There’s an Australian family I helped move twice in three months last year. The first move was the hard one. They were leaving a two-bedroom in Bophut because she was pregnant with their third, and they’d taken on a four-bedroom in Maenam that the builder swore would be done by the first of March. They’d signed that lease in November. She was about three months along by then, they’d known they needed more space since the second one started school, and a friend of theirs had finished a build with the same builder the previous summer that the wife had walked through twice and decided was perfect. Builder said five months, possibly slightly more if there was a delay with the pool tiles, but he could promise the first of March. Their existing lease ended February 28th. Two weeks of overlap was the plan. Stay at a hotel near the new place, the kids would think it was an adventure, the husband would work from the lobby, fine.
They drove out to the new place on a Saturday in late January to see how it was coming along. Walls were up, roof was on, the pool had been dug out but not tiled. The kitchen was a series of cardboard boxes with appliances inside them and the bedroom doors weren’t hung yet. The builder met them on site, said everything was on track, said the tiling would start the following week, and asked the husband whether he wanted the second guest room done as a study or another kid’s room. They picked the kid’s room. Drove home feeling reassured. The wife ordered a set of curtains for the new place online that night because she’d been wanting that exact teal pattern for three years and the new place finally had the right windows for them.
The builder had told them March 1st up until February 24th. Then it became March 14th. Then April 5th. Then “definitely Songkran.” They moved into the new place on April 22nd. She was eight months pregnant by that stage. The two existing kids, four and six, had spent six weeks living in a hotel room with two double beds and a kettle. The husband had spent something like 130,000 baht on the hotel by the time it was done and was not in a good mood about any of it.
The hotel stay had started off fine. The kids had treated it like a holiday for the first three days. The husband was working from a corner of the lobby because the rooms didn’t have proper desks. By the second week the older kid was missing his bedroom and sleeping badly. By the third week the wife had stopped enjoying the included breakfast. Songkran fell during week four and the kids loved that part, water fights with the hotel staff at the pool. Then everyone got food poisoning from one of the buffet places in the second week of April and the youngest was sick for two days.
There was a moment around week five where she had a Braxton-Hicks scare in the hotel room and they ended up at Bangkok Hospital Samui at two in the morning. False alarm. They didn’t sleep again that night. The next day the husband came into the office to grab a bedside fan from the unit because the hotel air-conditioning had been giving the older kid hayfever. He looked like he’d aged ten years. He asked me whether I knew any builders on the island who weren’t liars. I told him maybe one or two but they were both booked through to 2027. He didn’t laugh.
Their stuff had been in a medium unit at our place for the entire stretch. He came in to pull a few things out twice. The kids’ bikes the first time, then his work monitor and a box of summer clothes he’d packed too early on the second visit. On the second visit he asked me whether builders on this island ever finish on time. I told him roughly never. He said that was useful information from an entrepreneurial standpoint and went back to the hotel.
Three months later he was back at the office, the new villa now actually finished, and we were doing the second move which was the easy one. Out of the unit and into the villa. Half a day, two pickups. It was 33 degrees and humid the day we did it. She was eight months along and could barely walk in a straight line. The kids ran from room to room screaming about which bedroom they wanted, like they hadn’t already decided three months ago. The husband sat on a dining chair we’d just unloaded and didn’t say anything for a solid ten minutes. The pool still wasn’t fully tiled. There was paint on some of the kitchen tiles. By that point the new baby had arrived and the wife was barely speaking to her husband about the original timeline.
He was the worst of it that year, but not the only one. There’s a British woman who’d ended a tenancy in Lamai during her divorce and didn’t know yet whether she was staying on the island, took a unit for what she thought was a fortnight while the lawyer worked through the settlement, and was still with us three and a half months later when the decree finally came through. A young couple from Maenam, three-week gap on paper, builder delays, ended up at seven. An older British retiree who actually knew his gap was going to be six weeks, planned around it, took a unit, took himself off to a beach in Vietnam for a fortnight in the middle, came back for the move and did the whole thing without breaking a sweat.
The Australian husband still rings me whenever a friend of his is between places. He warns them about the builder thing. He says they never listen. I tell him nobody does, including him originally. He concedes the point. He’s now the guy at any expat gathering who’ll loudly demand a builder commit to specific dates with specific penalties for missing them. His wife refuses to be in the room when he starts.
What I’d Tell You If You’re Looking at a Two-Week Gap
First thing: the two-week gap is fiction. Anyone who tells you a new build, a renovation, or a fitted-out condo will be ready on date X should be assumed to be three to six weeks late. If your existing lease ends and the new place isn’t ready that day, plan for the gap to be more like 6-10 weeks. People on their third Samui move usually get this right. First-timers almost never do.
Second thing: don’t try the minimum-storage approach. Most people in their first between-leases situation try to be clever about it. They put the big furniture in storage, leave the boxes at a friend’s spare room, keep two suitcases in the car for daily use, store clothes at the in-laws if there are any in-laws around. This works for a fortnight. It does not work for six weeks. The friend gets tired of the boxes, the car-clothes get crumpled and unwearable, and you spend the whole gap looking for something that’s somewhere else. Just take a proper unit. We do removals alongside the storage, which means the move out and the move in are both done by the same crew with the unit as the buffer in between. Costs less than people expect.
Third thing, and this is where I disagree with the standard moving advice: you don’t need a full villa-sized unit if half your stuff isn’t actually worth keeping. The between-leases gap is a good moment to look at what you’ve accumulated and decide what’s coming with you. Plenty of customers pay to store things they then donate or skip when the new place is ready. If you’re moving from a four-bedroom to a four-bedroom, sure, take a big unit. If you’re downsizing, or you have any doubts about a piece of furniture, that’s the moment to have the doubt, not after you’ve paid two months of storage on something you’re going to throw out anyway.
We hold a couple of medium units permanently free for between-leases customers because someone walks in every fortnight needing one with two days’ notice. Sometimes the call comes in at 9pm. Sometimes the customer has been sleeping in their car for two nights waiting for the office to open on Monday morning. January and August are the worst months for it. Builders run late, leases never line up, and somebody is always sleeping in a hotel they hadn’t budgeted for. Our Samui storage is the buffer that turns the panicked version of the move into the boring version of the move. The Australian family are still in their Maenam villa. The fourth kid is due in October.
