Building a House in Việt Nam — Part 1
Beginnings
This Substack is about life in Việt Nam from the viewpoint of a 10-year expat who spent his first 60 years in a low-context culture.
What follows is the first in a series about my experiences building a bespoke house from scratch.
The house below is NOT our house, thank the gods. It’s also an unsurprising photo, based on what I now know about how they build houses here.
Building a house anywhere is a challenge.
When both your language proficiency and your understanding of the culture are slightly above that of an infant, it’s either insane or stupid. Or both.
Welcome to my world.
The Decision
It came in 2020, when I found that I would most likely soon come into some money. Not a fortune, it would make a significant difference in our lives.
As I wrote in my earlier post, Family,
I want to ensure that our daughter will never have to worry about having a place to live, so I decided to buy some land and build a house. Without her in my life, I would NEVER build or buy a house here, because I could rent for 50 years for the same money — and I’ll be lucky to have another 20. A second reason is that even though I pay 100% of the cost to build the house, my name cannot be in the red book (the deed) because I’m a foreigner. In Vietnam, foreigners are allowed to own an apartment or condo, but not dirt. Because I’m married and the red book is in my wife’s name, my interest is protected because Vietnam has “community property” laws; what we acquire during the marriage is split 50/50 if we were to divorce.
{snip}
Before I received the money, my wife and I spent months discussing the house we wanted to build. We decided on a three- or four-story in a quiet neighborhood, with two ensuite bedrooms, a shop for her, and an office for me. Most of the lots here are between four and six meters (~10 to 13 feet) wide, sandwiched between other houses, a “row house”, so they build up, not out.
My father-in-law offered his home site to allow us to build a nicer house (no land cost) with the understanding that he and my mother-in-law live with us. Again, from Family
During our house-planning discussions, she {my wife} and I had briefly discussed doing just this and we each agreed that this was NOT something we wanted to do. We wanted our own house on our own land.
So of course she said yes to her father. Although she and I talked daily, she neglected to mention it to me.
{snip}
Since elders, especially parents, are obeyed without question, she HAD to do it. It didn’t matter what she and I had previously discussed, decided, and agreed to, a Vietnamese father is “he who will be obeyed”.
Unfortunately, this was one of many things about Vietnamese culture that I did not understand when the understanding would’ve greatly changed what I did.
I was in the US when I got the settlement. By the time I got home five days later, her parents had moved in with another daughter and their piece-of-shit black mold-infested house was gutted. A few days after that, it was gone.
In their haste to create a situation from which there was no way I could gracefully extract myself, they put the cart before the horse; we hired an architect and a builder only after the existing house was destroyed. Not only would I eventually get to live with my in-laws, now I got to consult my FIL on everything about the new house. The fact that “he who will be obeyed” knows jack-shit about designing or building anything didn’t matter.
Since it is the land of the family homestead, the extended family sees it as my in-laws house like we moved in with them. This means they can come and go without notice like they live there, dropping off grandkids at will to be babysat (there’s one here as I write this). It was quite the adjustment for someone who lived alone for the 20-plus years before moving to Vietnam. No one told (warned) me any of this, I got to figure it out after we moved in.
The plus was that FIL would be on-site every day checking up on the builder — a necessity in every country, especially here. If you’re not watching every move, every coming and going, they’ll charge you for eight bags of cement per cubic meter of concrete, but only use five ‘cause three wandered off to another project or were sold when you weren’t looking. Then, for the rest of your life, your walls will leak and spall, but not until the one-year warranty is long expired.
I objected strenuously to FIL’s choice of builder, a guy named Phường. It was nothing solid, I just had a bad feeling. I was overruled because he is “family”. Although he has the same last name, Lê, as my FIL, I had never seen him at any of the family gatherings. I was skeptical. As I later learned, when they want you to accept someone, they call them “family”, even if they’re just a friend or long-time acquaintance.
What’s worse, my bad feeling was later proved accurate.
Reading this, you may be thinking,
That’s a LOT of red flags. Why didn’t you just pull the ripcord?
As the cliché states, hindsight is 20/20. Looking back, my best move would’ve been to put my foot down and say, “Sorry your house is gone, but you did that without consulting me. This is not what I agreed to and I’m not doing it.” My wife knew I’m a soft touch and counted on me backing down. She was right.
