Bruce Sargent wrote me a while back about a yurt he had built and that he was in the process of putting a book together to tell his story and show others how he built a yurt for less than $1,000.
Here is what Bruce has to say about his book: For yurt lovers everywhere, we’ve created the newest and best book about making an ultra simple, hand-made, yurt-home.
Ten years ago, at Spirit Hollow, a shamanic school tucked back in the Taconic Mountains of Vermont, I fell in love with yurts. I was bedazzled by an exotic tent, with a framed door, wooden floor, diamond latticed walls and rays of rafters, arching out from a central sky light. I was dumbstruck by the complex beauty and warmth of a tent in Green Mountain winter.
Later as I worked in Boston, seventy hours per week, at a Fortune 500 company, making more money than I had at any point in my life, I daydreamed of yurts. I sketched yurts set beside a roaring brook, in Arlington, in Vermont’s Kelly Stand. I made calculations of the cost of acreage, cost of a bridge to cross the river, cost of a floor and the cost of a Pacific Yurt sixteen feet in diameter. I would calculate the month of next year that I could afford to actualize my dreams.
In the next year, down-sized by life, aching for simplicity, living in an attic room and tending an organic garden belonging to friends, my head was still full of yurts. Purchasing land and a Pacific Yurt was now out of the question. I obtained books by Len Charney, Paul King and Dan Kuehn and down loaded a paper by Charles Lokey, works that would comprise the books of my yurt bible. I studied with religious fervor. Could I build a yurt, bit by bit, over the next several years?
How hard could it to build a yurt? Could I drill six holes in an eight foot stick? Could I drill six holes in sixty-six, eight foot sticks? Could I tie a knot at two ends of a cord after threading the cord through holes that I drilled? I knew I could do all of this and build a yurt wall, and from this place, I believed I could take on the rest of it. But could I really?
“A year and a half to complete everything”, I thought, but could I design and construct something that would fit and hold together, would actually work? To my amazement and joy, within two months, I moved into a new sixteen foot diameter yurt, my “ger” (Mongolian for “home”) all at a cost of less than $1000 or about one tenth of t he cost of a Pacific Yurt. Baku, a Japanese friend of mine said, “It wasn’t that God helped you build a yurt. It’s more like you helped God build it.”
How this all happen, step by step, the ideas, the calculations, designs, construction ideas that led to the simplest plan possible, the good fortune and blind luck that completed my yurt -home is the story that follows. Check out his book and website at For Love Of Yurts.