Joining the roof beams
The window at the top, centre of an ‘actual’ yurt [as opposed to my ‘flatpack version’] is one of the most beautiful things. There are many ways of making these, from steaming lathes of wood to complicated structures with many pieces. It’s where the light gets into the yurt. Typically a cylindrical shape is raised up on beams, some with supports creating vertical columns inside the yurt.
After recognising my limitations with creating a beautiful central piece, I decided to shortcut authentic yurt solutions and just have my beams meet in the middle. I experimented with several ideas but eventually used an old plastic wheel knocking about in the shed. There was a snap-in lid to this wheel that isn’t photographed here.
I drilled 12 locator holes to match the metal rods I put into the top of the beams. The beams are made of simple ‘two by one’ wood with the first two-thirds double thickness. It was a struggle to locate them in the sockets but thankfully Sarah was around to give me a hand with this.
The other end of the roofbeams butted up against the interior of the vertical supports and I included an angled joint to transfer the downward force of the weight of the roof cleanly out to the top of the uprights and their retaining tension [with the ropes]. I can’t remember quite how I got this angle but it must be based on the 24 degrees slope of the roof!
And there was the skeleton of my completed structure.
I placed my upside-down cement mixer bowl into the fire recess and was gratified to see that it came exactly underneath the apex of the roof. For those of you wondering what the sticky-up thing through the floor of the yurt is – there was a tree there that died that I intended to make into the support for a table – more later!
To all appearances, I now had a bandstand in the garden!