All in all…just another Brick in the Wall

All in all…just another Brick in the Wall

1 June 2015

The weather is getting hotter. The middle of summer in DaNang is hot…hot with clear skies and a biting sun. Often the midday heat climbs to 37 or 38 Celsius.

Our rental house has proven to be advantageous. Obviously it gives us an affordable home with an opportunity for Thu to have a small, elegant showroom and a home office to run our businesses http://chuonchuonboutique.com or Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/tuixachoppo But also it turns out that a quick check of the compass (I rarely travel without a compass and a tape measure these days… when you are building a house it becomes habitual to whip out the trusty Stanley 5metre tape and check the dimensions on something you like the look of… be it a room dimension or a small sink for under the stairs toilet etcetc)…anyway… a quick check of the compass shows that our rental house is aligned in exactly the same direction as the house we are building. So this means we can learn all about the patterns and angles of the sun at various times of the day, how far shade reaches into the interior, and what direction the cooling breezes come from. And…actually…the current  rental house is about 5 metres longer than our new house, but otherwise gives us a pretty good working of the ‘feel’  of the size of rooms and general dimensions etc.

When you build your own home from scratch, of course you have some constraints – and like most people our biggest constraint is budget… whish also determined the location and the size of the land. We could have gone for a 120sq metre block which would have allowed for a 1metre wider house, but at the time there were none available and, quite frankly, it didn’t seem worth the extra money. Given our long skinny block of land (5m x 20m) we have opted,quite logically, to build along skinny house … four and  half storeys high. This is quite normal in Vietnam and these skinny ‘tube’ houses are everywhere.  We live in one now, we livedin a few in Hanoi and now we are building one. Most of our neighbours have opted for three storeys but Thu and I figured that the cost of construction for one extra floor was not that much more (as I keep saying it is basically just a long skinny concrete box) and it gave us more room…dddurrrgggh… and possibly a better re-sale value in the future. Although to be frank we cannot think far enough into the future to think about re-sale at the moment and people here in Vietnam are not as obsessed with buying and selling their home to make little bits of capital gain like they are in say Australia. So our house is four storeys high but will have a little ‘shed’ covering the stair entrance to the roof garden that is big enough under Vietnamese traditions to make our house ‘four-and-a-half storeys’ which is much better for good luck and good fortune.

What is unusual is that we have not desire whatsoever to show off to neighbours or general onlookers… so we have no decorative features on the outside of the house – no mock marble tiles, or pebblecrete, or huge bronze gates with heraldic lions, or horrible little Russian turrets and fake Tudor beams etc. From what I can gather most local ‘architects’ are trained in some basic construction theory, and how to use CAD computer programs to ‘borrow’ features from other peoples designs, add all sorts of ‘decorative features’ and generally design these kind of Disneyland mansions that are as large and grotesque as the clients budget will afford  (and their addiction to showing off demands) and have little, if any, architectural integrity. Talk to most Vietnamese ‘architects’ and they immediately start talking to you about the colour of the granite benchtops and whether the toilet has music and a soft-close seat. Talk to them about flow or character or ambience or the ‘feel’ of the house …and they look at you blankly…. And it really shows in most modern Vietnamese houses.

Before you think me too harsh and critical, let me say: (a) there are a handful of very, very good Vietnamese architects who do just beautiful work – they usually have trained overseas and/or work in partnership with foreign architects (b) there is an ancient tradition of  building houses (particularly solid wooden houses) that have traditional proportions, have totally integrated traditional practices about the sympathetic use of natural materials and placement and position of key features such as the kitchen and the main supporting beam (“the “Mother Beam”) (c) there have been some amazing new buildings that have been designed in partnerships with foreign architects, but often they are ruined when local builders and budgets mean that they cut corners in the construction and alter critical design features and deliver a very cheap and shoddy finish.

My parents-in-law are simple farmers in the countryside and their house is practical, affordable and has a simple rustic elegance – 300 year old re-used wooden roof trusses, concrete walls and tiled floors – a little cold in winter but cool and airy in summer.

