We were driving down the road and our guide asked us if we would like to visit someone’s house. We said we would and he asked us which house. We pointed to the first one that we were approaching and said it would do. He pulled in and asked the people if our tour group could come in and see their house. The woman said that her house was a mess but come on in if you like, so we did. Bhutan is a friendly country.

You can see the house in the above photo. In the lower right, you can see me and to my left is the mother and daughter of this household. This family is a farming family. Their house was not nearly as nice looking as many others that we saw, but construction-wise, our guide said most houses were about the same. Their houses are quite large. The first story or ground floor is for the animals. They keep their cows and pigs and other such animals housed in the first story of their houses, so it is really their barn. The second story is reached by the stairway you see in the front of the house and this story was all farm storage space. We had to climb up a ladder to get to the third story which is their living quarters. It was not an easy ladder for me to climb. The rungs were very small and there was very little room for my feet. I was practically climbing up on my toes. These Bhutan farm families are hearty folks but must have small feet.

This third level had a room for food storage such as rice and wheat and vegetables. Other rooms included the bedroom (below photo). We only saw this one bedroom, so it might be a communal bedroom situation, but I’m not sure about that. There was a guy sleeping when we got there. We all stepped around him and he never moved. They had a kitchen which was a bit on the rustic side (fourth photo). It had a small plastic flexible pipe bringing water into the kitchen and a pan for a sink. The water then drained out an open window. The one other major room in the house was the Alter room. Every house has an alter room. The alter room had two areas, lots of statues, water and rice available for Buddha, space for reincarnations, etc. Then, if you look at the very top of the house, you can see space between the top of the living floor and the roof. This space is sort of like the top of a barn. They store the straw from their rice and wheat up there. You can see some straw bundles in the lower left of the first photo that hasn’t been stored yet.

So you need to put their houses together and think about it. They live in a cold climate with rudimentary living conditions. They keep their animals on the ground floor which gives the animals protection but also produces heat. The heat rises up and warms their houses (not without fragrance). They keep their food storage up off the ground in case of floods or some other type of invasion. They keep their straw on top of the house, but just under the roof. The straw comes available in the fall and is stored in time to provide them insulation against the winter cold. They feed it out to their animals, so that it probably lasts until spring and warmer weather. So their houses make a lot of sense for their situations.

The last photo is the mother and daughter that live here and showed us their home.