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The yurt obsession continues

By Ari | Jul 11, 09 09:52 AM

I wrote about yurts yesterday, and then did even more reading. I learned that wooden yurts are essentially frame-built round houses; you lose a lot of the useful structural features of the tent and your job becomes more like making a very odd cabin - meaning, maybe we should just make a cabin. These kits are pricey, because someone else is doing so much work, and then shipping it across the country. And they don't include insulation, interior finishing, or the floor and foundation the yurt will stand on.

So, a tent-style yurt as a temporary (to the tune of 10-15 years) solution began to look like a better idea. We could set one up cheaply and quickly, and then be rent-free and mortgage-free, with all of our earnings going into living and into building a more permanent house, if we wanted to build a bigger place. And we'd be living on our land, making building far easier and requiring much less transportation. My thinking was that we could be grid-connected at first, and put in alternative energy later. Since a tent-style yurt is a "temporary structure," we could start with a composting toilet and deal with putting in a (required) septic system when we made our cabin. Our major expenses would be a driveway, drilled well, yurt deck, and yurt.

I learned that yurts can be hard to keep cool in the summer, even if they're easy to heat in the winter. A passive solar design would make more sense in Ithaca. Then you wouldn't have to burn wood all winter, and swelter all summer. So, yurts aren't ideal for this area - but you can avoid mildew problems and live more comfortably and efficiently if you pay for a rain catchment system, thick insulation, an openable skylight, and other bells and whistles. These features aren't just luxuries - I think a lot of them (locks, window screens, a dome opener...) would be necessities, from what I've read of the experiences of folks who didn't supe up their yurts. You could probably rig these things in a more DIY fashion, but we don't have a lot of experience and it would be cool to be able to potentially sell the yurt later, so we'd likely make a better return on our investment if we let the professionals handle it.

The recommendation from many folks is to buy a yurt from a major company that will definitely be around in the future, because parts on your yurt wear out over time and need to be replaced. Handily, the major companies (like Pacific Yurts and Ranier Yurts) offer online calculators to help you figure out how much your yurt will cost with all of the extras you'll need and want to make your place livable in your climate.

The base cost of a yurt is $5000 or $6000. But once I factored in insulation and a deck and land and a driveway and water and all of the other amenities, I realized we'd need far more to make it really happen, from soup to nuts. If we could manage to get the money together and work hard, we could be living in a very comfortable 24' diameter tent-home on an acre of land by winter. Could we actually afford it? Would the land work out? What would it be like to live in a 24' yurt? Would we hate it and wish we'd kept our money and made something from dirt and wood and clay? Would we crave natural surfaces, solid walls, soundproofed privacy? Would we bake in the summer? Or would it be awesome, and a step closer to self-sufficiency?

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