The History of the Yurt - Chapter 1

I was working as a Movement teacher (Physical Education) at the Orchard Valley Waldorf School and was commuting a long distance when I decided to build our home.  I didn’t have land so I decided to search for land I could rent.  Michael and Susan, friends for many years, offered to let me build a movable straw bale octagon on their land and live there for one year. Although this structure is indeed an octagon we referred to it as a straw bale yurt. My sales pitch to Michael and Susan was, “it will only take two months to finish the house”.  Michael, an established talented carpenter, was so impressed that I could complete such a task in such a short period of time.  I had been collecting the building materials I would need and my plan was to build the yurt in the summer months, live in it during the winter months and move it in the spring.  It’s funny how easy things look on paper.

Since I was planning to move the structure I used pine stumps as a temporary foundation.   The frame, in order to take it apart for moving, was cut in a post and beam fashion.  The process of cutting the timbers for the floor seemed to take forever and I was looking forward to when the work would pick up speed, yet, as time went on, it seemed as if the process of building the yurt was actually slowing down. 

The center of the octagon is temporarily supported on saw horses.

The rafters are holding the center octagon in place.

The roof was built in sections resembling pieces of a pie.

The roof sections hold up the center octagon without nails.

The sections are numbered for the disassembling and reassembling process.

Two cables wrap around the yurt keeping the walls from spreading.

 Soon the two months came and went and I was living outside in my tent at the building site when school started.  Every moment of my free time was spent working on the house.  September passed by and in early October several inches of snow appeared and I was faced with the fact that building a movable, complex, straw bale octagon takes much more time than two months.  It was getting colder by the day and the small heating stove I had did little against the wind that had no trouble passing through the walls of the house.  I have done many crazy things in my life but this was definitely at the top of the list.  I decided to move my small two person tent inside the structure, insulate it with astrofoil and straw bales, and believe or not, move into it for the winter.  I ran a long extension cord out to Michael’s shop which enabled me to have a small electric heater, my entertainment center (boombox-radio, CD and tape), and an old coffee maker that my travel mug fit under to catch my morning coffee.  Earlier when I mentioned that the standard of living can start out low…well this is how it was!

The tent is covered with insulation…

then surrounded by straw bales.

I was able to take showers at the school with only a few people who knew about what I was doing.  This period had many highs but also many lows.  The highs; well I had plenty of time to think about the direction I was going in and to contemplate my life and how I was going about manifesting my vision.  I was outside much of the winter, both at home and at work, and I felt healthy and strong.  The lows were numerous. For one, I felt like I was homeless.  I couldn’t really talk about my living conditions without feeling like I was crazy.  I remember going over to the school to take a shower late at night so I wouldn’t see anyone.  I didn’t even want to try to explain.  What do you say?  “I know its winter but I live in a tent inside a straw bale structure in Central Vermont.”  Even to me it sounded crazy. Since I had no cooking facilities it was the winter of raw veggies, fruits and nuts.

Winter arrived with holes still in the walls.

Finally, this cold, cold season came to an end and since I couldn’t find a place to move the house in the area where I was living, I started to plan to move to back to Northern Vermont.  I told the school I couldn’t teach the next year because I had to move out of the area, then just in time, school community members Andy and Marianne came forward and offered a place to put the yurt on their land.  What a relief.