Monthly Archives: July 2008

Site down craziness

Sorry the site was down for a bit. Was late making my payment. But maybe it was long enough to drop off the radar of the spammers. Anyway, I am in the middle of one of the craziest projects I’ve ever tackled. We’re building a yurt. Now, that’s not so crazy. Lots of people would like to have a yurt. I’ve wanted one for about 30 some odd years. But I’ve decided that I agree with Froit . It has to have felt covering to be a yurt. That sounds easy enough. I have wool. I’ve done a little felting.

For the first time in my life, I don’t have enough wool. I’ve been told it takes about 500 pounds of wool to cover a 21 ft yurt in felt. I’m making a 16 footer. So I am going to pick up 300 pounds of fleece on Monday. I think, by purging a lot out of my stash, I’ll have enough. I know that this will likely be an insane amount of work. Nevertheless, we are building. We are tired of the Silver Streak. It’s not well laid out and has poor storage capacity. We need more room. I want something we can heat easily in the winter. And we have next to no money for this project.

Most yurts have some sort of a canvas cover. We’re not going to be able to do that this year. So, we are going to put it in an uninsulated covered building. I want to attach a greenhouse to this, to use up all the double paned windows we have. This should even give us a place for the cats to play safely. I’ve got two step-cats that needed to be moved in with us, plus Chuck (who’s been exiled to a smaller trailer for peeing on the beds in the trailer.) It’s the only way I can figure to pull it all together. We have lumber from a neighbor’s shed to use. We still haven’t decided if we are going to use small trees or sawn lumber for the yurt frame. I’d love to use trees. We have an area we can thin and I think we could find enough to use easily. I’ve got enough oak lumber to make the center ring. All I need is a lot of time and a good, quick way to churn out felted panels.

That’s why I have four garbage bags full of fleece in my car today. Hope your summer is going as well.