Building houses in Kyrghyzstan

Since I spent a couple of weeks building houses here in K-stan, can I now go home and build myself a summer house or something in Sweden? No not really!

Houses here are built in a completely different way to back home, or rather I guest that it is similar to how we did things a hundred years ago or so. Yes, I did recognize some of the tools that we were using from the historical museum we had in Härnösand (the town closest to where I grew up).

We took turns doing different chores, even though there were some tasks that were better suited to some people, which meant they got to focus on them. 76-year old Betty was maybe less suited to shovel mud up the back of a truck for an example. I probably participated in most of the things, so here’s some descriptions of what I did.

Mixing mud
Monica was the supermixer among us, but even she could not compete with this creature

I would never have guessed that there would be so much mud mixing, but boy; these people use a lot of mud to build there houses. We made many different batches, but it can mainly be divided in to three different kinds: A thinner mud to be used instead of cement to hold bricks together, a thicker one to make bricks of, and a thicker one, mixed with straw to use instead of plaster for walls and ceilings. (Plaster not being the correct word – my English fails me here…)

This was bloody hard work, where we mixed either by walking around in the mud with our feets, or used hoes to stir with. Cleverly enough we had a horse for the first few days, which meant that the mud automatically got mixed with horse poo and urine as well!

Making bricks
Drying the bricks in the shade takes longer, but gives you much stronger bricks.

We filled forms with mud (sometimes with straw sometimes without, I never really understood why), dumped them on the ground, and then left them there to dry. Since they were never ready during the builds (we used other bricks to build), my guess is that they run some kind of exchange system: you get 500 bricks from someone for your house, and you give back 550 or so acouple of weeks later when they have dried.

Laying bricks
Let's just say that Monica looks better than her brick wall, ok? :-)

Worked the same way as back home, except that the bricks weren’t exactly even, so choosing which bricks that worked well together was an added element. Quite fun, although hard to do right for those that was beginners.

Cutting planks
Bigbollah straightening planks with an axe!

The planks that was delivered to the work site still had uneven edges, i.e. they had a certain thickness, but the width varied by a lot along a plank. No one ever cared if the planks were of the same width, so we just tried to get the widest plan possible with the length we needed, which meant that some planks were four inches wide while others were twelve.

For one of the builds, we had access to a table saw, so when that was working getting reasonably straight planks was fairly easy, but far too often it just refused to work, or we didn’t have electricity. Which meant we had to straighten the edges with an axe... :-(

Yes, I would also have thought that a saw was the right choice for this, but obviously not. It did mean that the planks were not very evenly wide.

Don’t mess with Kyrghyz methods
This might be a good opportunity to say something about their methods in general: we didn’t mess with them. The first few days we had some ideas on how to improve how the locals worked, and even though you aren’t supposed to, some of us couldn’t really help ourselves. We quickly realized however that we shouldn’t be bothered. Although our methods might be better back home, over here they simply don’t work, because of the quality of the materials, the tools, or whatever. So we pretty much didn’t question the axe – especially since it was fun!

Putting in floors


First we put in the floor trusses, which were simply some logs going from one end of the room to the other. To get them on the correct height we simply balanced them on rocks!

Then the floor planks came in. Remember how the planks were very uneven? Well, to put them in, that meant that we pressed them together and then used a saw to take off the pieces of the planks that touched each other. So after doing that a lot of times, there were no gaps between the planks anymore! Clever, but it took around an hour per plank... Then the planks were pressed really hard together and nailed down.

Plastering the walls


Since the walls were...let’s say less even than they could be, we had to use TONS of plaster on the walls to get them even. And of course, the plaster being used was mud...

Painting
Or rather whitewashing I guess. Not much to say about that really, no more than we had to mix powder with water ourselves, and the homeowners wife at the last build was NEVER happy with the results. He was a really nice guy, but she was a complete bitch!

Digging


As if we didn’t get enough blisters from the mud-mixing, every now and then we had to do some digging as well. It could be either about loading sand or dirt on a lorry to get to the site, or maybe leveling the ground underneath the house before putting in the floors.

Chai time


I’m sure that there were tons of other stuff that we did as well, that I forgot or didn’t take part in.

The most memorable part of the day was definitely Chai, or tea time. You might think it was like taking a coffee brake, but there was food as well. Sometimes only consisting of bread, butter and marmalade, but just as often (at least on build #2) it was a full meal with maybe noodles or a soup.

I know that I lost a lot of weight in Central America, but NOT so on this trip!
All in all everyone had a great time while we were on the builds. Maybe we didn’t learn as much about building a house in the west as some of us would have liked, but we had a great time! As well as sore muscles...