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It's been quite a busy week up here in the NEK. Actually I guess it has been more like a week and a half since I last posted. Oops! It's hard to keep up with it when there is so much yurt building to do!

Jean-Paul is in CA for work this week, so I decided to try tackling the canvas since that is something that is mostly a one person job. I spent a long time on the phone and the internet a few weeks back trying to figure out the best type of canvas to get and also to find a source for that canvas. The book that we have recommends 12oz waterproofed, mildew resistant, fire retardant cotton canvas, but says that 10 or 15oz would work as well. However, a friend who lived in a yurt for a while recommended straight up untreated cotton canvas for better breathability. She said that when the untreated canvas gets wet for the first time the fibers will swell and the fabric will be naturally waterproofed. After calling around and finally getting in touch with the people who treat most of the cotton canvas that is on the market I found out that the waterproofing is a mix of paraffin and a flourocarbon; the fire retardant is "phosphorous based"; and the mildew resistance is something that is not a heavy metal (I was assured that they no longer use mercury.What a relief.). Jean-Paul then did a little research and found out that flourocarbons tend to cause cancer and we decided that perhaps we would try our luck with untreated canvas after all. So...

I ordered a 100 yard roll of 10oz army duck canvas from Top Value Fabrics. We only need about 50 yards (because this fabric is 60 inches wide), but our options were 100 yards for $330 or 50 yards for $250 so it seemed to make more sense to buy the 100 and then have extra for a replacement cover, patches, etc. The roll is ridiculously heavy though. Dad and I managed to hang it up in the garage as you can see below, but I thought we might be in the running for a Darwin award: "Father and daughter squashed by giant roll of canvas".

I initially thought that I would be using my great grandmother's sewing machine for this project since it is an old Singer (so beautiful!) and has done some heavy duty work in the past. Sadly, the thread that I got (V-92 bonded polyester) is too thick for the machine and the bobbin wouldn't work right. Before panicking I decided to try out my own modern machine and it worked!! Phew.

Working with all of this canvas is quite a challenge. The name of this post doesn't even begin to describe it. Last night, I finished all of the sewing that I can do on the roof until we have the frame up and I can fit it exactly. It felt a little strange though because I finished it, but there isn't enough room in the house to spread it out and look at it so I just have to hope that I put together all of the pieces properly and my seams are facing the right direction. Considering the amount of time that I thought about each pieces before I sewed it (my brain seriously hurt), I am fairly confident that it will be fine, but I am looking forward to trying it out next week!

While I've been busy sewing, Dad has also been hard at work on the crown or Tono. This is the circle at the top of the yurt that all of the roof poles attach to and where light shines down in a lovely fashion which is part of what makes a yurt so awesome. Also, it is where a chimney will come out if we end up spending a winter in there. The pictures below show Dad drilling holes at a 32 degree angle for the roof poles using a wooden jig that he made and the top part of the crown that will attach to the piece he is drilling. Spacing the holes was a bit tricky so we ended up with one more than we should have, but no worries! We'll just add another rafter. Yurts are so forgiving.

In the name of full disclosure I feel that I have to add a note stating that I have not spent every minute of my time working on the yurt (oh, the guilt!). I also spent a day at my aunt Robin's and she taught my aunt Wendy and I the art of Japanese braiding called Kumihimo. Now I am super excited for the Japanese-Mongolian fusion that will be our yurt decorated with beautiful braids!! Not to mention all of the great gift possibilities...

And, Mom also took the time on Tuesday to teach me how to make a ruffly nuno felt scarf. Not sure I can really link this to the yurt except to say that I will be a very stylishly dressed occupant of a yurt.

I forgot how tiring working in the cold can be. At first, I was feeling very wimpy for being exhausted after a day spent using a power drill, but then Mom reminded me that my body is working hard just to keep warm all day (thanks Mom!). It is similar to that wonderful dreamy exhaustion that I always attribute to evenings after a day of downhill skiing, but even better because I know that I have gotten some really good work done. This week, that "really good work" was getting the platform done!

