Most of y'all who read my blog know this already - I live in the Pacific Northwest. It's very dry for some of the year and very wet for the rest of it. Mongolia, on the other hand, is apparently very dry all the time. A piece of untreated larch wood will last for a hundred years or more in that environment.
Resources are also quite scarce there. Things like paint are hard to come by. So even on a hand painted yurt, no surface is treated if it isn't going to be seen every day.
I knew that I would need to do some touch-up on the yurt so I took one of the parts into Home Depot and had them match the color and gloss in a high-quality exterior paint.
Here's the top of the door frame and door, before and after painting.
There are a lot of places where there is exposed wood that I don't want to paint. For those spots I'm using Teak Oil to seal and protect the wood from moisture without adding the thickness of a coat of paint.
I'm seeking the advice of people who've dealt with a Mongolian yurt in moist environments before I oil the wall lattice. It may not be necessary since it's in the interior where the woodstove will be keeping the air dry. I'm afraid that a hardening oil might make the camel hide joints brittle.
These joints are a minimal and elegant solution. I'd hate to do anything that weakens them since I don't have a source for camel hide to replace them. The walls are kind of critical to building a home.
4 comments:
I can't tell you about camel hide, but I can tell you from personal experience that the walls ties will have to be replaced eventually. Leather rots and it stretches. Any kind of durable leather lacing will work, just not suede lace because that isn't tough enough. I retied my yurt walls last year for the first time since I built it in 1999.
the sandbags? If you can not get fire hose, perhaps used bicycle inner tubes might work? Would not be one piece, might be really cheap.
I used a truck tube full of 'river run' as a weight in my cars trunk-- baling wire twist tie sealed the ends
Eldri, it turns out that sandbagging at all would have been a bad idea, trapping moisture in the spot that gets the least air circulation. You'll see in recent blog posts that I've built a wide wooden curb that seems to be doing the trick.
Lara, thanks for the feedback. I think I'm going to stick to braided nylon for my replacements. Yeah, it's not traditional, but neither is the amount of moisture that we deal with here in Oregon.
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