The Geo dome below is finished, and has turned out to be quite a success, its done so good that we have decided to build another 6 units next to it, and they are coming up nicely.
Mr dang (our main builder guy, and Rini’s father) is in charge of all the building going on on the site, and he has gotten us another building crew, that are being payed by the unit instead of the day like our guys, which sees to it that the buildings are popping up quite rapidly, and we hope to have a total of seven bungalows finished by mid march (we now have two) and another three or so by the end of march.
So why pay the staff differently? Well, paying them per day as we have done up till this point means that you get a creative workforce, that don’t mind figuring out new solutions and work arounds, which is very important when you’r creating something like our geo dome, even though the concept of what we are doing, in scattered parts, is available, our on setup is unique. The downside to paying per day is that they will not work as fast nor as hard, but they do get the details right, and thats all that matters.
We have also managed to get our first “cracker box” finished, and its beautiful, looking much like a 18th century villa in mexico, but with glass bottle insets and a few other tricks up its sleeve, This building takes longer to build, and uses up more recourses, but also has a number of pro’s to it, one of them being that you can walk up on your own roof to have breakfast.. another one of these will be going up before the season is over, and next season a two story one will be put between them.
In other news, our project is gaining more and more support as we are getting more and more space in the awareness of the city, and people blogging about our way to do things. Being different in Asia means really being different, people are coming in specifically to see our buildings and ask about how we’ve made them, and how they can do the same, which suits us fine, as we aim to spread the knowledge about this to anyone who can benefit by it.
We have been getting excellent reviews online to, which we are very happy about, here is one example.
http://www.travelfish.org/blogs/phnompenh/2011/01/new-otres-beach-accommodation-is-done-right/
-Sam