Goodness knows why but she thought a yurt might be OK for us. I had thought that a yurt was a round tent made of animal skins that spent half its life on a mule wandering around Kazakhstan. One week, as we were leaving Wombalano for Canberra, she suggested we take the scenic route and drop in at Goulburn Yurtworks to update my knowledge bank by checking out real yurts. These were designed in California. I was against the idea on the principle that we never agreed with each other on anything at first.
Yurts turned out to be round wooden houses, or more correctly, nearly round houses made from triangles like the slices of a cake. Each slice was a prefabricated roof section, a prefabricated wall and a bit of wooden floor. The ‘modules’ were delivered on site as flat packages and screwed together to complete the yurt cake. The bit that everybody knew about except me was that a steel hawser was tightened around the cake at the end to squeeze it into a perfect round, fairly similar to the Kazakhstan original.
We sat in one at the Yurtworks yard while we waited for a salesman to appear. The wait was intentionally long because it gave us a chance to experience circling slowly round and round while suspended under a wooden ceiling that focussed the eye on a sunlit apex; a bit like being on a merry-go-round. The pungent mountain smell of the red cedar walls completed the sensation. I should have left in anger because the cedar was fully imported from the USA, not the superior locally-grown Toona cedar that I had dreamt of.
We both liked it, no arguments. They could deliver one in a couple of weeks and erect in in 3 days maximum. The one for delivery had been prefabricated under order and the order had bounced, hence the short delivery time and very low price near cost. The plan wasn’t quite right so we would go away and think about it.
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