The floor is on!

As the longest day of the year approached northwest Montana, we have made use of every last bit of sunlight our 15 hours or so gave us on the longest day of the year.  We have made some nice milestones and on the eve of our yurt raising we are excited and exhausted to see our project round one of the final bends in the road to establishment.

With the platform enclosed and protected from weather, Tanner was able to get power hooked up to the yurt, and our well guy came to finish all preparations for our water supply.  You know what that means:  We have water, baby!

Garden spigot

Water pump & breaker box installed.  Frost free hydrant will supply water to the yurt.

Waiting out the rain in shelter

Supports for front deck

With water and electricity all taken care of, the rest of the week was spent on laying flooring for the yurt in preparation for our team of friends scheduled to come help us on Sunday.  Tanner spent two days laying flooring and decided he was not a fan of that chore, but boy, does that floor look nice!

Back deck and yurt flooring, looking south

With the flooring laid, Tanner had my brother, Nathan, out to help him load the trailer with the remainder of the yurt.

insulation and ceiling joists loaded on the trailer

Strapping it down

Teamwork makes the dream work!

 We are all set for our yurt raising!! 
Cheers, The McGurts

Progress

Things are starting to really come together at our yurt site.  Once the weather decided to cooperate, Tanner was able to get the support pillars cut to the correct height for the platform, and some friends corralled to help load some cross beams onto the top of the structure to reinforce the yurt base.

Cutting the pillars to the correct height

Beams are up!

view from yurt floor

This small change looks so dramatic to me.  Being a very visual person, this really ties the yurt platform together.  Very exciting progress!

Next, Tanner stabilized the floor joists, began laying plywood for the floor, and enclosing the sides for the platform.

Looking Northwest, sides are closed in

All closed in on the north side

King of the castle

Roger and Tanner securing floor panels

Tanner had some help for a couple of days from a long time friend of my family's, Roger, who helped secure floor and side panels, maneuvered a shovel, and helped keep Tanner company.
The next day, Tanner added house wrap to the remainder of the sides to close in the first floor, and insulated the section of the floor where the well pump will be coming indoors.  We do not plan to insulate the ground level, so from here we just need to figure out what to put on the outside of the ground floor (siding, tar paper, keep the house wrap, etc).  Our main priority at this point, however, is to get the remainder of the platform ready on top of this section so we can raise the yurt on time.

Insulation around the frost-free hydrant

Add some floor...

All wrapped up...

Plastic sheeting covers this level, and is now ready for flooring

Lots to back-fill on the north side of the yurt.

Just a few more finishing touches before we are ready to have a crew come to help us raise the yurt!
Tanner is building front and back decks for the yurts two doors, and a catwalk encircling the structure to assist in the raising of the second story, and tongue and groove flooring will be laid across the entire base. 
Pictures to come!
Cheers!

Yurt Vs. Rain

Progress has been slow in getting our next home established.  We were hoping to be in the yurt by mid-June, but with weather delays we are looking like we will be in it, barely, by the first of July when we need to vacate our current rental.  Over the last two weeks, our frustrations are expressed occasionally, in exasperated tones as we check the weather forecast only to see that every day is all rain, all the time.  While we don't consider ourselves fair weather people, we truly love a good snowstorm or rain shower, the mud has infiltrated our spirits like the onset of a bad cold.  All of my life I've heard the phrase:  "if you don't like the weather in Montana, just wait five minutes, it'll change."  While this theory is very true in the mountains, the phrase is true anywhere you go.  Mark Twain said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."
My husband enjoys the changes and has even mentioned between bouts of frustration that he loves that it is sunny one minute, cloudy and windy the next, and very shortly after it's hailing from clouds being separated by more sun.  This weather schizophrenia is exhausting to me.  I just wish that it would stay the same for the length of the day.  In this objective, planning can be established early on, and all preparations can be made with the utmost thought for the days activities.
Being that the weather is something that we are all exposed to, it is interesting to read what others think of it.
"Let the rain kiss you.  Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.  Let the rain sing you a lullaby."  ~Langston Hughes

