Recently a friend, after looking at my blog, commented that she still was not sure what our ger looks like and what it was like to live in a ger. Here is what our ger does and doesn’t consist of.
The things we don’t have:
- Running water
- An indoor bathroom
- An oven
- A refrigerator
- Storage
And the things we do have:
- One room
- One lightbulb and one electrical outlet
- A bed handily crafted by Brian
- A dry sink
- A comfy chair lent to us by Darkhuu
- One rug
- One desk and two tables
- Two wooden school chairs and four stools
- One kitchen cabinet
- One wardrobe and two chests which constitutes all our storage
- One bookshelf
- Three buckets totaling 70 liters for our water storage
- One coal stove and one hot plate
- Oh and one slightly smelly dog who is perfectly happy there is no bathtub for her to be tortured in.
Because gers are round, most of our furniture is situated around the edge with the main table and stove in the middle. Here are a few pictures moving from left to right after entering through the ger door (which faces south)
The door from inside
Two views of our lovely roof
The wall curtain pulled away to show the lattice wall and wool insulation behind it,
And the outside of our ger
So, as you can see, the things and comforts that we have definitely outweigh what we don’t have, and for the most part we very much enjoy our way of life. Of course, there are those really cold mornings when we wish we had a furnace, those days when the pile of laundry to hand wash seems as big as a car (which we incidentally don’t own) and I would kill for a washing machine, and, on the random day when the well lady decides to lock the well and disappear, a sink with running water would be divine. Oh, and eating by candlelight is not so much romantic as a reminder that the power plant down the road is an 8 million dollar pile of junk.
In exchange, though, we can watch the moon move across the wholly non-light polluted night sky while we lie in bed, it takes approximately 30 minutes to dust, sweep, and mop our entire house, and our monthly household related costs (we own our ger outright) are between $35-$103 for water, internet, and power depending on whether or not we have to use our generator. I can’t see us living in a ger forever (just the thought of living in a one room house with a teenager gives me a stomach ache) but for now, we think it is just right.