In hot water

We were living in our yurt for almost six months exactly before we had hot water. I had previously been living without any running water what so ever, so I was just pleased to have a mighty 1,300 gallon rain water collection tank and a pump I did not have to manually operate. But once the hot water tank arrived there was no turning back.
We use a

 Bosch model GWH 1600 H

It is a tankless, on-demand hot water heater.  If I recall it came with the propane conversion kit included in the $599 price and shipping was only 10 bucks!  We are going into our fifth year and she is running strong!  It is a product I highly recommend to any home owner.  Proper water pressure ignites the pilot light, meaning it is not left on when the hot water is not being used, making it super safe.  It is really efficient as well.

Foundations

The site we chose to set up our yurt is relatively flat but covered with northwest natives such as salmon berry, evergreen huckleberry, ferns- all of which have tenacious root systems. In addition there were three alder trees, a small maple and a couple of other understory trees to cleared from the building site. I would say the process from forest to grid lines took about ten days of us both working as much as we could around our work schedules, friends helped out too.

Footing and Beams being stagged

The placement and digging out the footings was mostly done by Mr. and our friend in a day and I staged the beams along each of their runs. The righting of the posts and beams took another three days or so. The platform took longer than all of that combined. Our platform is 1 1/2 (1 1/4 true) tongue and groove plywood drilled down to 4x8 beams centered on 48" which rest on about 35 4x4 pressure treated posts on concrete pier pads. 2x6s run as cross supports perpendicular to the larger main beams. Follow that?
Being the third owners of our yurt, all of the lumber was purchased used, so it came cut to length. This was a good and bad thing- we didn't have to make any cuts but we had to be careful to use the right pieces in the right places. This really came to be true when it was time to lay down the plywood.  Each piece of plywood was labeled with an elaborate coding system which placed it at the correct location within the circle. This was created by the second owners of the yurt after they had trouble figuring out the reassembly configuration. Sadly they had lost the map that unlocked someones attempt to grid a circle.  Where is the secret decoder pen?!
In the end we figured it out! See below...

Yurt platform, near completion

If i had to do it over again, i have quickly said that i would pour a radiant heat concrete slab. The fiberglass insulation we installed has been nearly destroyed by woodland rodents who find it to be excellent nesting material. Unfortunately, the same is true for the foam type of insulation and any chicken wire attempts have proven to simply provide them with stout foundations for their own home building attempts. So suggestions are welcomed!
So yes, the floors get cold and radiant heat would be so cool (errr, not so cool...). However, there are a few things about our current set up i would really miss!
- the pier footing design allowed for quick set up. Once we set up a line grid and figured out their spacing, land clearing could be most concentrated to where the footings needed to be.
- we were able to dig out the ground below one half of the platform to allow extra space for our 1,300 gallon water tank
- we have a really cool recycling step coming up from our kitchen which automatically shoots the glass, cans, and paper out to bins stored below the yurt.
- the dog loves to den up under the shallow part of the platform on really wet or hot days
-the elevated deck out back gives a great perspective on the back yard
-the elevated platform allowed us to build a bathhouse on the same level as the yurt with room below it for the composting unit of our toilet.
-the feeling of floating in the woods.

Coffee

It's 6:40. The alarm is going off and there is no snooze on this model. It doesn't go off at exactly the same time every morning but the tune is the same: bored, awake baby. Mr. crawls out from our den of warm blankets, down from the sleeping loft into the cold yurt. He gets Jr. out from bed and i meet them with a blanket. Jr and I go to the couch to cuddle with the dog while Mr. begins to wake up the yurt.
First things first, the tea kettle is filled from our potable water urn and placed on the propane stove to heat up. The fire which heats us has gone cold at some point during the night prior, so out to the wood pile Mr. goes for his first armful of wood for the day. He returns inside and within minutes a blazing fire fills the yurt with the comforting smells of the wood stove. About that time, the kettle whistles and he returns to the kitchen. Meanwhile the inverter has been turned on and the coffee beans have been ground. Our coffee grinder is the only appliance we use in our house on a daily basis. It draws a good load from the battery banks but it is one we consider well worth it!

Slowly the hot water is poured over our freshly ground coffee beans. The Vashon Island Coffee Roasterie  hand roasts small batches of beans to perfection. It is a life blood in this family!

