng right now. There are so many futures, expectations, constraints…
So whenever you have an idea about new building-hybrids or whatever, please let me know. There are many new ideas in my head. Something between these two examples from Marocco where I took these pictures last year:
5-Star-Hotel in Zagora pretending to be something like “traditional” or “authentic”. Fake-Mud seems to be cool.
DIY-Mudhut. One of the millions.
28th of september until 21st of december. What a strange feeling…….so please feel welcome everybody. We already have a home-base-house were we could starting building on new dreams. Hope to see you all.
I don’t really know what exactly is going on with the house, but I saw on some pictures from the last weeks that they are definately working on extending the balcony (for whatever reason).
Right now I am thinking about going back to Laos and probably to the farm. This time my focus would be on my thesis, but living in the house and working together on some smaller and shorter projects would be great. I’m thinking about october, november, december. Anybody interested to join? Any suggestions or wishes for a project?
What I will do there will probably have some connection to (action/grassroot/anarchist) anthropology in Lao PDR and development and/or tourism. Sounds funny yeah?
Greetings Peter
On the 16.12.07 I started to clean the place where Mr. Thi, his wife Peng Oan and me had decided where we want to build the new house. The only picture I have from the site what it looked like before we came. As you can see on the size of the picture, in these days I planed a much smaller house!
Sarah sent me a new picture that was taken about a month ago from about the same position:
The latest news say that after the first rainy season the house is abolutely alright. No severe damages approached, even after a heavy hurricane that damaged lots of houses in the village of Phoudindaeng. Still the house is not inhabitable for many different reasons. Probably I will go back the next year. Whoever would like to join, is more than welcome.