"Among famous traitors of history one might mention the weather"  ~Ilka Chase
I'd hate to think that the weather was conspiring against us, as this seems foolish. 
On a regular day, when I didn't have a deadline for when my living status would appropriate homelessness, I could be heard saying something similar to this:
"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather"  ~John Ruskin

Most of the time, in having a career in talking with people I just met, this is truer still:
"Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while."  ~Kin Hubbard
Which makes me realize how thankful I am that I do live in a place with four seasons.  Even if some of the seasons are way shorter or longer than in other places.  I wonder how bored I would be if the weather never did change.


This being said, Tanner was a trooper this week, and spent plenty of time making incredible progress on our home site despite the weather.  Two days were spent putting in concrete supports, which hold the pillars to the yurt platform.

Tanner digging his first concrete support

Buddy, supervising

 Our concern with all of the rain, is that by placing the pillars while the ground is so saturated, we would have an unstable support when the yurt is complete.  The glacier silt that is our ground, makes for a very spongy surface when wet, but when it dries it will be like concrete!  Since the platform was draining the water sufficiently, Tanner decided to continue on.  There were 22 concrete supports total, all dug by hand.

The first pillars are up

Coming along.  Diagonal supports are holding the pillars square until the top of the platform is in place.

All done

Looking Vertical!!!

Again, this is just the platform that the yurt will sit on.  We have decided to make it  6.5ft tall to accommodate dry storage for things we need that won't fit in the yurt.  We will have an insulated pillar within encasing the water heater and pump.  
Tanner worked a couple of long days, getting sprinkled on, proving that "Bad weather always looks worse through a window" ~Tom Lehrer  I love this, because it is so true.  With the proper attitude and clothing, all weather is tolerable, and quite enjoyable.  The weather is something so much larger than ourselves, uncontrollable, and it's a great feeling when one can overcome it.
Ultimately, our quote for this project and with all that we do would be:
"A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves"  ~Marcel Proust

www.brainyquote.com
www.quotegarden.com

Preparations

As with every spring I've known growing up in Montana, this year is turning out to be an extremely soggy one.  We have certainly been blessed with nice weather here and there.  The start of our project on the new property was blessed with gorgeous weather and surprisingly warm temperatures in May.  The first week in June, however, has brought us plenty of rain and cool temperatures dipping into the 40s.  While I wouldn't say that we are behind in our progress with getting our yurt erect, we were optimistically hoping we would be further along in the project than where we currently are.  We have made the best of our time, and the weather, by taking care of some small repairs and preparations so that when Mother Nature decides we are sufficiently refreshed, we can get with the program. 
Our first order of business, was to get our insulation ready for the walls of the yurt.  In our yurts former life it had wool insulation for the walls and ceiling.  As I've mentioned before, there was some water damage to the insulation, causing irreparable damage to the wool, but leaving the other key elements salvageable or untouched altogether.  Looking for an affordable alternative to replacing the insulation, we found that you can find heavy duty Mylar bubble wrap reflective insulation online, or at your local building supply.  When researching yurts, we found that most companies use the same insulation, and can ship you sheets that fit your size yurt, for a hefty price.  We decided to go the cheaper route, and with Tanner's engineering brain to calculate measurements, and my sewing pattern experience, we could easily cut the insulation to custom-fit our yurt walls. 

One half of our yurt siding

Tanner measuring the windows

Windows Cut

Matching insulation to the walls

It fits!

 Once we knew we didn't mess up the first panel, all we had to do was trace the windows onto the additional panels.

Tracing windows onto new panels

Our plan for this insulating option is to have two layers of insulation in the walls, and two layers on the ceiling with one wool layer in between (which was saved from the mold damage).  Reflective Insulation works in three ways:  By radiation, from a warm surface to a cooler surface through an air space; By conduction through solid or fluid materials; By convection, which involves the physical movement of air.  The idea is, all of the heat coming from our toasty wood stove will reflect off the walls and ceiling to create a nice little haven from the cold of a Montana winter.

