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!

Hello Novembrrrr! Lattice update

Time has just been flying by since the last post. Summer has come and gone, and we are now fighting the change of seasons to get the yurt components that need outdoor space finished before the snow flies...and stays. It has of course snowed just about every morning for the past week or so, but luckily it has melted from the sun, or rained.

In the last post, we were just beginning to stain and chamfer the edges of the lattice. I may have proclaimed that it would take one million years to finish, however, much to our delight, we finished with many years left to live. The downside? Well, after many hours in a shop with no ventilation because of the frigid weather and cans of stain open, Sarah and I have lost many brain cells. It's all a part of the journey I suppose.

Here is the stack of un-stained and stained lattice pieces. It was incredibly daunting to look at the pile.

Here is half of the number of pieces needed to make the wall. We are putting the lattice up in two sections. The first section is complete, however I forgot to take a picture. It is currently resting at a friends house while we problem solve getting it to our house for storage over the winter.

The first section of lattice I put  together I used a different technique of taking half of the pieces of the half (45) and putting in the bolts in the top hole with a another lattice to make a pair. Then I attached all of the pair lattices together with the second hole and bolts. However I learned after breaking a few pieces and having to fix many sections that when they are attached, the end tend to wander and you have pieces on top that should be underneath and holes not lining up. Overall, it was he much more difficult way of doing it. 

Here is the section that we are working one now. 

This time however, we laid out 6 lattice pieces and took one lattice and attached it to the first hole of the first pieces, the second hole in the second piece and so on and so forth until all 6 holes spread out over the 6 pieces and we kept adding a lattice to the end as we added a lattice to the top. You can sort of see the pattern above. I will try and get a video next time, because it can be confusing at first.

 The lattice saga is almost complete, we just need to suck it up and freeze off our fingers to finish it this week. I have already started the rafters and problem solving the roof ring, so expect an update very soon!

Yurt Appliances on the Fly...and cheap!

One of the fun new activities we have added to our daily lives has been keeping an eye out for items we will need in the house. We are by no means rich, so going to a store and picking them out is not an option. We also enjoy the fun in finding them for a good deal and have met some really nice people.

As an example of keeping our eyes out is when we were returning from Maine, I was doing 60mph on the highway and Sarah tell me to stop and turn around because she saw a woodstove for sale. We turned around, found the woodstove siting in a wheelbarrow ouside of a swanky bed and breakfast place. They wanted too much and ultimately we didn't buy it, but I now know that she has eagle eyes.

We did end up getting a wood stove from a really nice guy in Glover. He was selling two, but had only advertised one at the time, so he showed us both and explained each one in detail. One of them was an antique and absolutely gorgeous, but wasn't airtight at all and would burn wood quickly. We were very tempted to buy this one despite that, but when he said that if we went to bed around 9:30, we would most likely need to restock it around 2:00am. That was when practicality set in and we passed it up.

The other wood stove is fairly non-descript, it is black, heavy, and has a glass window, the emblem says "king" and he said that it will work much better than the antique one as far as needing less wood and attention. It is no "all-nighter" wood stove, but for $100 we are very happy. So here she is...

hanging out in the garage until next spring when we put up the yurt!

She isn't the only new addition to our appliance family, we also have a stove! No wood needed for this one, just propane. Believe it or not, we also bought this one from another really nice older guy. He hooked it up and showed me everything. He did warn me that the oven may or may not work, but he wasn't sure since he never needed to use it in the sugarhouse. I took the risk and bought the stove thinking that even if it didn't work, it should be a quick,easy, and cheap fix. Besides, I only paid $25 for it. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to really test the oven, but it doesn't seem to be flowing propane to the oven and wouldn't light, so I called an appliance fixer and found out that they will basically fix the oven after they rob you of all your money. If we had a really expensive stove, I could understand the cost being nominal compared to the cost of replacing, but ours cost $25 and is a million years old. We will wait until we stumble upon someone who might know and be willing to help us fix it. Until then... here is our stove with a complimentary storage box!

