Megan De la Montagne wrote:Hi there!
This is my first post so I hope I do it right!
Calling out to other yurt dwellers: I have a 20' traditional Mongolia ger (yurt) coming in a couple of weeks and am going to make a strawbale and plywood platform. I'm looking for input from others who have made a strawbale platform on tips, tricks, what went right and what you wish you would have done if you did it over... I ordered 12 3/4 inch pine plywood boards (my partner thinks we will need 1 more but on a yurt forum someone else mentioned it took 11.5...) , and have 125 strawbales waiting under tarp. I will be placing the bales inside of a winter pool cover, then the plywood on top. Still open to suggestions for the outer ring of the platform, how to connect the boards securely and really any other input you may have! :)
This all sounds good generally but a couple notes after setting up a 20ft yurt on starwbales in North Eastern Ontario are:
-I only needed 80-90 starwbales for the base, although the extra 20 I bought were useful for making a vestibule by the door to keep snow from piling up around it.
-12 sheets of plywood will be enough but just barely so you cuts and layout will need to be precise, ordering and extra one will give you a bit of wiggle room.
-I made the strawbale base a couple inches smaller then the 20ft platform so the vertical plywood strips acted like a drip edge to keep the bales wrapped in tyvek dry.
-I used rachet straps to keep the bales tightly squeezed together as the compression gave it more stability.
-After cutting the plywood into a 20ft circle I added blocking underneath the plywood between the strapping holding it together so there was something to screw the out ring into, 12"strips of plywood were then attached vertically although 8" would have been plenty.
Also, what are your ingenious space saving tips and tricks? I'll be living in it full time with my partner and our toddler so being tight and organized as possible is a definitely a priority!
P.s. I'm on the south shore of Nova Scotia and would love to connect with others around here who live in yurts!
The biggest space saving trick I used was to raise my queen sized bed up 5ft so I could build a desk/work bench underneath. I built three walls, framed on 16" centers just like a normal load bearing wall and then cut 1/2" plywood an inch taller so the bedframe sat on top. A couple shelves built out of 2x4's doubled as storage and a way to climb up into bed. The peak of the yurt was 9.5ft so it was a cozy little nest up top and a usable, if slightly short for standing, space underneath (fine to sit and roll around on a chair though). It also meant I was sleeping in the warmest part of the yurt during the winter, there was a roughly 5-10C difference between the floor and upper area (less if the little overhead battery powered camping fan was running). Which was a very worthwhile purchase to balance the temps inside and keep heat from collecting/escaping through the top.
Burying a steel garbage can under the kitchen with a trap door cut to access it was a low cost and effective cold storage. Another one inside kept flour/dry goods safe from mice. A well organised kitchen counter make a bid difference, drawers and slides makes it easier to efficiently use a deep counter. Suspending my water jug from bamboo poles set horizontally between the central supports kept the water warm, gave me more counter space and created enough pressure for a simple plumbing system that drained into a bucket below. Finally saving the curved strips from cutting out the plywood deck made perfect shelves around the outside edge for spices and odds & sods.
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