We Have A Yurt!

It’s been a long time in the making, but it’s finally here! We have a yurt!

After work last Friday, I drove up to our property for a very brief but very important weekend… we built our yurt! It’s been months of excavation and building the platform and installing the flooring and waiting for the yurt company to fabricate the thing, and now we finally have a yurt!

A few days prior, Vince and his mom and brother rented a UHaul and drove up to Grass Valley CA to pick up our finished yurt— or at least, the pieces of our finished yurt. It was on us to actually put it together on site. Which, as you can imagine, was a bit of a project!

The first step was setting up the door (we paid extra for nice double French doors) and the lattice. Even just as soon as we stretched around the lattice, it started feeling like an interior space, a space separate from the outdoors. Magic!

The next step was raising the center ring. It’s a good thing Vince is so tall!

After that, we put on the roof covering and the insulated interior wall.

And the final step was putting up the exterior vinyl wall.

We actually thought the wall piece was mis-sized for the size of our yurt (it seemed to be the right size for a 16-foot yurt without French doors) but the company later told us that we’re supposed to cut it to size. I wish the instructions had been a little clearer on that point but I guess that makes sense—better to have it be too long than too short.

In general, Vince and Morey struggled a bit to follow the directions… it’s a great well-fabricated yurt but maybe another pass on the directions would be helpful. But I get it, they’re a small company and they’re mostly used to putting the yurts up themselves, not explaining to other people how to do it. And we figured it all out eventually. You don’t want these things to be too easy after all!

So yes, it took us 6 months to dig the foundation, 2 months to build the platform and install the flooring, and 1 day to actually build the yurt! What a journey it’s been.

Vince’s brother will be flying back to Chicago in a week, ending the couple-month phase of Off Grid Family Time that they’ve been enjoying. Hopefully they can cut the vinyl to size before then and complete the last few finishing touches to make the yurt 100% complete. And hopefully the next time I’m up on our property—which, with my work schedule, could literally be months from now—there’ll be furniture in there as well!

It was really exhausting (and not even in the good way I enjoy), going up for a single weekend. It’s a 6-hour drive and to go up and back in just one weekend, even a weekend where we got so much done, was just too much. I got sick the following week because I was just so burned out.

But I don’t want to never go up to our property again either, so until we get high-speed internet up there (which is likely a long way off), I’m not sure how I’m going to integrate this new job and our homesteading dreams. Do I just resign myself to the fact that I don’t get to be part of our homestead for the next couple years? Do I step away from a good-paying job or change the parameters of it somehow? We need to pay for the homestead to make it happen, so at least one of us needs a good job. And a good-paying job making podcasts, my vocation? I can’t walk away from that.

So I don’t know what the future holds. But I do know that we finally have a yurt, something I’ve been dreaming about since before we even bought these 10 acres of land. And for now, that’s enough. ❤️