Monthly Archive for December, 2008

Life Without Cars

Published
by
john
on December 23, 2008
in Ecotopia
. 0 Comments

Just read this interesting article about life without cars.

The area around me is getting more and more developed, but most city folk would still call this the “country”. Thinking of a life without cars is always a dilemna because I love living in the country but it’s an absolute requirement to drive a car pretty much anywhere when you’re out here. Ideally I wouldn’t mind living in a small village of people in the country with a neighbouring town that would be close enough to bike to in under a half hour. Maybe drive to the city an hour away once a week. Or better yet if there was an easy and comfortable train to the city that would really be ideal. Until then I’ll keep coming up with creative and fun reasons to  stay home a lot!

Yurt FAQ

Published
by
john
on December 23, 2008
in Yurt
. 2 Comments

We get such great responses from people who visit our yurt. People are pretty impressed with the style of the thing. Along with the many compliments we’ve received we also get numerous questions. Here are some of them.

Q. Where did you get it?
A) Pacific Yurts

Q. How much did it cost?
) The yurt itself was $13,400. We got a 24ft diameter yurt with 6 windows, a rain cachment and some other options.  Our deck/floor cost $4500 for materials and a local carpenter to put it together. Our woodstove with the expensive outdoor stovepipe cost around $1200 and I’ve probably spent around another $500 or so in miscellaneous expenses (tools hardware, feeding our yurt raising crew etc). We’re not quite done yet…we want to build a loft and some shelves so I expect when we’re done with the basic setup it will be around $20,000.

Q. Are you happy with it? Would you recommend buying mine from Pacific Yurts?
A. The short answer is yes, we feel like it is very good quality overall. If I were to do it over again there are some things (like the insulation) that I feel I could do myself cheaper.  I plan on writing a full review of our Pacific Yurt experience soon.

Q. What’s with the purple color?
A) Originally Kala, who is very easy-going agreed with my color choice of burgundy with a green roof. We both agreed that tan/kaki was too normal for us oddballs and I thought burgundy would be bold and at the same time blend in more. We got a comment from one of the people at Pacific Yurts to the effect of “are you sure you want that color combo?”. This caused me to have a second look and I asked that they send another set of color swatches. We were on vacation at the time and we sat leisurely looking at all the wall roof color permutations. The lavender purple kept drawing us though I wasn’t sure what it would look like when we actually saw it. Although somewhat mentally prepared, it was still quite a sight to see so much purple when we actually put it up. One friend said it looked like a “circus tent” and I suppose that is somewhat appropriate if you know us. :-)  It definitely puts out a vibe of fun and creativeness and we’re all about that.

Q) Is it warm?
A) We live in New Hampshire and it can get quite cold. Our entire wall with insulation is about 2″ thick, so we are just 2″ from the outside. The other night it got down to 6 degrees.  It was one of the first nights that we had a  new wood stove so were a bit apprehensive as to how well it would work in that kind of weather.  Our previously one was too small and couldn’t warm the place once it got below 20 degrees or so.  But we just cranked up  our new wood stove and we were as warm as toast. In fact we overdid a bit that night and got lethargic with the heat so we even had to open the door for a bit to cool things down.  So the answer is that we are as warm as we want to be. The only real heating issue is that while the insulation does a pretty good job of keeping heat in considering its thinness and its lack of thermal mass, the heat disperses out of it fairly quickly so you have to keep the fire going. If its a cold night and we fall asleep long enough for the fire to die down, it can be quite chilly. One of us will hop out of bed in the early hours of the morning, throw some kindling and logs in, get it blazing and hop back into bed. Within a 20 minutes it’ll be warm enough to be up and about comfortably. We’re quite warm under our blankets even when it chills down, though we now know the reason people use to wear nightcaps as so much heat escapes from the head.  The only real problem is if we go out overnight or long enough for the fire to completely die out, the temperature inside the yurt is basically the same as outside. Not fun when it’s 6 degrees! Luckily our woodstove heats up pretty fast and we can actually open up the doors of our woodstove and  be sitting in front of a roaring fire within a couple minutes after entering. One word of advice to those who are buying a yurt for a cold climate: get a nice and BIG woodstove. We started with a smaller one that I thought would be enough but it wasn’t. You want an all nighter!

Q. Do you find it hard to live in one room?
A. Yes. However, me and Kala get along really well so that helps. Also we have access to a (very) small cabin so we can escape to be by ourselves when we wish to.  But I do find it difficult to focus on my work with my son River and Kala coming and going.  I think one more small yurt for our bedroom and another for Rivers bedroom would make our setup complete and we might end up doing just that.

Q. Why did you buy a Yurt instead of a more permanent structure?
A. Several reasons. One is that we are moving to another state in a couple of years. We can just fold up the yurt and take it with us. If we like we can even take our deck apart and take that too. Another reason is that although we could build a small structure for the same amount it would have been a LOT more work and would not be nearly as beautiful. Living in the yurt feels like living in a temple..It’s just gorgeous everywhere you look! And plenty of natural light. To build something as comparably large and as beautiful would cost substantially more.

