The journey of building up a 6.5m yurt as our first event space.
When Julia joined and bought a yurt for her and Kali, she decided to buy a second yurt for us to build up as a common space. The process had several stages which progressed over 2024.
The first stage was levelling the ground, building up some retaining walls with stones and creating drainage ditches.
We had lots of help from various volunteers and especially Robert and Lila and their children, who stayed for several weeks to explore the project.
We decided to make the platform with gravel, recycled plywood pallets and 15mm OSB boards, as this worked out quite cheap.
We thankfully found a local builders yard who could deliver the gravel directly to the yurt site, which was our first test bringing a vehicle down the newly cleared track to the yurt area.
We again had help to spread out and level the gravel, first the bigger gravel, then the thinner ‘brita’ gravel on top to help get it more level.
We then laid out the pallets and did the jigsaw puzzle of cutting the shapes to match the circle of the yurt as close as possible while retaining the support of the pallets blocks.
Next was a similar jigsaw puzzle for the OSB boards.
We had four volunteers who helped with this and with clearing the mimosa around the back of the yurt area.
Once the platform was made, we built the yurt up with the help of Grim and Andrew, accompanied by Juniper who made her own sculpture. We used natural rope around the outside of the walls to hold them together and learned the hard way that while the natural rope looks nice and is more eco, this type of ropes loses the tension over a few days, so we replaced it with synthetic rope - one of several compromises about using yurts compared to natural building. Even so, they are great structures to set up at the early stages of a project and will provide a nice space for our next events!
Thank you everyone who helped create this space and we look forward to share beautiful moments in it with you :)
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