Wooden Kampung Houses

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In this part of Perak many of the older style houses on stilts are now abandoned.

Are you talking about kampung houses built out of wood?  If these are truly abandoned, what would it take to buy the house, disassemble it, and move it to the east coast?  I would love to have a wooden kampung house on some property that I could visit on weekends.  Buying lumber is very expensive and, thus, recycled wood might be cheaper.  They are tearing down some old houses here and putting up the butt-ugly brick row houses so prevalent in new housing areas.  Snoring, boring.  A little TLC would restore those old wooden houses to their glory (plus modern wiring and plumbing).

I mean, my internet name is 'Teak' after all!

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hi,

What would it take to buy. Probably a bit of kopi money. Shipment would cost a lot. There's a gem of a place, slowly falling apart, just down the river from me. It was built by Chinese craftsmen, specially drafted in from China, some 100 years ago - well, that's the story and it's always the same.

It's quite easy to build a new one. The price of wood has rocketed in the past few years but there's plenty of meranti around and this isn't so expensive.

Teak is marvellous, and worth it's weight in banker's bonuses, and I'm sure you have the same view. But there's plenty of other hardwoods which, when well-designed, will last a lifetime. I usually visit the local sawmill once per month just to look around, and smell/feel the lumber. I don't know why they won't sell me the wood cheaper before it's eaten away by bugs.   

I think that one approach is to take the traditional house-on-stilts with front lanai  (porch, deck) and add-in a bit of prefabricated wooden panel plus full-height wooden framed doors and windows (like French doors). With the sides pre-fab'ed you can get a lot of workshop quality and all you then need is a frame and roof.

It would then be possible to add an outside verandah at the first floor level, similar to Singapore colonial black & White houses. The design was imported from a tried and tested Indian summer environment. Gracious living indeed for the tropical climate but now largely ignored.

One fine day I'll get around to sketching something out.

The only problems are, (a) where to buy the land, and (b) such an individual house would not be a ready seller if the need arose.

Most of the traditional houses have a metal corrugated roof so you'd need to sized-up the roof timbers to take tiles. Keeping, and living under, a zinc roof is somewhat uncomfortable. When the sun shines so do you, and when it rains you can't hear yourself think. And it rusts something horrible.