Q. What are the downsides to living in a Yurt?

A. Well I mentioned the cold in the morning…that can be a drag. Also the living in one room thing…fine in the great weather but a little confining in the cold. Another issue we have found is that because of the thinness of the wall there is virtually no sound insulation. If we are playing a movie or stereo somewhat loud the sound really carries! And we can hear every car that passes by and every power tool are neighbor uses. Both of us are pretty noise sensitive so this is kind of a drag. We live in a fairly quiet place, but still way too noise. I would not even consider living in a yurt in any kind of suburban or city environment. I also do miss running water sometimes. We are literally chopping wood and carrying water.  We’ll be able to do something creative with our rain cachment system in the spring and likely have some gravity fed running water.

Q. So, overall you are happy with your yurt?
A. Hell yeah!!

Living Rent and Mortgage Free

Published
by
john
on December 11, 2008
in Homesteading
. 0 Comments

I was fortunate enough to spend 8 of the last 10 years not having to pay rent or mortgage as I lived with my (then) partner in her grandmothers house in a downstairs apartment. A couple of years ago I moved out with my new partner Kala and we spent the last two years renting.

I was soon reminded of how lousy it feels to hand over money to someone every month simply for the privilege of having a place to live for another month. It felt like a giant hole in my wallet sucking out money that I could use to have adventures, create art, share with friends or buy things I wanted. Luckily the two places we lived had fairly cheap rent ($650) but spread out over 2 years, even that low rent comes out to $15,600! What do I have to show for it? Nothing.  What would you buy right now if I handed you $15,600 cash? That’s a pretty good chunk of cash..enough to buy say a place to live? Well, most people would say no, but in my universe I say why not?

Last summer me and my partner Kala were given the opportunity to borrow $18,000 (interest free) from a good friend to buy a Yurt. That she is a former partner and mother to my son who had recently come into an inheritance made it even sweeter.  She even offered to let me put it up in a big field on a piece of land that she inherited. It was crucial to have a place near facilities to put it up, because with that kind of money we could not afford to dig a well and add plumbing and the infrastructure for electricity. Instead we use her house for some basic functions such as filling up our water bottles, taking a shower and having a line of electricity. While I am on the path to unplugging myself from the grid, I’m not all the way there yet!

For what I was paying for rent, I will have the yurt paid off in two years and then I can use the money that I would have been paying for rent to either upgrade my living space (add solar, some kind of plumbing, more outside facilities, or other things),  or I could choose to invest that money in my art, travel or just work a bit less because I need less money.

Rent/mortgage or most peoples largest expense. For me getting rid of that is key to living my life free.  The thought of not having to pay rent or mortgage again for the rest of my life pleases me greatly. :-)

Compost is the Most!

Published
by
kala
on December 10, 2008
in Gardening and Homesteading
. 0 Comments

“Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch”

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I come from a family of flush toilet users. Here in America, this is not much of an admission or surprise. But what does surprise me is that even my Mom who was born in 1933 always had a flush toilet! Somehow I thought that along with her stories of the entire family sleeping in the kitchen by the wood stove during January nights, that they would also somehow have harbored untold tales of creeping out in the middle of the night to the outhouse, complete with the moon shaped air hole on the door. But she grew up in Salem, Massachusetts and by then many of the cities had become modernized, or as some would say, “civilized.”

But being “civilized” is a matter of perspective, as well as choice. If being “civilized” assumes having an advanced or or humane culture, then using flush toilets just does not live up to this description. Is it advanced to dump what could serve the earth into the sea and create levels of bacteria that infiltrate the entire fish population? Is it humane to send it all to a sewer treatment plant where toxic chemicals fill the air for the local population to breath into their lungs while out for an evening walk? When I lived in Salem myself I witnessed both the toxity of the water and air because of our inability as a culture to deal in an advanced, humane way with our excretions.

I contemplate such things now as I settle in to a life dedicated to composting my poop. It’s a funny idea that is abhorrent to many. I think many would be horrified to sit on the homemade seat that hovers over the bucket in the shed adjacent to the yurt I am living in. Our culture seems to create sterile places where we can wisk away the things we’d rather not talk about or see, certainly not smell. The idea of actually choosing to go back to the old way of doing things before the supposed progress of porcelain and plumbing must seem to many backward and bizarre.

But to me it comes as a return to the sacred. I come to this led by my love for the earth and her creatures and with a desire that all I do be in balance with the ways of the land. For me an advanced and humane culture would consider the needs of the earth before doing anything. Like in Starhawk’s wonderful book, The Fifth Sacred Thing, a truly advanced culture would honor the four sacred things of air, fire, water and earth, and in doing so create the fifth, which is spirit.

Two years ago, I was introduced to how simple humanure composting could be when my partner and his son and I camped for the summer in the White Mountains, staying on land in which they utilized the bucket system. No $1000 composting toilet needed, just a bucket, some sawdust or leaves and a dedicated pile. I was especially surprised how the sawdust so effectively took care of the smell and how once I got used to it, even dumping the buckets became not disgusting to me, but a service for the community and for the earth.

I’ve fallen into this way of being quite easily and think it strange now that what will feed the walnut, pear and apple trees on this land I live in is considered waste by too many. I also find it strange that much of what is considered “civilized” today does damage to the planet’s brilliant beauty and our own ability ultimately to live sustainably. I am enjoying the idea of feeding the plants that feed us from out of my own body. Nothing is wasted. Everything about me is sacred.