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Yurt sweet yurt: the value of simple living
New Life Journal, June-July, 2004 by Erin Everett
As my husband and I crest the top of the hill, our eyes meet a strange scene--nestled in the small Appalachian valley, a garden of raised beds filled with vegetables and flowers spreads out before us. Behind the garden rests a large, wood-sided, passive solar house with a new tin roof. To the right and in front of the house, with basil and winter squash growing almost to its door, rests a spaceship. The clear dome at the 11-foot apex of its rounded top sparkles in the sun, and its circular, aerodynamic body seems prepared for a silent liftoff. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to see a spaceship in the backwoods of Madison County, North Carolina; after all, the New Agers who have taken over nearby Asheville write books on the alien activity in the area. However, despite the first impression this dome-shaped structure creates, it is a visitor not from another planet, but from another time.
The design of the yurt in Pete Malett's yard has been called "an architectural wonder." The yurt (gher is the proper Mongolian name) has been the traditional home of nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia for centuries, and these tentlike houses, formed from yak hair felt, grasses and wood, can still be seen dotting the high steppes and tundra of those areas today. A modern version of the ancient design was created and introduced to the western world by the "father of yurts," David Coperthwaite, and several varieties are being manufactured and sold by companies across the United States. This yurt is made in the modern way; its roof and six-foot walls are vulcanized canvas instead of yak felt, its "eye of heaven" (the round hole in the center of the domed roof) is covered with a convex acrylite skylight that opens and closes on hinges. It even comes equipped with screen windows that can be covered with clear vinyl or closed entirely with canvas flaps, and it has a small wooden door. And this yurt is ours.
When we had begun our search for a house to buy ten months before, Adam and I looked at our options from all angles. At first, we felt exasperated. With the naivite of young first-time home buyers, we felt rich with our $10,000 savings, but we soon discovered that the housing market in our area was steep and highly competitive. The first cabin we fell in love with sold to a Florida couple for a vacation house the day we saw it. The costs of housing in this popular area started high, and they had risen roughly 30% in two years. We could barely afford a shack on a postage stamp, and that shack would come complete with an outsized mortgage, introducing us to what we saw as a lifetime debt trap. Freedom and room to grow were our visions of home ownership; we looked at our priorities and realized that the bells and whistles were considerably less important than staying out of debt. So, we searched out and found a used yurt and laid down the few thousand dollars purchase price with only a little hesitation. After all, the fabric-covered structure is only twenty feet in diameter, with a total floor space of 314 square feet.
One of the yurt's many attributes is its portability, as its history as a nomadic abode attests. Mallett, the yurt's former owner, was kind enough to help us disassemble the structure. It took the three of us a day to take it down, to transport it and unload it at its new temporary location behind the house my husband and I rented at the time. The disassembled yurt itself, including the floor, fit neatly into the back of Pete's pickup. The next day, we took down the yurt's foundation. Take-down, transport and unloading of the timbers, boards and cinderblocks took us half a day and another full truckload. We stored the yurt on wooden pallets under two tarps until the next weekend.
Assembly was more of a job than disassembly, especially for novices. Since the yurt was not new, we didn't have instructions to go by other than our memory of the steps involved in taking it down and a couple of phone calls to Pete for last-minute tips. The most difficult part was erecting the post and beam foundation and mounting the jigsaw-puzzle plywood floor onto it. After the struggle of leveling the floor and fitting its components together perfectly, we were ready. The various components of the roof and walls waited for us, neatly rolled and folded on the pallets.
We recruited four of our friends to join us for a good, old-fashioned yurt raisin', and the six of us assembled the small structure in an afternoon. The main elements of the yurt, other than the floor and foundation structure, are the expandable lattice wall (called a khana), roof beams, door, Reflectix[R] insulation for the roof and walls, canvas wall covering, inner roof fabric, vulcanized canvas roof covering, roof center ring, metal stove flashing, and the acrylite dome skylight for the apex of the roof. After we slid the skylight up the roof and into its place crowning our achievement, we stepped back for a look at our finished project. There it stood--its light brown, rounded shape looked like it belonged there in the corner of our yard, under the tall pine tree. We were tired, but entirely amazed that we had built a house in a few hours.
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