12 volt cooking means that we don't have kitchen equipment that requires long term heating of a hot plate or coil. We have no toaster (we use the wood stove) we have no conventional coffee maker (we hand pour into a chemex coffee maker)-for the best coffee in the world!

We consider these differences from most kitchens to be of little inconvenience. Hand poured coffee is the sweetest gift the morning can deliver. A very small amount of water is initially poured over the freshly ground beans. The pile of grounds increases in volume, a reaction known to those who care as "blooming". As the grinds bloom, more water is slowly added in as constant of a stream as possible. Sometimes a baby darting for the dog's water bowl or towards the wood stove demands one put down the water kettle and attend to other more pressing things!

Soon my hand made mug is full of hot, deliciousness and i sip it next to the fire. Slowly I come to life as Jr. sits in his chair munching down bananas, eggs, and toast.

I gotta hand it to Mr.- he gets this place running every day in a matter of such efficiency which I am constantly taken aback by. I sure do love him!

Change

As we pull out of our third winter in the yurt, I find myself challenged by where i thought we would be at this time and where we actually are. Three or so years ago we decided the yurt would be a three year plan in order to explore yet another non-traditional home and save money to begin building our house which i envisioned we would raise our family in.
In actuality, there is still no house and little savings. Our son is fourteen months old.
The yurt feels smaller at times but at other times it seems to swell with our family, holding all of our needs as one. Some times it is hard when I find myself comparing my life to the standard of living so many of our friends and family are accustomed to. Compared to the majority of the world we live in luxury. And compared to many north americans we live life that is closer to the rhythms of the earth. I appreciate that.

The site where our yurt now stands.

I try to remind myself of that when i am feeling down on our progress. Four years ago, none of this was here.
 We were living in a 50 sq ft cabin with a battery that my husband brought in from his truck each night which we used to run a fan on our propane dickenson heater and the single twelve volt light we used at night. No running water, no kitchen to speak of.

The yurt entrance, summer 2008.

Now in a space that was covered with dense NW foret, we have carved out a small space for ourselves and are able to live with so much less than most others.

 I often recall to myself the saying i was so fond of in college: live simply so others may simply live.

Oh, the houses we live in...

When I was little, I remember one of my favorite books was about the houses we live in around the world.

Come Over to My House by Theo LeSieg as sold on amazon.com

 Alternative living options have always appealed to me. Even as a child I preferred to sleep in my cardboard-box castles, and under the stars, over my proper bed. Since moving out of my parents home, I have inhabited a dorm room, an apartment, a conventional duplex, a church which was converted into a home, a century-old craftsman home, my tent, a teepee, a treehouse, a 50 square foot cabin- which I shared with my then fiance'. Now I live in a yurt with my husband, our dog, and our four month old son.

Looking back at my childhood fascination with the living accommodations in other parts of the world-- I recall being more enamored by the stilt huts of the south pacific than the swanky flats of europe-- I suppose it is not so strange that I have chosen to live in some what of an array of alternative living situations.

Upon our engagement, while sharing the 50 square foot cabin, my husband and I began to explore our options for the next step of our living situation.

 Perhaps I should jump back just a bit and explain how we came to be in the "cabin" in the first place. When I first met my husband, ten years ago, he had just purchased an acre of wooded land. It is lush with large douglas firs, western red cedars, and maple trees, with a dense understory. However, the land came without water, sewer or power hook-ups. Being young and poor, the land was never developed. But soon a tee pee was put up and various boys stayed there for a number of years. Then came the tree house project, and years later an idea to expand the tree house to include a basement that would have a small kitchen and wood stove. The whole thing never quite came together and by the time the ground floor was complete, we realized the tree house had gone beyond the state that we wanted to inhabit (we had been away for a couple of years and the local wood rats found the place to be quite to their liking...). So down came the tree house bit by bit and we were left with a small cabin in the dark woods, with out power, water, or a toilet. Obviously, as much as I loved by fiance', there was no way I was going to stay in that place any longer than I had to. We ended up staying there through a summer and one (very wet) winter.

During that winter, we began to think of other options for a home on the property. We have always wanted to build, but without cash in the bank it seemed impossible. A chance came up to purchase our friends yurt, and it seemed too good to be true. We took it.