Paring life back to the music

In the convergence of tiny houses around the world, the humble round house covered with canvas is still holding strong. The Mongolian yurt seems to be a more quiet, simple way to live a tiny life and that is reflected elegantly in the home of Kevin and Annie. The couple (along with their dogs, Henry and Holly) have been living in a 20-foot, off-grid yurt in Vermont since 2016.

That Yurt is a 20-foot latticed yurt built on a platform designed by Pacific Yurts, but the couple purchased their yurt from Two Girls Farm & Yurts in New Hampshire. The That Yurt blog and newsletter features life in the yurt, maple syrup harvesting and garden tips, life without electricity and indoor plumbing, and a peek into a life far from traditional large living.

Kevin was so kind to give us a little more insight into life in That Yurt:

Where is your yurt located? On private or shared land? Tell us a little about the location situation and why you chose it.

Our yurt is nestled in a little clearing on a 75-acre parcel in southeastern Vermont. We’re about 200 yards from the (dirt) road, so most of the wooded acreage is back and around us; between us and the road is a small field, a creek (I guess a “brook” as they call them up around here), and another small field. We’re close enough to the road that we can hear tires when a truck goes by, but far enough that you can’t see the yurt from the road. We’re about four miles from town.

The land we’re on is owned by a friend. We pay “rent” in that we pay the difference in extra property tax that was added when we put a yurt on the land, thus adding to the “value” of the property. I say little and boy do I mean little (a few hundred dollars a year). Our friend was nice enough to offer some land when they heard we were considering buying land to put a yurt on. The agreement is that we pay this difference in tax and are here only temporarily, and when we leave it’s as if we were never here (minus a few trees we borrowed for cordwood).

We liked the spot initially because it is surrounded by trees, and thus sheltered from wind. As well, it provides a fair degree of privacy—you wouldn’t know there’s a yurt up here unless you mosey by on a stroll through the woods. Also important was access to water. There is an established springhouse on the property, and though it’s a distance away, we were able to run a hose from the spring into our clearing, so we only have to haul water about 150 feet.

Why did you choose a yurt? Did you look into other tiny house options?

We did indeed look into other tiny house options. For years we’ve been interested in alternative living situations and in sustainable (or more sustainable, since that’s all relative and idealistic in modern civilization) ways of living. 

After moving to Vermont in 2014 we rented an apartment for two years, with our eyes constantly on the woods. (I feel like the dream of “homesteading” is particularly strong in the visual, vicarious, Instagram-fueled Millennial generation, and I don’t pretend that we’re an exception. We watched and continue to watch those feeds as much as the next. I also don’t pretend that we’re “homesteading”—that takes a level of effort and energy and dedication and, quite frankly, startup capital that we are not in a position to invest.) 

Initially we were looking at buying a house or cabin, an established place to realize this desire of a more sustainable lifestyle. Perhaps “sustainable” is the wrong way to describe what we desire; maybe it is the desire to live more simply, to cut out a lot of the noise in an attempt to pare life back to the music.

I digress. Yes, we explored many options after deciding that we wanted to live more simply. And we had models that informed our ultimate vision. We had met people over the years who lived in off-grid cabins and strawbale houses, in isolation and in communal situations; we also met people over the years who lived on grid in cities like Baltimore and still displayed a degree of intentionality in their everyday life that would put many environmentalists in Vermont to shame. So with all these models we knew that there was not just a single way to live simply and live intentionally.

So at first we were exploring options in buying a house, and gradually (fiscal realities being what they are) came to consider buying land and putting a tiny house on it. Turns out, land is expensive around here. The journey to our ultimate decision of a yurt was a slightly circumstantial one, in retrospect. We visited a friend in Maine who happened to have a yurt, and so opened up that possibility in our minds. And we were introduced to some now-friends who had just built a Coperwaithe-style wooden, permanent yurt. 

Seeing yurts in action kind of made us fall in love with them. The spaces inside yurts are inviting, and the lack of right angles demands some creativity and personalization in design. This highly personalized, made-to-suit living space was attractive, and once we dug into our options and found Two Girls Farm & Yurts in New Hampshire (about an hour away from us) we were sold on the idea. So then we were looking for land to buy on which to put a yurt, and our friend presented us with this very generous situation, so we pulled the trigger.

Tell us about the outhouse and bathroom setup. Also a little about the kitchen setup.

