where it all happens

When folks find out we live in a yurt, they usually ask a million questions. So, I thought, since this is homebase for everything that follows, the yurt would be a good place to start.

The building beside the yurt is the bathhouse. A triangular deck (the hypotenuse is curved around the yurt wall) connects the two structures. Hovering overhead is a large jib sail, acting as a shade and rain diverter. We bought the yurt as kit from Rainier Yurts (which was in the middle of purchasing the company from Nesting Bird) and we couldn’t be more pleased. It is 30 feet across, which gives us about 700 square feet (plus 150 more in the bathhouse).

Here is a picture of the inside, before we moved in our heaps of stuff.

Isn’t that pretty? The floor is recycled red oak. We got an incredible deal on it, seeing as how it was used and a mess. But that meant buying it right then and we had no place to store it. We lived in the old pre-yurt farm house with piles and piles of that oak on our living room floor–for months!–while we waited for the yurt platform to be built. We’ve used recycled and scrounged materials wherever we could. My husband, Paul, is the creative mastermind of junk.

We had an amazing yurt-raising, lots of generous, wonderful family coming out to help. The whole thing went up in one day!

Tha’s it. Yurt, sweet yurt.