1.5 months of life in the yurt!

Despite our worries and quickly fleeting time, we were able to move in to the yurt on the first of July. We celebrated our first night over a delicious pizza made the The Elmore Store, which uses Elmore Mountain Bread for the crust and local veggies (right across the road). Since then we have had many more pizzas from there and a whole lot of work, some relaxation, a interesting stories to impart on the blog. The first order of business, is to let you guys know that yes, we do love living in the yurt. The circular area has much more of a relaxing nature than even I anticipated. This relaxation has been far and few between, but when it has been taken advantage of, it has been much needed.  I forgot to take some more recent photos of the yurt, however I have some photos of the yurt more finished from the last time we posted. 

The yurt pre-doors, (we do have doors)

Back Door with stairs

The floor has R7 foamboard under the flooring

2 days worth of flooring

we began to move our stuff inside and things became much less open

The quick bed frame I made to store stuff under

Future site of the kitchen and bathroom

It quickly became a disaster zone.

Silas loves the yurt

He is, as always, so helpful when it comes to cleaning up/

The dome and rafters can not be captured in pictures

Silas and I on an early morning hike up Elmore Mtn.

The kittens and Silas have been catching up on their beauty sleep. Apparently the yurt is a wonderful sleeping space.

The bathroom walls.

The newest updates to the interior of the yurt which have no pictures (yet) are the bathroom walls, the loft above the bathroom, and the addition of a countertop, which I am still working on. We have also problem solved some small tweaks in the composting toilet system. Originally we were going to just use the buckett system as outlined int he Humanure Handbook, however Sarah and I thought that if we separated the urine it would reduce any smells. This was a wrong assumption, and we ended up having more of a smell and we emptied the bucket everyday. After our vacation to Maine, where we stayed at an off-grid hostel, we were convinced that the simple bucket was the way to go. As of a few days ago, we have been using the bucket for all deposits, and it has been working much better, and with no smell.  

4th of July weekend, I spend neck deep in a freezing spring fed well, cleaning it out and running water pipe about 600' down the hill to the yurt. I was able to re-use some of the buried pipe through patching leaks by putting my ear to the ground and listening for gurgles of water, then digging, cutting, and rejoining the pieces. I did need to put down about 200' of new piping and it is currently above the ground. We will have to find a solution to the water for the winter, right now it works and we have running water to the yurt. We also have an on demand hot water heater and I built an outdoor shower stall, so we are living pretty luxuriously! 

Sarah has been busy digging holes and making garden beds for next year, moving brush piles, and trying to stay on top of my never ending clutter, whoops. 

Here are some quick highlights of life in the yurt so far

- After a few drinks, the urine bucket will quickly become full and overflow (even if friends are around)

-Leaving the yurt for someone to poop quickly becomes old and the bathroom walls suddenly jump to the top of the list

-Cats are clever and will find ways to escape the yurt through opening doors and crawling through the velcro windows

-When it rains hard, forget about watching that movie or having an audible conversation

- Outdoor showers are the most amazing experience, especially when they are hot

- Being a debt free home owner is satisfying 

- Walking on the trails outside our door and not having to get in the car or even put on shoes.

- explaining to people that yes you live in a yurt and, no you are not crazy.

-Nothing is better than sitting in front of the window while drinking tea and realizing that you really built your own home

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!

Composting Toilet

Tomorrow is the first day of March, and we haven't started the canvas yet, but I just finished the composting toilet, and for now, that feels like an accomplishment.

Sarah is headed off to Florida to visit her grandmother ( and get a tan ) while I stay here in the frigid north. I'm not bitter though, because that means that the house is all mine and I can work on the canvas and not have to worry about the total chaos that will ensue when I am cutting out the panels. Hopefully we stay motivated because it will be April before long and we still have lots to do.

On the bright side, did I mention that I finished our composting toilet? Well, I don't want to sound too proud, but it turned out better than I expected. I used a combination of red cedar, poplar, and pine for the sides with even a piece of cherry thrown in for good measure. The top and bottom are plywood, with a beautiful maple seat. There is an intentional one degree slant on the wood to keep  lines fluid and add a rustic look, and adjustable feet on the bottom. It is finished with a polyurethane so that we can keep it clean. Now that the aesthetics details have been given, who wants to poop in our bucket/box? Don't fight everyone, simply RSVP a dinner party and you too will have a chance.

I'm sure you might be wondering how this system will work and keep our lovely yurt from smelling like the kitty litter box, that can be answered simply by saying that the buckets will be emptied in an area where it can be composted. The details still need to be hashed out with our wonderful friend Ken who is letting us live on his land. If you are interested and want to learn more, check out the humanure handbook.

Here is a quick video of the toilet, I took it with my new fancy kindle fire, but the camera apparently doesn't love the indoor lighting so it's not as clear as I would have liked for it to be.

The video quality isn't that great. It looks much better in person. 

Where Did The Time Go? (Lattice and Rafters)

It is the end of January and we have been seriously lacking in the updates of the yurt progression. The last you guys know of, we haven't even finished the lattice, but have no fear, because we finished that months ago!  In fact... Here's proof!

That is only half of it, but you get the idea. I was able to fit half of the complete lattice sections in my car, so we made two trips to our house where we are storing the yurt pieces. We have an extra shed that has been a godsend. Our well used, 2 car garage is taken up by various appliances, odd and end things for the yurt, along with our  two cars. Having a garage is probably the biggest thing I will miss about our house. Nothing beats hopping in to your semi-warm car on a -30 Degree day and not having to scrape the windshield, brush off snow, and start the car 10 minutes before you leave. 

Anyways...back to the yurt. 

The next step was the rafters, which was consuming a large portion of Dave's wood shop porch. It was another item that I had summed up to be "just rip them down the middle, make a 30 Degree cut on one end, a 90 Degree cut on the other, Notch the 30 Degree end, sand and stain. Should only take us a day" I should probably be burned at the stake for how many times I have told David that it was no big deal and wouldn't take very long. Luckily for me, he knows to take my time guesstimation with a grain of salt. Time never quite adds up in my mind the same as it does in reality. Here are some pictures of the process, which I am sure you are much more interested in than my inability to gauge time.

Dave and I finished making the 30 Degree and 90 Degree cuts at 10:00pm while it was snowing and Sarah, Cathy, Melissa, and Olivia were sitting inside the warm house drinking hot and refreshing beverages. 

Although they did help during the day....

The adorable Sarah and Olivia helping with the rafters

Even Raymond helped out!

Sarah staining the rafters

We started to stack them in the garden plot area but decided to move them to our shed where they would be sheltered from the elements and have a better chance at drying out.

Here is a picture of the notch that I made for the cable to rest in.

The rafters are now safe and sound in the shed but they are not fully finished. It didn't take us long to figure out that we would be best off to wait until the spring to stain them since they were still very wet. It was also becoming t0o cold for us to work outside and time was running out. Most of them will still need to be notched and stained, but it is going to wait until we have a warm spring day. We are currently in winter hibernation for the moment. 

The next post, which will come much sooner than before, will be about our very exciting new advances in the insulation and fabric! All good things come in time, we must be patient. Until then, drink some hot chocolate, watch a movie, and snuggle some cute pets!