On Tuesday, Dad and I drove down to Varney and Smith's in Lisbon, NH (but basically in Littleton) to pick up the dense pack cellulose blower, a bunch of cellulose, and some insulweb fabric. The insulweb (which it turns out is pretty much exactly the same thing as agricultural fabric, or row cover) got stapled to the uncovered side of each platform piece (as shown below) so as to create a cavity that we could fill with insulation.

When one is attempting to install "dense pack" cellulose the idea is to pack in about 3.5lbs per cubic foot. The blower (big blue box shown above) didn't have any kind of button labelled "3.5lbs per cubic foot" and also didn't come with any kind of manual so Jean-Paul called the company to find out if there was anything special that we needed to do to make it do "dense pack" as opposed to something else. They said to just start it one third of the way open and see how that goes... Our best bet for something that could be "one third of the way open" was a bright orange metal piece toward the base of the machine that could slide in and out so we went with that.

Of course, that really only determined the rate at which the cellulose was leaving the machine and the only measure of how much we were actually getting into our platform was the "pressing down" measure. In other words, press down on it and see if it feels full enough. All a bit vague really.BUT, we did it!

Then we just had to put the final pieces of plywood over the top of the cellulose to seal it all in and voila! A yurt platform! Well, at least the segments for a platform. We will put it all together when we get ready to put up the yurt.

Speaking of which, in the midst of finishing up the platform we have also been making progress on our wall sections. This is where a part of my brain that has been relatively unused for the past 10 years or so was put to the test. In "The Complete Yurt Handbook" (which we have been using for much of our design) the wall sections for a 16 foot yurt are only 5 feet high. We envisioned much head bruising as a result of not stooping down quite far enough to get in the door so we decided to raise our walls to 7 feet. This meant not only longer full-length strips of wood, but also a different number of full-length strips and all different measurements for the shorter lengths as well. After much trigonometry and graphing we finally came up with some approximate measurements to test out. In the pictures below you can see how we laid out the lattice in order to check and see which strips needed to be longer or shorter.

Then we made a full cut list and on Thursday I was able to get all of the strips cut out. Now they just need to be drilled and then let the assembling begin!

With only one week left in January, it is looking like we won't quite finish this up by the end of the month, but we are getting close. With warmer temperatures forecast for Monday and Tuesday this week we should be able to get quite a bit done before JP heads to California for work. Now that our canvas has arrived (just yesterday!!) I will get that started next weekend and then hopefully we can set everything up when he gets back so that we can fit the canvas and put the finishing touches on our future home. Enjoy the winter weather everyone! -Jericho

Over the last week we've gotten a whole lot done on the yurt - in fact, the platform is almost completely done.

In the last post, Jericho mentioned we're building 13 "pie pieces" to use as the yurt platform. Here's a visual aid to help explain that:

We made twelve of these out of twelve sheets of plywood. They're eight feet long and four feet wide at the base. Jericho used a circular saw and a track to cut triangles out of the plywood:

Then we screwed 1x4s onto the edges, and a couple more pieces in the middle to provide additional support:

After cutting a triangle out of a piece of plywood, there are two pieces left that can be combined into another triangle of the same size. We'll use those pieces to cover the opposite (bottom) side of each pie piece.

Twelve of these don't quite make a complete platform, though. We need one more, but it doesn't come out to be the same size as the others. To determine how big to make the last piece, we loaded up the first twelve on Jim's truck and brought them to Newark school's multipurpose room (it's not just a gym!):

At the school, we set up the platform and measured the size of the gap:

Then we loaded them all back up, brought them back to the garage, and assembled the final piece. Now we have all 13 pieces of the platform.

We still need to do a few things to each of these. We're insulating them with dense-pack cellulose, so we need to cover the open side, blow the cellulose in, and then screw on the remaining pieces of plywood. The plan is to take care of those steps this week - and then the platform will be completely done!

Cellulose seems like a pretty awesome insulation material. Dense-pack has an R-value around 3.8 per inch (we're doing 4 inches, so our floor will have an R-value of around 15, plus whatever minimal contribution the plywood makes), plus it remains effective at sub-freezing temperatures (whereas fiberglass loses some of its effectiveness). The cellulose is 100% recycled newspaper, it's much less expensive than most other kinds of insulation (partially because much, much less energy is needed to make it), and it's a lot safer to work with and be around than some of the alternatives. Plus, blowing it into the platform pieces requires playing with a big machine.

