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$19.95 + First Class USPS & Handling($4 USA, $5 Canada, $10 UK) USD* *Vermont Orders: Price - Vermonter Discount + Sales Tax=$9.95 Ebook, $19.95 Paperback
Table of Contents
Contents Introduction 6
History and Traditions 9
Words and Meanings 10
Sky-Blue Yurt-Home: The Love 12
An Ultra Simple Yurt-Home 14
Plans: An Overview 17
Tension Band 19
Site Preparation 23
A Flat Spot is a Floor 26
Door Frame 29
Walls 33
Rafters 49
Roof Ring 51
Some Assembly Required 56
Scaffolding 59
Roof Ring Supports 61
Covering 63
Insulating 65
Custom Doors 67
Snow, Wind and Rain 69
Dome Covering 72
Heating and Cooling 73
Spirit Hollow Yurt-Home 75
Math 78
Understanding 16 Foot Plans 82
Understanding 12 Foot Plans 84
A Story Ends/ A Story Begins 86
Photographs 88
Bibliography 102
Resources For a Yurt Life Style 103
Index 104
Introduction
Ten years ago, at Spirit Hollow, a shamanic school tucked back in the Taconic Mountains of Vermont, I fell in love with yurts. I was bedazzled by an exotic tent, with a framed door, wooden floor, diamond latticed walls and rays of rafters, arching out from a central sky light. I was dumbstruck by the complex beauty and warmth of a tent in Green Mountain winter.
We fall in love with people and things that invite us to live an unlived aspect of ourselves. All my life, I’ve longed to live outdoors, close to nature and yet I have found myself laboring to survive. living in a mortgaged house, driving a bank owned car to commute to work that allowed me to live an indoor life that I didn’t really want. I was forever running short of time, energy and money. Getting t o the mountains became a chore. When I did get to the mountains on weekends, I didn’t want to leave them and return to work when the weekend ended. If I had known how, I would have run away from civilized life and lived with deer.
In the yurt my divergent worlds came together. Conflicting life needs and intentions found unity. My natural world and my civilized world intersected. A yurt was more beautiful than any camp, house or even mansion that I had ever seen. Light beamed in from a center circle in the roof, through radiating wooden rafters to fall on a familiar wooden floor. In a yurt I was warm, dry and comfortable and yet open to the sounds of the wind in the maples and water in the nearby stream. I loved the experience. I wanted a yurt. I wanted a Pacific Yurt like the one at Spirit Hollow.
Later as I worked in Boston, seventy hours per week, at a Fortune 500 company, making more money than I had at any point in my life, I daydreamed of yurts. I sketched yurts set beside a roaring brook, in Arlington, in Vermont’s Kelly Stand. I made calculations of the cost of acreage, cost of a bridge to cross the river, cost of a floor and the cost of a Pacific Yurt sixteen feet in diameter. I would calculate the month of next year that I could afford to actualize my dreams.
In the next year, down-sized by life, aching for simplicity, living in an attic room and tending an organic garden belonging to friends, my head was still full of yurts. Purchasing land and a Pacific Yurt was now out of the question. I obtained books by Len Charney, Paul King and Dan Kuehn and down loaded a paper by Charles Lokey, works that would comprise the books of my yurt bible. I studied with religious fervor. Could I build a yurt, bit by bit, over the next several years?
How hard could it to build a yurt? Could I drill six holes in an eight foot stick? Could I drill six holes in sixty-six, eight foot sticks? Could I tie a knot at two ends of a cord after threading the cord through holes that I drilled? I knew I could do all of this and build a yurt wall, and from this place, I believed I could take on the rest of it. But could I really?
“A year and a half to complete everything”, I thought, but could I design and construct something that would fit and hold together, would actually work? To my amazement and joy, within two months, I moved into a new sixteen foot diameter yurt, my “ger” (Mongolian for “home”) all at a cost of less than $1000 or about one tenth of t he cost of a Pacific Yurt. Baku, a Japanese friend of mine said, “It wasn’t that God helped you build a yurt. It’s more like you helped God build it.”
How this all happen, step by step, the ideas, the calculations, designs, construction ideas that led to the simplest plan possible, the good fortune and blind luck that completed my yurt -home is the story that follows |
Hi Yurt Lovers,
