MY first six months in Thailand were spent in an apartment.

I’ve nothing against apartments; they’re secure, clean, and this one was in the centre of town. But, however much I tried, it didn’t feel like home.

It seemed wise to look for something more permanent, and somewhere where I didn’t have to pay rent each month.

In Pattaya finding a pad is easy thanks to the estate agents. Outside of the city (which is where I was) the only way to find somewhere was to drive around and look for hand-written signs.

On my third day here I thought I’d found the perfect spot. A nice, new project, on the outskirts of town had a spare one-storey place left, and it looked good so we put down a small deposit. It was only when we returned the following day that neighbours told us water was a rare commodity and the factory just on the other side of the wall had a habit of spewing out rather smelly clouds of something.

After that near-miss, I took a little more time. Many of the new housing villages are impressive, and offer swimming pools, gyms, and a clubhouse. But the prices reflect this, and most modest homes were well over a million baht.

Nothing of interest had come up for a few weeks, until I drove down a small side road and spotted some townhouses (terraced if you’re British). One was on sale for 720,000 baht.

Inside was a woman in her 40s and her elderly mother, who lived in this three-bed, two bathroom home. The place was cluttered and dark due to the mass of clothing racks in each room, and needed some serious cleaning. Cleaning doesn’t cost much though, and it was a fair size place, so I took their number.

Opposite the women’s home were five identical houses that were still being built. These started from 850,000 and were pretty much the same.

After a night’s consideration, I made an offer for the first home. I don’t know about where you’re from, but in my neck of the woods we tend to negotiate over prices, or at least have some debate over it. Not here.

I offered 650,000 baht cash.

“No, definitely not,” came the tort reply.

“But I’ll have to re-tile the house, put in a new toilet, and paint it,” I explained.

“Full asking price only.”

To be fair, it wasn’t an outrageous price tag, but you’ve got to try, haven’t you?

I pressed on and asked about what kind of mortgage the woman had. If the place you buy still has money owed to a bank, you supply a cheque direct to the bank, and another to the owner for however much they’ve paid.

The woman’s demeanour darkened when we tried to elicit which bank the mortgage was with. Our potential seller didn’t want to say, or reveal how much was owed on the home. In fact, she didn’t seem very keen on selling at all, so after a few more attempts at compromise, I gave up.

The five new homes opposite still held some interest though. The one sticking point was a large lump of land directly to the rear, where construction workers were living in wooden huts with corrugated iron for a roof.

According to the land owner these were going to be replaced by four rows of bungalows at some undetermined point in the future. This seemed reasonable, and would still ensure a view of a temple to the west, so we sat down to talk about a contract.

A day before we were to sign, I asked for confirmation that there would only be bungalows, ie one-storey places, behind our home. It transpired that this was only a general intent, and there were actually for anything. This raised the spectre of another two-storey house slap next to ours, totally blocking out any light. You’d like to think that no planning authority would permit such a development, but naturally here that wouldn’t really be a consideration.

The house itself was great though, and if you base everything on ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’ you’d never get out of bed, so the next day I rang back and offered the asking price.

Having agreed on the details, I slapped down the deposit on my desired town house, and the ball started rolling. We sat around the builder’s lounge and counted out the cash. Once it was in his hands, he produced two contracts; one for the land and one for the building.

The contracts most people use here are standard and so there shouldn’t be much variation from one to another. All the same it’s essential for someone who can read Thai to check them over. Mine were duly checked and I paid an initial deposit of 180,000 baht.

At the time the deposit was paid, the house was still missing windows and a kitchen. Thai workers had their own makeshift huts to the rear of our place, and scurried around with shovels and paintbrushes each time we arrived. They were a cheerful bunch who worked hard and for the most part seemed to know what they were doing.

As the house began to develop I realised there was still time to change some details.

The kitchen was to the rear and below the second bedroom. It would be relatively easy to level off the kitchen ceiling and then build a balcony for the bedroom. Cost: 400 pounds.

The main bedroom was set in the middle of the house, while the third bedroom faced the front. Another option was to extend the third bedroom out to make it the master room. Cost: 400 pounds.

Our workers set about the new task with so much haste that every day we returned, a new wall had appeared. They hammered things in and bashed things down; they ran backwards and forwards with pieces of wood and occasionally painted things, although invariably I’d have to call them back to finish the job or ask them to remove paint from where it wasn’t required.

I also learned quickly that if you want something done, you need to be specific.

