The Yurt

Embarking on a new project is always exciting.  There are times when the task may seem daunting or scary, but a really good project leaves you feeling elated and invigorated, even when the project has left you working long hours, maybe in extreme temperatures.  The task of building a house, and developing land that has been left untouched is probably the biggest project that any married couple will enter into.  Many marriages don't survive the process, for some it's a hobby and just a warm up for the next house-building project.  For Tanner and I, it is our future.  We do not plan on ever building a house again, or moving from the beautiful property with which we find ourselves so lucky to have found.  We hope that our home will be a haven for family to come and spend time; a place for our dogs to grow old and retire to; a haven for our creativity to flourish.

I think this view will suffice...

While we are in the process of building our first house, our first home will be a yurt.  "What the heck is a yurt?" you ask?  Well, it is basically a glorified tent.  To be fair, it is a round structure with a pitched roof, 7 foot walls, solid flooring (whatever platform you wish to place it on) with windows and doors.  Yurts have been used for centuries by Mongolian herdsmen on grassland steppes of Central Asia.  Today yurts are manufactured all over the world and used as back country shelters, temporary housing, or conference centers (no joke, the website boasts it).

This diagram shows the guts of the main walls of a yurt.

Our yurt is a Colorado Yurt.  You can learn more about them at mycoloradoyurt.com  This website is full of information and options for all sorts of alternative living structures.

We bought our yurt second-hand, which in turn saved us a healthy chunk of change, but has been a much bigger task in getting it taken down, cleaning it, and we will soon be setting it up again.

                                  This is our yurt, before we took it down.

Yurts come in five different sizes, ranging from 16-30 feet in diameter from the Colorado Yurt company.  We have a 30 foot yurt, which gives us 706 square feet of living space.  We have eight windows, two doors, and a T&G wood floor.  Once inside, the dome skylight lets in a ton of light and it really seems spacious.  Our excitement for living in the yurt is growing more each day!
Cheers!

To learn more about yurts:
www.yurts.com
www.yurtsofamerica.com