Every time I start to think about the kind of house I would like to own one day, the idea of living in a yurt keeps coming up. I can picture myself in a 20 or 30 ft diameter yurt sitting up on a raised deck, somewhere in Colorado or New Mexico, surrounded by beautiful views and possibly a river. After many years of cutting back and rearranging my thinking, I have very minimal needs for my life – basically give me a roof over my head and food on the table, a reliable vehicle, an internet connection, a cell phone, my books, and maybe a few channels on the TV, and I would be a pretty happy camper. I don’t collect anything, hoard “stuff”, or have much need for things that don’t serve a purpose, so my storage needs are minimal at best. I imagine it looking something like this, from the Colorado Yurt Company’s website:
Wouldn’t that just be pretty cool? Nice and quiet, pitch black at night, and incredibly simple to both live in and also to maintain. I stayed in a yurt up near Big Sur, CA for a week and had an amazing time. Even though it was cold & wet outside, it was nice and toasty inside – and very home-y to boot. I just felt at ease while staying in the yurt.
Living in a yurt would certainly require you to minimize clutter and maximize organization, two things that I am getting very good at. It wouldn’t be like living in a tent, as you could have windows, heat, plumbing, snow and wind-load tops and sides, and you put them almost anywhere. Never mind the price – a fully-loaded 30 foot diameter yurt (which is huge, lest you think it isn’t – it’s giant inside), configured as I would want it for this area, would only run me a little under $16,000. Trying getting what amounts to a 900 square foot house for that much!
Find some land, drill a well, set up a few solar panels and boom – a very nice house for not too much money at all. Ditch most of the stuff I still am holding on to for some reason, pack up the cat and the computer, and move into a yurt near the mountains and a river. Sounds lovely and so very much like the simple and slow life I am after for myself…all things considered, who wouldn’t want to live like this:
Hmmm…time to make a dream a reality? Have you ever wanted to live in a yurt? Do you already? I would love to hear from you about it!
I would suggest talking to the people at Colorado Yurts or another yurt maker, to design/order a yurt that matches your climate. Good luck!
I am moving my vegetable farming operation from a dairy farm to a vacant 18 acre parcel owned by a friend. While I have permission from the landowner to put up any living structure I choose, I have decided on a 30′ yurt. Because I don’t own the land, it doesn’t make sense to build a house…and a mobile home would be fine, but a yurt is better by far. I’m still in the pre-planning stages and don’t know what obstacles I’ll hit with the township/zoning/etc, but here’s the plan: a 30′ yurt from Blue Ridge Yurts in Floyd, VA (I live in PA) with 10′ walls so we can build a roomy loft. We’ll run our gray water to a dry well and have a composting toilet so there’s no need for a septic. Eventually, we plan to add on 1 or 2 more smaller yurts as “bedrooms.” We’ll heat with a corn stove (burns cleaner and more efficiently than wood in my experience) with portable, electric quartz-infrared heaters at backup. Wish me luck!
i want to live in a yurt but my idea would be even simpler than that. its a dream really but i dont know if i will ever accomplish it the way i want to. the kind of yurt living i would want would probably be quite hard as i would have no plumbing or most of the modern things. i would want internet but thats easy. i think there are wifi adapters you can get and get internet anywhere, you just have to pay a bill but thats ok. and solar panels could solve the problem of power i think although thats kind of a long shot. i would like a yurt that i can easily move by myself but on every site i go to it says that a good sized and good quality yurt needs at least 2 ppl setting it up. i wonder though, if its possible to live alone in a yurt and be able to set up and move it by myself. but one that i could live in all year around.
yeah im going for the most simple nomadic kind of yurt, but so far this dream seems to be out of reach for many reasons.