New Garden Architecture

As I finished up last time, I talked about building a new garden structure, a small yurt.  Well, I did it.

I spent several days trying to figure out what to do about a platform.  Most yurts these days seem to get up up on platforms, which is kind of funny.  The original design is of course Mongolian, even though there are plenty of variations.  But it's designed to be a house for nomads, yet it gets set up on a platform.  The platform is heavy, not mobile, and removes the mobility of the structure.

So in the end, I got a shovel and roughly leveled the ground where I wanted this thing so it's not 6" taller on one side than the other, then I brought in two cartloads of wood chips and raked them level.  Then the chickens un-leveled them.

I had originally built this thing about five years ago as a small smithy for my hand-cranked forge.  My wife came on the scene soon after that, and ever so gently convinced me that the back yard was a poor place for it.  (She was right.  It wouldn't have looked good there at our wedding.)  So I took it apart and stored the pieces.  And a yesterday I hauled out those pieces, which were basically two stock panels, 16 rafters, and a door frame. 

I marked out my site before leveling it, so I had a circle the size I knew I'd end up with.  Last time, I used quick links to tie the two panels together, overlapping by one 8" interval between verticals.  This time I cut off the end vertical on opposite ends of the panels, then I used 9" sections of old copper pipe as sleeves.  I should have had 13 of them but I only cut 10.  Oh well.  It works.

 

I bent the other ends around and tied them together temporarily with some thick soft wire I picked up at the dump a while back.  Then I set up the rafters.  One of them split and broke, but I figured 15 would be good enough.  The upper ends are cut so that they're vertical when in position.  The lower end has two vertical sections, the upper one 1/2" out from the lower, so that that short horizontal can bear on the top of the stock panel.  Both ends have holes drilled a few inches from the ends.

I started by wiring the upper end together and spreading the bottoms to make sort of a tipi.  Then I lifted one bottom end at a time and wired the ends to the top horizontal of the stock panels.  With three up, it looked like a pile of rafters hanging vertically from a tripod.  One by one they went up, and then I had to reposition all of them, one by one, so that they'd be equally spaced.  The way they come together at the top still isn't quite right, but I'll live with it.  It's good enough.

  And then I used heavy fence staples to attach the door frame.

I wrapped the wall in a few strips of old greenhouse plastic, and covered the top with some old white plastic tarp. There are a few holes in both of these that I'll want to tape up, and I need to arrange doors, but overall, I'm happy with it.  It'll be a place to store tools, get out of the mist and wind for a break, work on my computer in a quiet place (I haven't tested to see if wifi reaches.) and maybe take a nap out of the sun in the summer.  I'm still considering a floor.  If I get around to it, I'll lay down more plastic on the ground and then have a few sheets of plywood over that, as a hard clean surface, good for sorting seed packets and such.

I've got some shutters in the barn.  Maybe a pair of them will work as double doors to keep the chickens out.

UPDATE:

Last night I did as threatened and found some shutters in the barn.  They're 47" x 14", which is just right for the 48" x 29" opening.  They had half hinges already, so I drove in some large finish nails and then bent them up to serve as hinge pins.

 

This shot shows the fold in the roof tarp.  I'll probably need to tape that down somehow.

Here's a detail shot of a rafter butt:

And here's my lantern, which meant that I had more light than if I was just working with my flashlight in my mouth last night: