When people hear that I have this dream of living a simplified life, off-grid, in a simple cabin, dugout, or yurt, I get these responses:
- Are you an eco-whacko?
- Did you read too much Little House on the Prairie?
- That’s a lot of hard work.
- Are you crazy? You can’t do that anymore.
- What the heck is a yurt?
So let me clarify with the following:
- This is a medium to long-term goal. I don’t plan on building a small-footprint house in the city where I now live.
- Simplified living, to me, is about living with less dependence on the outside and more self reliance. Of course this is a lot of work. It’s also how most of our families lived until the 1930s-1950s (depending on where they were).
- I am interested in the ecological payoff of using wind, solar, and geothermal power. I am interested in greywater recycling and composting toilets. I’m not an eco-nut, I’m cheap. If I live far away from power lines, running power may be more expensive than making my own. Same thing with a septic system and well. Reuse of water and composting is where a modest concern for the environment meets Yankee frugality.
- As for the house itself, I’ve been looking into houses that my husband and I can build largely ourselves. Again, this isn’t wacko as much as it is frugal. Hand-made cabins, although quite nice, can be a lot of work in clearing, making of proper logs, etc. Dugouts have equal engineering challenges. When I learned of modernized yurts that are being used at ski camps, I thought I might have a good compromise solution.
So I’m reading up on yurts. You can put them up, start to finish, in seven days and for $25k (when you include the foundation, a stove, basic plumbing, and an interior partition.) Since yurts can be interconnected, we could make a little Yurt complex. Kitchen/Great Room Yurt, Bedroom Yurt 1, Bedroom Yurt 2 (Charlie & Guest Rooms), and Bathhouse Yurt. Or we build one medium-sized Yurt and live in it while we build the residential cabin and barn. The yurt can then be a guesthouse when we don’t need it for daily living. People rent them for camping and skiing already. They’re rather nice. And they are durable, really.
For more information about yurts, I recommend http://www.yurtinfo.org/yurtinfo.php and Lars’ Yurt Page: http://www.rdrop.com/~glacier/yurt.htm
