New Year is over and after only two days holiday the builders were back at work. Step one of the house build is finished and has been examined by the Quality Control engineer from Modern Tage.
As you can see from the previous post, step one set the foundations and the vertical concrete supports for the ground floor, or as the Thai's and Americans say, the first floor of the house.
Step two is the construction of the base, stairs and vertical supports for the second floor of the house.
This part is very unusual for me. The Thai style of house build is nothing like the European way. As can be seen from the image they have made numerous vertical bamboo and wood supports and distributed them over the floor of the house, connecting them to the concrete vertical supports.
It will be interesting to see what they do next.
The next thing was the placing of metal frameworks for the reinforced concrete retaining wall moulds (not sure of the proper name) as was done on the base of the ground floor. These retaining wall moulds were surrounded by wooden boards and filled with concrete. 
This was all completed by about 20th January. Then there was a few days wait for concrete slabs to be delivered and placed. During that time the builders were not idle but started the construction of the steps outside the front entrance, and the stair case inside the house.
The slabs were eventually delivered on 24th January and placed in the same way as they
were on the ground floor concrete base. They were then covered with a steel mesh to await concrete that will form the base of floor 2.
It was at this time a small hiccup was identified. The people doing this basic work were unaware that we were having a hot water system / 150 liter boiler installed in the main bathroom so there was ample hot water available for the bathtub. The bathtub was shown on the plans but the boiler was not. A quick chat with the boss of the Phayao office soon rectified the problem. It is a good job this was identified at this stage!
Next up was the delivery of concrete to form the base.
The concrete was delivered the next day. The concrete was dispensed into a large bucket that was suspended from a crane. The bucket was then raised by the crane and manoevered to where the builders wanted it to disgorge its contents.
There was not enough concrete in this first delivery to satisfy the builders needs so an urgent request for 300kg more was placed. It had to be urgent as the new load would have to be poured before the original load started to dry. Again, this issue was resolved immediately and the extra 300 Kg of concrete arrived 45 minutes after being requested.
