I was one of the lucky ones that saw the writing on the wall last year, and sold up and got out of construction, to do a life long dream of traveling the world. Seems construction gets under your skin, you can’t just leave and forget about it. Every country I visit i find myself looking around job sites, checking on what they are doing, how they are doing it. Heres a couple of pics from some of the sites.
Thailand. Thailand is quite sophisticated in many ways. On the job sites women are often preferred over men, because..well they just work a lot harder!. And whens the last time you saw an architect drafting by hand on the jobsite!
Australia. In northern Queensland they have a building style called the queenslander. Its stick framing with a local hardwood, but the boards go up on the inside and the framing left exposed.
India. India just blows you away, from homes in Varinasi that have never had a lick of paint in the last thousand years, to the standard new construction of post and beam concrete all mixed by hand.
Nepal. ah i love Nepal.Bamboo scaffold is amazingly strong, this scaffold is still used all over Asia. Nepal is another Asia country famous for its carving, watching these guys make doors was humbling when i thought of Norm and the millions of tools he’d have to have used.
Can you imagine telling your guys to CYCLE down to Home Depot and pick up some lumber?! Ive seen guys carrying 2 or 3 sheets of plywood on their backs to the jobsite.
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Here ya go.
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Spheramid Enterprises Architectural Woodworks
Repairs, Remodeling, Restorations
They kill Prophets, for Profits.
Edited 2/14/2009 6:03 pm ET by Sphere
thanks for the pics....more please!!!
Where do ya stand on that bamboo scaffolding?... and, yeah more pics please.http://www.tvwsolar.com
I went down to the lobby
To make a small call out.
A pretty dancing girl was there,
And she began to shout,
"Go on back to see the gypsy.
He can move you from the rear,
Drive you from your fear,
Bring you through the mirror.
He did it in Las Vegas,
And he can do it here."
They just balance on it. I have a couple of other scaffold pics i'll put up, but your right, I need to get some with them actually working from it.
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sounds like (and looks like) the makings for a great book.
Jeff
Buck Construction
Artistry In Carpentry
Pittsburgh Pa
I agree! More pics! Just brought DW over to show her these.
Forrest
Who is DW?
Ok sorry Im new on this forum, and Ive never seen one that was set up like this, so posting is a little confusing. Still not sure how to make the pictures show up.Back in Australia in northern queensland and Im not sure if its lack of timber, structural demands from cyclones or just ease of construction, but a lot of the new construction i saw was steel frame. The door jambs and window jams are still solid 2x hardwood.In Nepal in the middle of the Himalaya's with no road for 100km 'd come across neatly stacked lumber, long, wide 1X's and 2x's and big 8-10-16x's. I couldnt figure out how they were getting the machines in to do the milling, but then I saw a couple of guys on a two man saw and realized its all still done by hand.In Nepal too they still build dry stack stone houses, newer cheap ones have corragated iron roofs, then they load the roof with rocks to soak up the heat of the sun, and to keep the roof on in the high winds.Traditional houses have a front porch roof that is used for everything from keeping the goat on, to drying out the corn, they are built by using a form of bamboo that they then lay 12inches or so of mud onto, when the mud dries it makes a rock solid floor.In Thailand they have seen what tourism can do to increase their standard of living. They are very fast becoming westernized, but I dont think OSHA is going to make it there for a while.Imagine going to all the trouble of building your nice new house, and this is all you get for a toilet!
Very interesting. Would be better if you downsized some photos. Some are ok but others are in the 3MG range. When those come up I'm looking at a single nail head. If you wish, refer to the "I just started a house" thread over in Photos where sizing was discussed.
Nice however. Thanks for the read!!
Runnerguy
yeah little difficult to get everything just right when your in bf nowhere sitting in an internet cafe. I'd dumped all the construction pics in a folder, but hadn't re sized some of them. I'm heading to new Zealand for a couple of months so i'm going to be working on cleaning up the files there.
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cool pic..blue tarp from Home Depot? lol
http://www.cliffordrenovations.com
http://www.ramdass.org
Home Depot hasnt quite made it to Nepal! There's actually a funny story to this picture. As i took it, I realized off to my right was a woman standing at a water spigot in the street, (in the country, thats where everyone gets their water and washes) She had her top down and boobs out all over the place. She looked at me with my camera and kind of giggled. I thought, oh #### she thinks i just took a pic of her. So i sort of motioned towards the house and said "nice". She giggled even more and i realized she hadnt seen me point at the house and must now be thinking I'm telling her her tits are nice. This was just getting worse, so I hot footed it out of there before her husband turned up.
Haha yeah, My thought was tv series.
It's always interesting to look at other construction methods. I like to study Korean architecture, since my wife is from there.
Over there they're having a revival in traditional architecture, and my father-in-law recently built a traditional house. After it was built I found that the builder had blogged the whole thing, with photos, so I could go back and see how they did it.
Here's the roof going on:
* http://blog.daum.net/leepoongkye/14619297
(The whole site is wrapped in un-linkable javascript, but if you go down to the very bottom left, you can click on the up and down-arrowed links to see the next and previous blog entries.)
The guy also posts his fishing photos, so I've become a regular reader :).
Thats some nice timber they are using. Im surprised. Most places Ive been to in Asia have been raped of their forests, and there's no way they have the lumber to build wood construction houses.My plan after New Zealand is to head back up to Northern Thailand and possibly jump over to Korea for look.
Yes, the timber wasn't easy to get. Right around the time they were buying it, some psycho burned down Namdaemun and the government started grabbing all the traditional building material it could find to rebuild it.http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2899170If you make it to Seoul there's a nice walking tour of some of the traditional houses in Bukchon. There are also a number of folk villages around that have good examples.http://bukchon.seoul.go.kr/eng/exp/exp0_con.jsp?house_id=13&house_kind=05