I givez u helpz...

... u givez me cheezburgerz?



It must be said: You are not really helpful, little cat. Rather the contrary...


But at least you're warm and furry.

New progress

We are really on the last stretch now.
We bought some truck tarp and started putting together our roof.


Started working on the roofpoles:




And on the lightring: The round window in the middle of the roof that will also hold the whole construction together.



It's about time we got somewhere. I have to add a layer of clothes every day we spend out there and soon I am gonna look like the Michelin man and who could build a yurt dressed like that? ;o)

Toasty warm!

Well, it didn't really heat up our open air workspace yesterday, but at least we had a possibility to warm up our fingers and butts from time to time. :o)

And or course we hope that it will keep our yurt toasty warm.

Our baby

spot the difference

So close!

We are so close now, our noses were itchy all weekend! :o)
The second trellis is halfway done:



And with the greatest help ever we started working on this:


It's the lightring, the key element of the yurt. It will sit at the top of the roof and serve as a window, whilst holding everything together at the same time.


Aaaand: On Monday we got sooo close to finishing the floor! Everything is set up and doublechecked now, and it really looks like it is working. We just couldn't put all the pieces together because it got too dark.


So now we are hoping for a few more dry days next weekend and then if the Gods allowe we'll have only parts to work on that are not so dependent on the weather. I also have holidays for two weeks from next week on, time to really work continuously again.
Sooo excited!!

Pics II: Other stuff

We are actually sometimes having fun on the site... ;o)



The glorious day when we finished the first trellis!

Pics I:The story of the floor

Pictures!!! :o)
Looking through them I realised how much work we've actually already done, and that feels pretty good.
So here are some photos of the first attempt to put up the floor, how we put bitumen paper on all the parts, and our new solution to make it easier. It's a ring that sits on top of the inner posts so it doesn't matter where those posts are positioned. It seems to work pretty well and we've got half of them done in half an afternoon already.

Up and up and dooooooown

I think some years from now I will say that the yurt project taught me a lot about life and so on and so on. But for now, it is just like a rollercoasterride, really uncontrollable and with lots of ups but what makes the biggest impressions are always the downs...

We had such a good weekend, with five (!) friends coming over to help put up the floor on saturday, and two spontaneous helpers on sunday that made progress so much faster than we had ever experienced it before.

Then, on sunday evening, when we wanted to put in the last posts of the floor, we realised that the wedge there was too small and the floorboards would overlap about ten centimeters. What a bummer!

There had to be a mistake somewhere. But where was it? And how much work would it be to correct it? We figured, rather unenthousiastically, that we would have to take out and move about eight posts to fix it, but decided to leave it with that and think about it again the day after.

That was a good decision for I don't know if we would have made it home if we had found out the whole truth that evening.

Today we checked everything again and found the error. We had miscalculated the position of the inner posts. They were off by 2.5 centimeters - all of them.

Imagine sitting on the results of seven people working for a good day and a half as it dawns on you that all that work had to be undone and restarted.
I felt like crying.

The thing is, we are really quite behind on our schedule. We are afraid of winter. And we are tired, we want to get.it.done.
And that of course causes mistakes such as this one.

So there we were, really frustrated, sad and angry at ourselves. We took out and put away all the posts and beams we had mounted on saturday and then went home early.

We will try and come up with a better solution for mounting the floor so it gets exact. And we will work on other things for a while to rest our minds and then make a new beginning.

Thanks again to all the people who helped, we are so sorry we can't give you better news, but that your help surely wasn't in vain and we really, really appreciate it!!

(On a side note: I took some photos with Trev's old cam, but the old laptop here doesn't recognise it, so I'll upload them as soon as I have the possibility. )

Unhappy words and not so many pictures

We have been working our asses off to get everything ready for next monday, when the cows will be back. Besides, we try not to get fired at our jobs, get enough sleep and keep up whatever there must be done for our social survival. To shorten this explanation, just read: It's hard.
It's tiring, and we are both torn between our enthousiasm and the greatness of seeing something emerge from under our hands and our growing wish to just get it done and have time and energy to concentrate on other things in our lives again.

Blogger is a bitch with pictures again, these three is all it wanted to give me, so you only get a little sneak peak of how we took the tipi down,


Put the very first stake in the ground


and actually finished all pieces for the floor and brought them up to the site.


The floor only needs tarping now and hopefully the weathergods and some friends will help Trev put in all the stakes this weekend.

I am gonna be away on another firebird excoursion which is not so handy this time I have to admit, I'd much rather stay and make sure everything goes ok. (Apart from the fact that the weather is again as shitty as can be... oO)

More pictures and happier words hopefully next week.