The outhouse was, for obvious reasons, the very first thing we built after the yurt. It’s a simple affair, which is maybe redundant when talking about outhouses. It’s a 4’x4’ room with a bench. The bench has a hole in it, and a toilet seat to sit on, and underneath the bench is a five gallon bucket for our waste. We then empty the bucket into our compost bins, cover with straw, and repeat. It’s the “humanure” system in action. (The book for reference is the “Humanure Handbook”.) It’s based on the premise that we as a civilization are making a grand mistake in treating our excrement in chemical treatment plants, when it could be recycled as excellent fertilizer; and on the practical reality that a healthy compost pile can create enough heat to kill the pathogens that would otherwise make a human waste pile a health risk. Win-win and reduce the waste stream.

The kitchen is, at the risk of tooting our own horns, so lovely. We made the countertops out of old schoolhouse tables—they are basically just giant butcher blocks, which we finished with eco-friendly, whey-based finish from a Vermont company. The oven/range is pulled from an RV. We found it on Craigslist. It has four stovetop burners and an oven large enough for a single casserole dish (i.e., it’s big enough to feed us but we couldn’t cook a Thanksgiving turkey in there). It’s fueled by a standard, grill-size propane tank, which needs refilling every few months. We cut a hole in one countertop for the sink, which is a standard issue bar sink, and this drains out into a greywater hole just outside. I am embarrassed to admit that we started the project of getting “running” water inside but have not finished it in three years. We’ve gotten so far as to install a foot-pump (a marine pump used in boat galleys) that operates as a siphon and can send water from a tub up into the sink, but have just never completed the “faucet” aspect of it. When we do dishes we warm a pot of water (on the woodstove in winter and on the stove in summer) and just dump it in. Our drinking water comes from a ceramic gravity water filter.

A cheeky response: This question is the most challenging thing about living in a yurt! We definitely field it often. I think it arises from the perception that “alternative” ways of living are necessarily challenging when compared to the status quo, which, in our experience at least, isn’t the case. I suppose it requires a definition of what a challenge is. If hauling water and then filtering it is considered challenging compared to turning a faucet, then living in a yurt has all sorts of challenges! We don’t flush a toilet; we fill a bucket and then dump it out. We don’t have an endless supply of grid power; we have to be conscious of our energy usage and conscious of the weather forecast for cloud cover. But I think one of the main lessons we’ve learned in our yurt-time is how adaptable people are: humans can get used to anything. (For better or worse—sometimes the things people get used to and accept as normal are quite detrimental to themselves or to others or to the world around them. Again I digress.) Hauling water used to feel like a chore when we first moved here; now it’s simply how we get water.

That said, if pressed I would say the most challenging thing (to us) about living in a yurt is our current lack of refrigeration. We’re not able to keep fresh produce or leftovers for very long, so we end up going to the local food co-op every day or every other day. But this too is not a challenge about living in a yurt, per se, it’s simply a challenge we haven’t yet felt the need to address by expanding our solar setup and battery bank. We could, for maybe $1,200 we recently napkin-estimated, have the panels and batteries and fridge to have refrigeration.

The most rewarding things about living in a yurt are likely those things you’d expect us to say: we are intimately affected by the seasonal cycles of nature and the world around us, and intimately connected to the goings-on just outside our door. We listen to the owls as we fall asleep (sometimes they keep us awake they’re so loud—chalk that up under “challenges,” maybe). We watch the unfurling of leaves in the spring. We keep track of when the sap starts running so we can make syrup. We’re mindful of frost dates for the garden. And on and on.

And sometimes this intimate connection is less than ideal. We had a mouse problem for a while, and were trapping a mouse literally every night. It was an ongoing and losing battle. But then one day over the winter we spotted an ermine, which are known for being voracious hunters. Our mouse problem disappeared in several days. That beautiful and vicious weasel decimated them, and we haven’t seen a mouse since. Experiences like this, and experiences bigger and smaller, remind us of what happens out there, and it’s simply amazing being so close and attuned to it.

What advice do you have for anyone else looking to move into a yurt? Is there anything you would differently?

Sharing such a small space with another human and two large dogs has been significantly easier than we expected, I think. That said, we had several years ago spent three months living out of a Honda CRV, and survived—so we kind of knew it wouldn’t be an issue for us. Being realistic about spatial needs is probably the biggest piece of advice. 

I think the other piece of advice is to be realistic about cost. The price points for yurts can be attractively low, at least in terms of housing options, but it’s worth keeping in mind all the additional costs: building the platform, getting a wood stove and appliances, finding an energy solution, building outbuildings, etc. And obviously be sure to explore the laws and regulations in your particular area.

Anything we would do differently is pretty small beans. Probably we would choose a hardwood for our floorboards (our dogs’ nails have scratched the pine tongue and groove boards to hell). Probably we would choose a slightly shadier spot for the yurt itself (it gets HOT in the summer). Maybe we would add another window. But no, there’s nothing extremely significant that we would do differently.

Written by Christina Nellemann for Tiny House Magazine Issue 77