When I asked for a towel hook to be put up in the bathroom, I assumed that was sufficient information. A couple of days later I returned and found the hook had indeed been put up as requested – but inside the shower unit. As tactfully as possible I explained that the idea was to keep the towels dry, not surround them with water, and eventually they understood and moved it.

Before long, I was fast turning into my worst enemy.

In those halcyon days when I had no home of my own to worry about, I couldn’t have cared less about such material things as fridges and curtains.

When you’ve bought your first house though, things change pretty quickly. Suddenly all those material things become, well, material.

Back in England, I’d often visit a friend’s house only to be amused and bemused in equal measure by the efforts some people would spend in ensuring their cream walls went with their vanilla sofa and the new Ikea coffee table.

They would then be just as bemused when I didn’t remark on how nicely co-ordinated it all looked. The truth is I neither noticed nor cared. Putting me inside a furniture shop was like being asked to watch synchronised swimming: you can only put up with it for so long before something snaps.

But having recently placed a deposit for a new town house near Pattaya, and having watched the builders begin to put up walls that weren’t there a week earlier, I realised I had to go shopping.

Each weekend was spent scouring the streets of Pattaya in search of sofas, fridges, kettles, toasters, beds, and computers. As soon as I laid down the cash for one thing, something else was required.

Surreal conversations would take place about whether to go for the funky rubbish bin or the practical one. I opted for funky.

Periodically, towel racks and other accessories would be dropped off to the builder. During one visit in November I pointed out how quickly things were going, and that there should be no problem meeting the January deadline. The builder paused for a second, grinned, and said: “January, no, this will be finished by the end of the month.”

Nothing like a short deadline to focus the mind. Given everything else I’d experienced thus far in Thailand, I had expected deadlines to be broad statements of intent, with an embarrassingly large margin for error.

For some reason, probably pending work elsewhere, our home was to be finished ahead of schedule.

The thought of having a completely barren space to fill is exciting and daunting at the same time. You can’t blame the previous owners for any screw-ups, after all.

So, having typed ‘interior design tips’ into Google a few times, things seemed to be progressing.

HomePro and Index soon became almost daily stop-offs, but often the best deals came about by chance. Some chaps with a sofa display outside Tesco Lotus in Pattaya knocked up a wonderful corner-piece for just over 20,000 baht, while the excellent Ursula’s art shop on Sukhumvit had a selection of specially-designed ornaments, including an old Tibetan cabinet.

November drew to a close and, sure enough, the house was finished. It looked good too, and we began to gradually move more and more stuff from our apartment and into our new home.

Things seemed to be going smoothly, and then the delivery men arrived. Two guys approximately half my size turned up with our king-sized bed.

Despite their diminutive stature, they wrestled the base of the bed and headboard up the stairs in five minutes. The king-size mattress was a different matter. Although they struggled, huffed and puffed for 10 minutes, the mattress wasn’t going to squeeze through the space between the stairs and the ceiling.

Plan B saw the truck backed into my yard, and the mattress tied to a rope. I stood on the upstairs balcony, which overlooked the yard, and one of the workers threw me one end of the rope and beckoned for me to pull the mattress up. I gave it a tug, and the rope promptly snapped.

Once they had finished laughing, they re-tied it, looping it around twice, and this time it worked. I pulled it up and hung on while one of the men raced from the truck to the balcony, and helped me haul it over the side and through the bedroom door. Thais are generally efficient when it comes to delivery, but they’re not always that thorough. The bed was assembled in five minutes, but they had forgotten the bed rest’s legs, and so had to return the following day.

Bed linen suffered a similar fate. A pleasant lady-boy, who was definitely more boy than lady, served us in Home-Pro as we selected our colours. We were promised the sheets and duvet cover would arrive the following evening, although there would be a 1 baht per mile charge for any distance over 20 kilometres.

The following morning, at 9.30am, there was a knock on my apartment door. The bed people had arrived early. It wasn’t until they had left again that I realised they had dropped off the wrong colour.

I raced after them, they apologised, and suggested I called the shop to correct the error. I suggested they called. Ten minutes later the phone went. The lady-boy from the store had realised the error as soon as the delivery boys had left the store. He’d driven down the main road in pursuit with the correct linen, which had been left in reception.

The final week before completion saw a stream of visitors delivering fridges, TVs, washing machines and dining tables. Work on the house slowed down as the list of tasks decreased, although the builders did manage to fit a security door in the wrong bedroom as one of their final jobs.

The house had finally become a home and, once nine monks had been round to bless the place, it was time to move in.