Slow progress

It has been an incredibly busy week, with studying and starting a new job and meetings and still some building. We did not make as much progress as we hoped we would, due to time and health issues. But we're grinding our teeth and holding on.
With a little help from our friends.

A week of yurt

As you can see on my facebookaccount and this blog, pretty much everything in our lives apart from the yurt has been put on hold this week.
We've been working on it every day and we made a lot of progress.
All the floor pieces are finished and the bamboo is ready for drilling and joining.

Next week we want to finish all the details on the floor and maybe even put it up already. There's still lots of small things that have to get done for that. We are currently marking up the exact measurements of the pieces. Then we need to cut them out and sand them neatly.
We started cutting some really long planks in half and glueing them on top of each other for making strong main supports.
And we still need to get rope and stakes for the final design, and pitch to protect the wood from humidity.

Then at the same time, as soon as we've found the right cord we'll start drilling holes into the bamboo and tying the trellises together.

But that's all plans for next week. This weekend we are taking a much needed break because we're both really exhausted from having such full heads all week. Besides, yesterday was a pretty crappy day when everything went wrong, our tools didn't work the way we wanted, I realised that my photocamera is broken, and I got a really bad wasp sting that is driving me crazy.

Go to Lia's blog for some pictures.

Have a nice weekend!

Ups and downs of the carpenter's life

Luckily, there are a lot more ups than downs, as far as I can see.

Lots of great friends who came around to help and made work go so fast.


The new baby:

The ten pieces of the inner ring for the floor are finished. That's about half the work done. (The creature next to it is yaga in her onion look ^^)

Downs surely are the crappy weather, that makes working space very limited and lots of clothing layers necessary.
Further on: A leaky tipi that made me move my sleeping stuff in the stable in the middle of the night.

Half good half bad is the fact that we really need to get the floor finished in two weeks, because then the stable will be occupied by the cows again and there will be no place to store the wood. That puts a lot of pressure on us, especially since this is the last week of my holidays, but it also lets us get tons of work done.

The fascination of powertools

Or why we're still going on. Well, it's hard work but who could resist electric screwdrivers, drills and sanders? And we got rewarded:




The first of thirty pieces of our floor. Yay!
We are gonna stay out on the site this weekend, so I'll be tuning back in on monday or tuesday, hopefully to show a lot of progress, since there are many helping hands around these days!

Little green house: Cleaning

It was a rainy day and a welcome excuse to stay home and recover from the nasty cold. So I have been cleaning a bit.

I got really unnerved by our ancient vacuumer which is maybe less efficient than a broom. And, I thought, a broom would not only be cleaner, it would also be greener, because it is powered by your own muscles. Well, vacuumers are a very handy thing if they work right, I won't deny.

But what other cleaning products are you using that could be substituted with something greener, or even just cancelled from the list?

I use these things for cleaning: Water, Vinegar, baking soda, a sponge, a microfiber cloth, a normal cloth and muscle power.

From floors to watercookers to the bathroom I clean everything with vinegar. The smell evaporates quickly, and if you want you can put a piece of fresh vanilla or some lemon juice in your cleaning vinegar to scent it.

Everything that needs an extra boost, like the toilet, a sticky stain or a blocked drain I treat with baking soda. Right, that's the stuff you buy at the grocery store (you can get it at the pharmacy in bigger amounts). Just pour some soda on the questionable area, fizz with a bit of vinegar and let it soak for a while. The rest is scrubbing and rinsing.

There is more greenery going on. I am thinking about plastic *very* hard these days, and I am planning on greening my washing. Stay tuned. ;o)

Bam-booh!!

Lia and me drove to Aargau yesterday to get 400 sticks of bamboo, up to 3m long. They didn't quite fit in the car, but we managed to pack them with minimal sticking out in the back (not like the guys from the selling place...). The way back was really uncomfortable for Lia because she had to squeeze into the passenger seat with its back turned halfway down, and pulled all the way to the front... and it took us so long, since we couldn't use the highways. But finally we got there and picked up jana.
The rest of the afternoon we girls worked away on all that bamboo, measuring, cutting and smoothing, whilst Trev continued with the floor. It was a very pleasant way of working, repetitive and satisfying. A bit like knitting but with mor co-working. :o)







The not so pleasant thing was that I had caught a cold the other day and was feeling more and more feverish as time went on. So today I am staying at home and trying to get better, hoping that we can continue tomorrow and on the weekend, pray the weather gods allow!