Practicalities Part 1

We are currently living in the only rental we could find quickly that accepted month-to-month rent, a dog and was a decent place to live. We looked at a few and most were just, well, not acceptable and one was even expensive and not acceptable.

So, the current rental is a nice enough home in a nice enough subdivision – totally not our thing, it is the proverbial cookie cutter home. But, it's clean and safe and the management company is responsive and good to deal with and there's a fenced yard for Suki. However, it is expensive. The monthly rent is higher than our previous 15 year mortgage and we also have to pay utilities here that we didn't have at our previous home. It feels like we're bleeding money and with no future return on it.

Building a house is going to cost more than we had anticipated, so we started thinking about what we could do to decrease our living expenses while building. (Living in our current rental long term is not going to work.) We started thinking, “How can we live on our land while we build?” Something we've considered in the past (glad we didn't at the times we were considering it!) is living in a yurt. We could buy a yurt to live in while we build and then what? We could sell it and come out well ahead of what we would have had we continued to pay rent. However, another thought occurred. Brent has said he'd prefer a separate building for his office. He telecommutes, and going to another building for his workday will help keep him focused (and make it so that Suki and I don't have to be quiet all day). Hmmm, the yurt could work well for that and Brent's always been drawn to them.

We began exploring the yurt option. Looking at Brent's office sf needs vs our needs for living in it up to a year, we narrowed our search down to a 20ft yurt (315sf) or a 24ft yurt (450sf). The 24ft would be huge for his office, heck, even the 20ft would be too big for its long term purpose. We decided we could build an interior wall dividing the yurt into his office space and a workshop space. So, what space did we really need to live in for a year? We talked about it, thought about it and played with floor plans.