And finally, we found a sink at our local resource store for $5, and boy does he shine! There are no faucets yet, but all of our new yurt appliances are quickly taking up space in our garage. Tada!

Please excuse the spare tire pedestal

So, that is where we are at! We are continuing to keep our eyes out for the remaining things that we need, but we aren't in too much of a rush and we are enjoying every minute of the search. I am especially enjoying the game of how many things can I fit in my subaru. So far, the wood stove, the ovenless stove, and everything else aside from the lumber has made it in my car and arrived safely to its temporary home. Hell yeah Subarus!

Tonight after work, Sarah and I will be heading over to the wood shop to work on the yurt since our week and a half hiatus, more updates to come!

Back from Maine

The day we all dread, the first day back to work after vacation! There has been no progression on the yurt, however our energy has been re-invigorated after a lovely trip to Maine. Sarah's birthday (month) is now over but we celebrated it well. We decided about 3 years ago that we would rather plan a trip for each other on birthdays instead of gifts. Since then, we have gone rock climbing, a cabin retreat on an icy blue river, downhill mountain biking, a long weekend in a yurt, and now our most recent trip to Maine staying at a dear friends beautiful second home. It would be easier to tell you what we didn't do, but I'll summarize it for you sake :)

Well, we left after work on Wednesday to maximize our time and after a short burst of panic as I wrote down the wrong route and had us going on a small detour, we made it to Barbara's home that she so kindly allowed us to stay in. It was perfect.  Quaint house, with an amazing view of a lush green pasture, and the most comfortable leather sofa and surround sound home movie theater. Ah, the luxuries! The next day we visited a convenient store/diner that we used to go to, Melby's. If you are ever in the Stoneham, ME area and looking for a great place to have breakfast, check it out.

   

After our exhausting, delicious breakfast we returned to the house and promptly took a much needed nap. It was just what we both needed. After we made up some of our deficit sleep hours, we received a call from our gracious host, with bad news. She owns an alpaca farm, and one of her yearlings was down and not able to move her hind legs so she would not be able to come to the house for dinner. Instead, we ended up driving to her home and having the dinner there with Julia, her daughter, and Bill, her husband, who we had never met before. We know Barbara through working at Sunday river. she was our supervisor, I worked as a ski instructor, and Sarah sold tickets. Therefore, we saw plenty of her and Julia, but Bill works elsewhere and we never had the chance to meet him. He didn't make it in the photo either, since he went to bed early. We may never have proof that he exists!

Now, back to the alapacas. First things first, we "helped" or hindered the vet in getting Laura, the baby alpaca, set up in the barn with some hay and a friend. She was so stinking cute, and her buddy Silver Star, or as I liked to call him, Silver Fox, was as handsome as could be! 

Baby Laura in her nest recovering. She had some kind of parasite that could kill her, but the vet gave her some serious antibiotics and a vigorous dose of some stuff that should hopefully help her. (My vet lingo is sub-par, sorry)

Silver Fox, her caretaker and friend.

Needles to say, the alpacas were very cute, but I have decided that they are very cat like, and much too cute for their own good. They enjoyed being just out of petting range and would huddle together and stare at you. Try having a dozen little eyes glued to you, when all you want to do is rub their little hair poofs. I did however, make away with their best asset, a couple bags of fiber! 

It was a fabulous night, but we had to leave and get back home since the next day we were going...SURFING! I wish I could attach pictures of the flailing that both of us did, or how we both were able to successfully stand up, but much to our dismay we were too busy surfing, so no pictures were taken. We went to Ogunquit and the surf shop was Liquid Dreams, we highly recommend them. Of course, we enjoyed some delicious seafood while we were there.  I am assuming that you guys might not want to see another picture of us eating.. Sarah wouldn't love the picture either. 

To finish off our trip, we went on a short hike to a natural waterslide, glacial waterfall area. It was absolutely amazing. The views were incredible. The waterslides were pretty fun too :)

So that was our vacation! 

We have now returned to the "real" world and an update on the yurt progress will come soon!