Concurrently with all of that, we've actually gotten a bit of snowfall and accumulation here in the Northeast Kingdom:

It actually feels like winter most days now. Of course, it was nice when it warmed up a bit, since most of the garage where we're working is unheated. Fortunately the next step of yurt construction mostly involves working in Jim's heated workshop, so we can appreciate the snow and not freeze our fingers.

We've also been working on the khana, cutting the lattice pieces and drilling holes in them.

The longest pieces are nine feet six inches and need nine holes drilled them (for a total number of holes somewhere around 500 - thank goodness for power tools). We diverged from the original plan a bit to make the walls seven feet tall, so we've had to figure out the number and size of these pieces ourselves (a task involving a lot of graph paper, calculators, and time). We're converging on a final design, so now we just have a lot more cutting and drilling to do.

We're here. We've started building. Phew.

I am a person who loves routine so the past couple of weeks of packing, moving, and celebrating left me craving a shift back to some kind of regular schedule. Of course, now that we make our own schedule we have to figure out what “regular” actually means. At the start of the week, I attempted to sit down and mark on the calendar what days we would order seed, work on the yurt, etc. etc., but it turns out I need to loosen up (surprise? I think not) for many reasons and most of all the fact that working on the yurt is somewhat dependent on the weather this time of year. For example, our first step (cutting rafters and platform pieces) required the use of my father's sawmill which will not run if it is too cold outside. Also, even if we were super tough and willing to cut and assemble yurt components in subzero temperatures I think that it might be dangerous to operate power tools when you can't feel your fingers.

Lucky for us, the weather warmed up a bit toward the end of the week and on Saturday we started cutting!!! Here are some pics of my dad and I (Jean-Paul was there too, but was the photographer so didn't get in any of the pictures. We'll have to trade places next time) milling and moving around 2x2's for the rafters and 1x4's for our yurt platform. Which reminds me that I should mention something about our yurt design (after the pictures).

So after much talk, sketching, and engineering brainpower (thanks Dad, Pat, and Dave!) we came up with a design for our yurt platform that involves 13 standalone 4” thick insulated pie pieces that we can transport apart and then put together to form a basically circular platform that is about 2” bigger than the yurt all the way around. We'll be sure to take lots of pictures once we start assembling the pie “slices” to you can get a better idea of what I mean.

As for the yurt itself, we decided to follow the instructions for a 16' diameter traditional Mongolian ger (their word for yurt) found in “The Complete Yurt Handbook” by Paul King. This seems like a good idea not only because it will be neat to make a yurt that is more traditional than the design we were originally thinking to follow, but also because it is kind of nice to have some basic guidelines to follow especially where measurements are concerned.

OK. Enough about business though. At the top of the post I alluded to the fact that the transition has been a little rocky (as all transitions are), but what I didn't mention is how it has also been really amazing and has made me once again reflect on how incredibly lucky we are. I mean, first of all here we are embarking on this incredible adventure which could never happen if not for the generosity and support of Jean-Paul's parents on whose land we will be housing our agricultural pursuits, and we get to spend our first month with my parents, sleeping in the little cabin that my Dad and I built (see below), taking over portions of their house for office, etc., and having a professional carpenter (Dad) spend his time (and his lumber) helping to build what will be our portable house. Can somebody pinch me please?

Plus, I know that I am biased because I grew up here, but Newark, VT is a really awesome place. Some friends of the family had their annual Twelfth Night party last night and each year this event ends up feeling like a reunion of sorts. Almost everyone there was a huge influence in my life, whether as friend, teacher, co-worker, or neighbor and at Twelfth Night we have a chance to reconnect, reminisce, and celebrate together. It always gives me an overwhelming sense of love and pride for the place that I came from and the people that made it so special. I guess, Twelfth Night, more than New Year's Day is when I find myself reflecting on past year's and thinking about the new one to come. And man, I am so psyched.