I arrived at our land a couple of days ago to find that the gasoline powered water pump that I had purchased for my irrigation setup from Global House had been stolen !

Gone ! Stolen ! 4500 Baht Ahhhh That ticked me off to put it mildly, I had gone to the trouble to making a steel cage for the pump and concreted that into the ground with enough concrete that you would have to make a very serious effort to dig it out and then the entire cage concrete and all would simply have been to heavy for a couple of men to lift.

The weak point was always going to the the lock and despite buying a pretty good quality US made padlock they managed to cut it.

So in a rather foul mood I decided to bring forward a project that was always intended but I didn’t think would be required for at least several months – a more robust and infinitely more secure pump house.

Somewhat hurriedly planned the pump house will be 3.6 x 2.4 M, built with a concrete raft slab, red interlocking block walls and solid poured concrete roof and 1.2 M hand made steel door for security.

Eventually I will fit a fiber cement sheet roof similar to the rest of the house so that it will blend in but that will be purely cosmetic roof tiles are not secure as they can be lifted or damaged to gain access.

I have decided that if I build the pump house to these dimensions I will be able to store valuable tools in the lockup whilst the build is underway.

Here are some pictures of the poured pump house slab.

We mixed all the concrete for this slab by hand ie with a shovel and hoe in a large plastic tub Thai style. It might not look like a lot but there are 8 50 kg bags of cement plus stone and sand in there the footings are 600 mm deep.

The slab took about 9 hours for 3 men to frame and pour and I had to have the next day off to recover !

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