Yurt Deck

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of work and many 15+ hour days. Quite a bit has been completed and/or nearly done, and Sarah and I are so excited to have a few days off once the yurt is built. I have been told however that once it is completed, that I have a long list of projects....


As the title says, I have been building the deck. For the past few weeks after work with my friend, Geoff, has been willingly helping me build, and thank god because it never would have fabricated without him. Some of the numerous challenges that we have faced have been the intolerable amount of black fly bites and their corpses in our eyes, a death trap of stumps and uneven ground, a ton of heavy shit to carry up the hill to the site, and the biggest one has been the fact that I have never built something like this before. It has required quite a bit of problem solving and some extreme inefficiency! I am going to have to take the lazy route on this one and let the pictures do the talking.

Looking up at the site from the road

The stack of lumber for the deck

Sarah doing what she does best- relaxing

(don't mind the pile of metal behind her. We had to dig it out and remove it from the site from where the old cabin was before it burned down)

The site

Laying out the blocks

Looking towards the road from the site- Our view

View from where the front door will be

Our view from the side of the yurt

Another view from the road up to the site

Silas came out and "helped"!

Base camp

This shelter has saved us from so many bugs

Geoff's dog Alfonzo has been helping every day too!

He isn't quite so sure about our abilities...

Cutting the posts to the correct height. 

I know, we would make a great couple.. 

One of the many hazardous work areas we set up

Our first cross beam

dead level.

First tall ass beam set up

First pain in the ass beam

First time we have 4 beams set up

and here is where we are at now.

We finished putting the home wrap up and some blocking which will need to be continued this weekend, as well as the subfloor and then the plywood band and WE WILL BE DONE...with the deck, at least.

Funny Story:

Last night I came home around 9:30 from working on the deck, which I started right after getting off work at 3:00. I am telling Sarah about how much progress I made and my story goes something like this-

Alexis- "so we got the home wrap up and most of the blocking, but it started getting really dark" (I had been walking on top of the beams which have a 4 foot gap between each one. With the home wrap up and the light being flat, I misjudged where the beam was and nearly fell down 7 feet on top of braces, where I would have possibly broken my back, and then would have been impaled with the stumps below.

Sarah- " I can't believe you tore the home wrap!" 

The truth finally comes out. 

Homewrap section- $5

Alexis- Priceless... oh no, I mean price-less! $0

Movin' Out so VERY Soon!

Honestly, this blog has been weighing on my conscience. I fret about not having updated in it months, when there have been so many advancements. I apologize to all you yurt fanatics and family member who still want to figure out what the hell we are doing.

The only thing that is official, is that we are moving out of our house by June 1st. Our landlords have put the house up for sale, which means that we may also be having people come by and look at the house with the yurt parts sprawled from the dining room to the office! Hopefully though we will be spending more time at the site.

As far as the yurt progress itself, much of the insulation sewing is nearly done. Sarah and I still need to cut out the roof canvas and make the frustrum cuts for the insulation. The interior liner that we ended up purchasing to ensure that our home is flame retardant still has quite a bit of sewing and work to be done. If needed, we can always put the yurt up and retrofit it with the liner. That would not be ideal, since we would have to get some friends back out to lend their backs. The canvas walls are nearly done, they only need velcro and zippers and then I can make them into the finished wall product and add grommets.  The canvas and fabric portion of the yurt has been my least favorite. It has been time consuming, tedious, and since I can't sew, Sarah's mom has been our sewing slave. I don't think she will ever use the words "fun" and "yurt-building" in the same sentence again.

Now on to the wooden part of the yurt- my favorite part. The rafters have been sanded and stained! It took us many days and I kept my regrets secret from Sarah so that she wouldn't know that there had been an easier way to get this done but at the time I was feeling lazy and we were now paying for it... (she will now know that I should have run them through the planer and we would have ended up with smoother boards done in 10% of the time.) Live and learn. Lazy now= no lazy later. Sarah also finished bolting the lattice together. It was only a few pieces that we couldn't finish last fall when the weather turned cold on us! When we are raising the yurt, we will need to fix a few pieces that have broken in the transition and simply because they had a crappy knot in the middle. Luckily, we have some extra pieces. The door frames are in the garage and waiting to be assembled on site. That project went pretty well except for the tiny detail that I accidentally broke one of the windows in our doors when transporting it and now I can add that to my to do list. Finally, the roof ring is the last piece of the puzzle. It took quite a bit of problem solving to get the 30 Degree angle on the ring once it was assembled, but I cut the edges with my skillsaw set on a 30 degree angle on both ends, then used the saw on edge to make relief cuts, and chiseled out the excess wood. Now, I need to get it to David's shop to use the plunge router to make the holes, sand it, plane the edges where I cut, and put on the hardware for the dome to open.  Good grief.

At this point, we are needing some good news. The site. We put in our application to the zoning board in Elmore, and we are able to go ahead and start building the deck, as long as we wait to put the yurt up once the application has been approved. They need the septic plans from Ken (Our friend who owns Peacepups Dogsledding and is leasing his land to us). Then we will be good to go! Ken also spent one of his days off clearing the site since it was completely wooded. We now have a big brush pile to move, but that might need to wait until the yurt raising crew arrive with all hands on deck to make it go much faster.

I have been using up my "I would love to help" offers from my dear and ever-willing friends. Yesterday, Geoff and his girlfriend Liz came out to help at the site. He also ended up transporting our newly bought generator for us, since it was certainly not fitting in Sarah's car. We plucked up many baby pine saplings and maniacally threw them in the brush pile, dug up old burnt mattresses springs, rusty metal pieces, nail embedded in steel, and Geoff ripped out tree trunks with his bare hands. It wasn't quite as much fun as you would think. After that, we made a trip to our house to pick up the concrete blocks and came back to find Sarah lounging in one of the camping chairs with a beer in one hand and some tortilla chips and hummus in the other. I guess I knew where she stood for the day. However, I still put her to work. We carried all 26 of the blocks up the hill that I began to loathe. Particularly when Liz decided to start carrying two at a time and I couldn't let her one up me! It did however make it go by faster. Once they were up the hill I just couldn't help myself! I thought we should go ahead and place them in their locations for the yurt.  The short story is that we were using sticks among other sticks to be markers which Liz ingeniously marked with mossy hats for us to see and occasionally the blocks needed to be placed EXACTLY where a freaking large stump was. I also may have mis-calculated the distance for a few of them and we had to go back and move them again. Whoops.

So, how is the yurt coming? Don't ask.

...but really do ask, because we may love to take you up on that offer to help!