Now having to move in to my 16′ yurt (yurtlet) over Christmas holiday, and be out of my house before the New Year, I called upon some friends for an old-fashioned yurt raising. These are true friends too, it was cold and the shortest day of the year. We ended up working under lights because naturally, it took longer than expected.

I had my friend pickup the yurt with his large trailer from a shipping company that brought it from Oregon. I put the drip edge up that morning and cut the slots for the doors.

Some specs on the yurt:

• 16 foot
• Tall walls
• One standard door
• One french door (opposite standard door)
• 3 windows on each side (making it pretty much all windows)
• Snow & wind kit
• Tinted dome

As we all discovered, the snow & wind kit requires a LOT of extra time as you have to drill/screw all the braces to the studs (top & bottom) and cut them to length. That absorbed much more time than we expected. I believe they tell you that you can setup a yurt in 4 hours on their website - that might be true, if you don’t have the snow & wind kit. Not to mention several chiefs and few indians to direct (if you know what I mean).

What I didn’t realize until we were unfurling the side canvas in the dark was that they sent me the wrong canvas - built for a 16 footer, but only one window and one door. Luckily, they did send one of the sides as well, so the bad side we just cut to length and it worked fine. It turns out this was a gift in disquise because the windows are the weakest point for wind. And the window flaps are utterly useless. They block nothing except maybe your privacy and flap incessantly in the wind, no matter how much you try to tighten them down.

And, as I did years later, if you have big clamps, use these to secure the canvas to the door frame to make it really tight. No matter how many people we had struggling to hold it tight, the clamps worked much better.

The slideshow: