Finding quality building materials in Mongolia isn’t easy. Either it’s locally made and of questionable quality or from China and of questionable quality. Mixing that with building a “Canadian” (as they call it) style building here is not an easy recipe to cook. We needed a lot of materials for our house, materials that could be found locally but were all imported from China with a 30%, 40%, or even 50%+ markup. Things like plywood, sheetrock, insulation, doors, furniture… well, pretty much the whole house. My friend Tugu and his dad were heading to Eren, a southern border city between Mongolia and China and offered to send back a bunch of stuff for us. We made a huge list, and ended up with something similar to the picture you see above, even included the kitchen sink. It was supposed to take a month to get here but 6 days later I get a call saying my stuff is waiting for me to pick up at the train station about 15 min out of town. Completely unprepared, I drive out there with Tugu’s mom to find a massive 40’ container packed from end to end waiting for us. It was snowing. We got it all unloaded and sent to another storage facility where we stuffed it into a 20’ container and a garage building. Seems like I had to yell at the loaders every 5 minutes to ask them to be gentle with the sheetrock, don’t drop the toilets, careful with the furniture, etc… etc… hired daily workers aren’t exactly the easiest people to work with. Since then the material has simply sat in those containers. At that time spring was just around the corner and I figured that we’d have our garage/basement built within the month and be able to move everything out there… it’s now been 3 and we’re haven’t even built the walls yet… pretty discouraging. Also, considering we’re paying per day for the storage space had I been more realistic on the time frame I could have used our storage rental money to build a temporary shelter on our land for all the materials and then torn it down for building materials later… but oh well, gotta learn my lessons someplace, even if they’re expensive… ** Current progress. Am filling the foundation trenches with gravel (finally) and preparing foundation drainage tiles to fight frost heave. More soon.