Unfortunately, my wife’s lack of consideration for my wishes and her lack of communicaton at crucial points has made me very wary of her re anything that involves the in-laws. I do understand she was acting in accordance with their culture and that my ignorance is no excuse. It doesn’t help very much.
In my native culture, spouse trumps parent. I just wish I’d understood then how much this isn’t my culture.
Now that I’m securely wedged between a big-ass rock and an immovable object, there’s a house that needs designing and building.
A Meeting of the Minds
During the first meeting with the builder and architect, we told them that once my FIL and I agreed on the final drawings, there would be no changes unless both of us signed off. That worked very well for my FIL; not so well for me. “He who will be obeyed” is Vietnamese; the builder is Vietnamese; I am just a westerner who is paying for everything. Their attitude was “let’s see how much we can get away with.”
Fortunately, one of my wife’s aunts is an attorney and she drew up the contract with the builder. It said that before each next payment due is made, my wife and I must be happy with everything done to that point. I lost track of how many times I pulled that gem out to get Phường to undo something my FIL told him to change, always for the worse, that I had neither agreed to nor been consulted on. A few of them cost Phường a considerable of money to rectify, but I was relentless in my drive to keep FIL from screwing everything up.
Insulation
During the initial client/builder/architect meeting, I insisted that the house be fully insulated. The other three, including FIL, went on and on:
No one insulates their house in Vietnam.
You’re wasting your money!
This isn’t America, we do things differently here.
I asked each of them, one-by-one, “Does your house have black mold?”
The replies were each a version of,
“Yes, of course. All houses in Vietnam have black mold.”
My reply, “Ours won’t. I’m paying the bills, so we’re going to have an insulated house.”
You’d’ve thought I was asking them to build the house out of food waste.
I found a hydrophobic (water can’t penetrate) lightweight polystyrene insulation made in Saigon. It insulates against both temperature and sound and was exactly what I wanted. Fitting snugly between the two layers of brick that make up the exterior walls, it dropped in against the outer wall as they built the inner wall, adding only a few minutes to their standard method of construction.
There are different ways of building a row house in Vietnam depending on your budget. Low-budget houses have exterior walls one-brick thick. Higher-budget houses have two one-brick walls with a 25mm (1 inch) air gap between them. In our house, they simply dropped a 25mm sheet of insulation into the air gap. The total cost to insulate every centimeter of the exterior walls, a few interior walls, and put 50mm of insulation in the roof was less than 0.75% of the total cost of the house.
Those of you in the west may be wondering why we didn’t build a stick house. There are no stick houses here as you know them. Only the very poor or ethnic minorities build houses with wood. They’re small with one thin layer of wood between them and the outside world. I’ve never seen one higher that two levels, but they may exist.
Walk into 99% of the non-air contitioned houses or businesses in Vietnam and you will immediately notice that it’s cooler inside than it is outside. This is because there is no insulation. Walk into our house, thanks to that 25mm of insulation, you will immediately notice that it’s a comfortable temperature all year ‘round. It never really gets hot here in Dalat, so it’s rare to see an air conditioner, other than in a high-end hotel. Every one of the five houses I’ve rented here was so cool inside that on all but the five or six warmest nights of the year, I needed a heavy duvet on the bed. Many days, I’d wear a sweater or jacket inside and take it off to go outside. No longer.
If I were to build another house here, I would use 50mm sheets in the walls for additional soundproofing and 100mm in the roof. What we have now is sufficient, but in Vietnam, more sound insulation is always a good idea.
All our windows and exterior doors are dual-pane — another battle with the three nay-sayers because most people use single pane. Triple-pane wasn’t available here in 2021 and probably still isn’t. According to the guy who made our windows, there’s no demand for it.
If you’re looking to buy an existing house in Vietnam, check the width of the window sills to determine whether it’s single- or double-brick construction. Anything thinner than 150mm (6 inches) is single-brick.
If you fall in love with a single-brick house and just have to buy it, get a builder’s quote to add a layer of insulation and a layer of brick inside the house on each outside wall — even if there’s a house butting up against yours. Sure, you’ll lose a bit of interior space, but the lifelong gain in comfort will be worth it.
Can you tell I’m a big fan of insulating houses?
Were you in construction in your previous U.S. life?