Once all of the windows were cut from the insulation, we decided to spiff up the doors, which also had their share of damage from snow and water.  We had scrubbed all dirt and mold from them with bleach water, so the parts that needed fresh stain got a dose from this stuff:

Superdeck is what Colorado Yurt Co. recommends and uses for their wood components on their yurts

Windows taped, like a bunch of amateurs, and ready for stain

Looking parched

Fresh stain

Back to life

We continued using the Superdeck on the posts used for the yurt platform.

Posts for yurt platform

With all of these details ready to go, we are hoping progress will be easier once we are ready.
To learn more about Reflective Insulation go to: Innovative Energy, Inc
To learn more about Colorado Yurt Insulation Packages go to:  CO Yurt Insulation

Rainy day projects

After a slow week, with plenty of rain, things are starting to look finished on our little piece of heaven in Montana.  We started the week with a holiday, which will inevitably slow things down, but the merciless rain didn't speed things up for the remainder of the week.  We did manage to get a grey water drain field set for the yurt, and tile around the perimeter to avoid water collecting under the yurt platform.  Some of our large rocks scavenged from the ground were set around my garden frost free water pump and other key areas where we needed to keep the freshly disrupted earth from oozing out of place in all of the rain.  With the conduit laid for electric and phone lines, the trenches were covered, and Tanner and I have been busy laying seed for native grasses to fill the empty space.  Our hopes are for the grass and other native plants to take over that space before thistles and other noxious weeds take up residency.

Yurt drain field

Frost free garden pump, with rocks below (rocks on the side will be used for retaining walls near the house)

Seeding the newly covered trench from the road

In the process of adding seed to our land, I have been doing my best to research native plants and decide which ones I want to add to our already lush landscape.  I was lucky enough to find a native plant nursery in West Glacier, and they come to my local farmer's market!  You can learn more here.  I am anxious to bounce ideas off of their wealth of knowledge, but in the meantime I am learning to identify many of the plants I'm seeing on my walks and throughout the property.

This plant, which hasn't quite bloomed, is called Mountain Lover, which is all too appropriate for Tanner and I

While the seeds are germinating, we decided that all of the rain and large trucks coming and going from our building site had made our road a mess, only to get worse in the coming months.  We decided to invest in some rock and take advantage of Jardy's schedule to get them all smoothed out for us.  As they say, a stitch in time saves nine, and we are hoping that this extra step now will save for a lot of grading and futzing in the driveway later on.
First off, we needed to lay down road fabric to give the rock a boundary of sorts in the very squishy mud.  This should keep the rock from forming deep ruts and potholes over time.  The dogs loved the fabric, even more than the dirt, which kept Tanner busy telling them to move!

Looking west up the new addition of driveway

Main driveway looking east, yurt platform on the left, home site straight ahead and on the left

Yurt platform, all staked out and ready for a dry day

Once all of the fabric was laid, the dump trucks began arriving with rock.

Jardy spreading out the new rock

Tanner cutting away excess fabric

Tanner and Buddy supervising the dump truck unload

Moose and I catching some sun

Walking down the new driveway

After a very long day, things looked great.  We couldn't be happier with how things are looking after initially breaking ground on our untouched wilderness.  I think that we have done well in disrupting the land as little as possible and conserving the nature that thrives here, thanks to hiring a great excavator and being mindful of the value of what lies therein.

yurt platform from driveway

Looking clean with fresh gravel

The sight of where we first broke ground. The existing driveway ended at a dugout in the hillside, now freshly filled and seeded alongside our new gravel.

Looking to the west

To learn more about Montana Native Plants: www.mtnativeplants.org
If you are in the area of Glacier Park or the Flathead Valley, buy your plants directly from:  www.windflowernativeplants.com
For an expert excavator call Rocky Mountain Excavating at (406) 261-4281
Buddy Approves!