In January of 2022 we started clearing a site or our new home.  We started with brushing out the spot where we wanted to put the yurt, with a little bit of wiggle room on all sides.  Some friends came and helped us fell a few trees around the perimeter.

Between busy work schedules and wet weather conditions, the site prep took about a month.  But finally we had a blank slate to work with!  Next step was to set up the piers and beams for the foundation.  This required careful calculations to make sure everything would end up level since we were working on a slope.

Finally, in mid February, we were ready to assemble a work party to raise the yurt!  We are so blessed to have friends and family nearby who love to work hard (in exchange for some good food of course).

We actually had a bit of a hiccup that day and the yurt ended up with a weird twist to it.  So the next day we had dry weather, we had to pull it back down to the lattice and reset the tension cable.  Let me tell you, you do NOT want to have to take the roof on and off a yurt!  I think that thing weighed about 3 gazillion pounds… 

But by the end of February we had a proper dried-in yurt!  Next step was framing out the rooms inside.

And of course we needed a heat source…

While the yurt was being built, we were staying in a really cramped shared living situation, so once the walls were complete and the stove was installed, we moved in.  A few months later when we had some more time (and money) we built the loft!

Since then we’ve hung a few shelves, installed a proper closet rod in the downstairs bedroom, and added better steps and a back deck.  There’s still a lot more to do, but we’ve come a long way from a bare scrap of land in the woods!

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**Check out an updated tour of our yurt! (September, 2023)**