Salvaged and Sexy

I would like to introduce you to our new floor!

With the help of some sketches from Red Sky, we threw together the skeleton in a few hours. It's in seven pie wedges, which we'll bolt together on site. Ideally, the yome's wall fabric will fit right over the sides, protecting the lumber from rain.

We covered each wedge in our cedar boards, adding a touch of class and some serious character!

Today we'll finish sanding them. Tomorrow, we'll flip them over, fill them with a yet-to-be-determined form of insulation and cover the bottoms with plywood.

Sunday the platform goes out to MFW to get bolted together and hoisted onto pier blocks by us and some friends. Hoorah!

(it doesn't look like a lot of floor space, does it?)

Yome?

John here. I'd like to step in for a minute and explain the name of our blog.

Yome: [yohm] noun, verb

noun- A Yurt-like structure utilizing architectural theories derived from Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. Manufactured by Red Sky Shelters in North Carolina, the Yome comes in a few sizes. We will be living in a SeptaYome (seven-sided) while we build our house out of trash, dirt and spit. That's a little over 250 square feet. We will most likely be sharing that 250 square feet amongst ourselves and two cats for a couple years until we have a home we can live in. Perhaps you're starting to see the potential hilarity involved in our undertaking. (the picture is from Red Sky Shelter's website. It is not our yome)

verb- To barricade yourself in a tiny, whimsical building. "Christy is sick of gardening, so she is going to go Yome it up".

Aside from my own soft spot for puns, we thought Yome Sweet Yome would be a fitting title for our blog, as that is where every day of our building process will start and end.

Our Yome arrives in about a week. We have been hard at work building a platform for our future home to rest on. Through some good luck at Earthwise, a fantastic architectural salvage outlet in Seattle, and with Craigslist, we got all the lumber for about $60. Special shout out to Kari at Earthwise!

We built our platform in seven pie wedges, so they can be easily transported from Christy's shop to the land. The skeleton of the wedges was made from somebody's salvaged deck, and we made the floor from an old cedar fence! Cedar floors! $60! This weekend we will finish sanding and oiling the floors. After that, we will be insulating the floor with either used cellulose from craigslist, or old burlap coffee sacks from one of Seattle's many roasteries. We'll need some help assembling the whole thing on our land. Just saying....

first times a charm...

Welcome to my very first blog post.

I would like to let you , the reader , know a little bit about how we got to this point. I will keep this short, as most of you reading these first few entries are probably friends and family. You know how we got here.First there was the land shopping. For the last 8 months John and I have been going nearly every weekend to see land all the way from Canada to Oregon. We ended up deciding that we needed to be fairly close to Seattle and have at least 5 acres. The idea being a place that could support us, provide enough sunlight for power and food, be private, and have some heavily wooded areas. We also wanted it to be near a "cool" town, and in our price range. That's not too much to ask, right? Privacy and woods, sun and pasture, remote but near a major city?

While we land shopped, we went to the library and took out as many books as we could about building, energy consumption and usage, design, gardening, etc. We bounced , and are still bouncing, back and forth about what type of sustaining house is best for this climate. Cob or straw bale? It's just too wet here and we are already going to have to fight enough building codes. Rammed earth? Well, it doesn't seem to have enough of an R-factor for the amount of labor. I will delve more into this argument in later posts. It is a source of constant debate.

But, somehow, we found our land! 5 acres in Kingston, Wa. It has everything we want, plus some things we didn't even know we wanted. It is only 2.5 miles from the ferry and as of October that ferry will be going straight to downtown Seattle. It is bow tie shaped, one side of the tie is pasture and one side is wooded. It already has power, water, and a cleared building site. We also have an amazing neighbor that owns a back-hoe (!) and he is very excited about our plans for the land. All in all, we were very thorough with our research and looking and think that we actually found a property that fits. Whew! Now all we have to do is build....