Recent content by Dan R-M

Plenty of talk about woodstoves here, and well warranted, but how about [electric or gas] cooking stoves? In trying to make the most of our space, and use fewer resources, we've been thinking about getting a narrower-than-standard stove/oven. Standard is 30" wide, and they come bigger, too...

After abandoning our immediate hopes for a yurt I have been going whole hog into renovating the beat-up house on our property. In the process of envisioning our ideal living space, my wife and I are trying to make choices that limit our resource footprint while expanding our quality of life. As...

A friend is looking at Yurts of America as a prospective local supplier. Anyone here had any experience with them?

After reading Jeff's post on his platform I'm inspired to solicit some opinions on platform finishing. We've got a nicely-weathered platform out there (the "heavy duty tarp" has outlived its water-repelling lifetime) and my plan is to take a few days before setting up the new yurt to 1) sand...

We were just assuming we'd put our yurt up on the old yurt's site, not worry too much about any official status, and fly under that radar. Then an attorney friend told us he was worrying for us, and wondered if we'd like him to do some brief research into was is legal in our locality and...

As we get closer to a new yurt we're doing serious thinking about how much power we want to consume. At this point we're thinking about only enough to have a little light and computer charging capability, maybe not even that. I want a cross-section of what my fellow yurtists do.

Among many other things, I'm thinking about how big a loft I can get away with. I'm wrestling with the balance of maximizing space without sacrificing ventilation (or some other factor I haven't thought of). We're going to get a Colorado or Pacific yurt to go with our 20' platform. Going with...

Piggybacking on Yurtfolk's question here and Woodyrock's post here, I wonder if there are any general thoughts regarding size, or make and model, of woodstoves in a permanent yurt when winters get down and stay down below freezing regularly. (We don't usually get below 0, but we do regularly...

Or just a creatively bad idea? I'm thinking about the concept of putting a woodstove under a loft in our yurt design. That way, if it were really cold we could curtain the loft area in for sleeping and not worry about heating the whole space. Assuming a good amount of head space, say 6...

Hey all. I'm going to start a few threads at once, since we're getting much closer to buying another yurt. This one's about wind. I notice there are a few companies (or maybe just Pacific and Colorado) that have high wind kits available, and I need a little perspective on this point. What...

I'm putting this out there 'cause we're thinking again of making yurt livin' our first priority in getting over to the garden site. Put us down as serious flip-floppers. And we're trying to think this through as well as possible before committing to getting a real, honest to goodness, solid...

So, say you've got a yurt platform that, for whatever reason, doesn't have a yurt sitting on it. How do you protect it? My strategy was to make a perfunctory roof out of rafters and a tarp, weighing down the tarp to the ground with cinder blocks and this and that. I should have taken off the...

So here we go. A new idea for me. How about straw-bale walls? What kind of roof might I put on it? The purpose is two-fold. 1) I want the yurt platform to be used (for a yurt), and 2) we're considering doing some straw-baling on the house, and this would give us some great practice on a...

Here are a few choice images, now that the event is more than a week behind me. For those with more experience these might show something obvious that I'm missing. And they are certainly gruesome and sensational, in yurt terms, so that alone is a good reason to post them :) The collapse...

Well, for our yurt, at least. In the strong winds last night (which didn't seem as strong as previous winds) part of it collapsed. Well, all of it I guess, but a quarter to a third of the wall bent in and down. Bad timing, though it could have been worse. We could have been living in it. I...