how to build a yurt (6 out of 10)
After five pages of photos about the six weeks of hard work to prepare, we finally come to the actual day the yurt went up! The obtuse, absurd, book of instructions suggested doing it in two days, but we had 60% chance of rain the next day–it had to be up by the end of the day, or all that gorgeous oak flooring was going to get rained on. Uncles, Aunts, Sisters, Friends, all came out for Yurt Raising Day. It was amazing! I have never felt so supported. It was just like that barn raising scene in Witness, only without the funny hats.
More to come….
Category: alternative building
Yep. That’s the one thing the yurt salesman never tells you, isn’t it? Sure, it’s easy enough to raise the yurt. Takes a couple of days with three or four people.
But building that platform is a huge pain in the butt. Took my brother-in-law and I six weekends, and we’ve both done framing before (he used to do it for a living). That and the numerous errors in the architectural plans from the yurt company made it a really frustrating experience.
So if you’re thinking about putting up a yurt, know that building the round platform is going to be much more of a challenge than just raising the yurt. Especially if you’re on a patch of very unlevel ground, as we were.
Even with experience building square and rectangle, know that it’s quite complicated and time consuming to build round. Afterwards, we estimated that (if we had the foundation poured and cured going in) we could have roughed out a small cabin in the amount of time it took the two of us to build the yurt platform.
No kidding about the work involved in the platform. The yurt did go up in a day, but the prep to make that happen took several months. Still, a lovely space. No regrets here.