Being your own contractor in the Philippines.  Our Philippine house building project is almost  complete.  After our unhappy experiences with hiring an architect to build our perimeter fence (see _____)  we decided to hire our own crew to build our house.  We hired an architect to do the plans and to come for site visits on an as-needed basis.  We shopped for our own materials and supervised the work with help from a foreman. Was this a success?  It looks like it’s going to cost us about 2.5 million pesos for our 150 square meter house or about P16,500 per square meter.  Houses can be built for that amount or less, but we tried to use top quality materials, so we feel as though we have gotten a…