So our house is simply based on: site constraints, budget, local building regulations, our lifestyle requirements, features that we like from other houses we have lived in or have visited, ideas (unashamedly) borrowed from architectural websites, ideas from my imagination and experience, and ideas that emerge in conversations between me, Thu and Mr Khai the builder.

Actually Khai has trained as an architect, so he keeps trying to come up with his own ideas for the interior finish, or says “that is not normal”, ‘that makes too much bad luck” , or simply “I don’t like that”. I need to politely keep reminding him that I am only contracting him as a builder, and whilst I am happy to hear his ideas, it is our money, our home and we will pay him to build many of our ideas. He usually scowls for a few moments then gets over it.

Like the front planters that create a vertical garden on the street face of the house. There is quite a well- publicised house with this kind of feature in Saigon and since then a number of hybrids have evolved the original ideas of the Saigon house. Our house will not have any balustrades on the front balconies – instead it will be served by three horizontal concrete planter boxes. When full of plants these planter boxes will allow for a green and leafy ‘screen’ against the harsh sun. Even though (thanks to a dodgy local building regulation) all of our balconies, except that one coming off the living room, will be under 1 metre wide, it will allow us to have large sliding glass doors at both endsof the house, which, when opened will allowdappled light and a cool breeze through the house.

But this was tricky for Mr Khai to understand, let alone build. He kept saying that this was “…not the same as the Saigon house”…even though I tried to explain that our house design was deliberately different, his desire to diligently copy the exact details from someone else’s design was quite overwhelming and powerful.

But slowly, slowly, step by step, we work through refining our design and our relationship… and the two are deeply intertwined. Slowly he is realising that the ’crazy old Tay ’ does not want an architect/builder that tells him what his house should look like. Whilst such a service may be a popular ‘fashion item’ for most middle class Vietnamese…. “ Oh this?... oh we paid for an architect for us to give us his ideas… yes…this is an architect-designedhouse you know!”… the old Tay and his wife don’t want that. Also his ability to conceptualise things such as the size, flow, space of the house grows daily as the physical construction allows us to actually stand inside a space and talk about such things.

The men have worked hard. Mind you,they seem to party hard as well. When I took them an old electric fan as a gift and I noticed a couple of 10 litre plastic bottles of homemade rice liquor under their sleeping platform. Every so often, usually about 10pm, Mr Tuan our supervisor rings me in a very jolly mood.

“ I am drinking with the men and they are very happy… they say you and Mrs Thu are very good owner and they will build you a good house”.

“Tuan oi, have you been drinking a lot of rice whiskey with the men?”

“Yes Robert, now I am very happy also”.

I usually tell him to take it easy and just hope that he makes it hope safely (so far he has). I also, most often, politely refuse their invitation to join them in their revelry… I don’t mind a good old night on the booze every now and then… but Vietnamese men tend to just keep drinking and drinking until the booze runs out… and that is just abit much for me these days.

But every morning they get up at sunrise and eat their breakfast of rice or My Quangnoodles.By the time I get to inspect the house about 7.30am they already well into their days work. They rest for a few hours in the midday heat and then back into it until the sun goes down. I get the feeling that after their last rice-whiskey party Mr Khai cracked the whip and told them he expected a bit more daily progress and production – but they are his crew and they respect him, so Thu and I do not interfere.

So as of 8am today we now have:

·         A huge and bloody massive set of steel and concrete foundations – three metres deep and seemingly, the constant talking point of all the curious (and jealous… but stingey) neighbours.

·         All the pipes for the ground floor water tank as well as the brick and concrete underground ‘septic tank’ for the sewerage

·         All the columns for supporting the second storey slab

·         Most of the double brick walls on the ground floor – with a double brick cavity and air-gap to insulate against the hot outside temperatures and the inevitable noisy karaoke-loving neighbours

·         One of those cheesy architectural ‘concept’ pictures… actually to be fair to Mr Khai’s dab hands with Photoshop it doesn’t look half bad! Of course the image of the front façade is not exactly right and all the images of the rooms have been ‘borrowed’ and probably won’t end up looking anything like that… but otherwise it’s okay. I asked Mr Khaiwho was the little, fat midgetwho appears to be about to walk through a hole in our front fence. Khai shrugged and said “Maybe your new friend?”