Late July 2008 - Yurt Cellar Hole

We decided that, rather than try to build something from scratch right away, we would buy and put up a yurt to live in. We'd always wanted to live in one, and now was our chance. We figure we can sell it when we're done with it. It was our understanding that the building department didn't mind yurts, since they are portable structures, so figured we could avoid dealing with building permits and all of that for now - just get a roof over our heads before winter. Our understanding about the building department proved wrong, but so far we haven't been forced to take it down.

These first picture shows Jeanne (no, she doesn't do all of the work, someone has to take the pictures, and usually that's me!) digging a hole in solid clay to form a basement for the yurt. We dug a drainage ditch to daylight down the hill, dug a drainage trench around the perimeter, one in the bottom, installed perforated flexible pipe in the ditches to form a french drain system, covered the pipes with a layer of gravel, then backfilled the ditch down the hill, leaving the end of the pipe sticking out with wire mesh over the end to keep the mice out.

This all proved to work well. When the snow melted this spring, water came running out of that pipe every day, and our basement while not necessarily totally dry, at least didn't flood.