Welcome to the Yurt Life

Yup!  We are the crazy people that built a spaceship looking home called a Yurt and moved in our family of 5 on a week that reached -25 F.  We know how it looks, it looks crazy.  But we hope that opening up our housing adventure and family life will show that a relative mainstream family can succeed at something so unconventional.

This blog will primarily focus on our family changing their lifestyle to be better stewards of our talent, time, money and relationships. Through this experience we hope to be closer as a family, spend more time on the things that we hold dear, positively impact the environment, bring a fresh approach to mainstream housing options and continue to set ourselves up for financial success. Who wouldn’t want all those things?  

For starters, I’m Kylie.  I am a coffee addicted, environment conscience, Jesus loving, mediocre long distant runner.  I am wife to a man that never runs out of energy and kindness, and I am starting up my own business all while attempting to raise 3 loving, balanced and responsible small humans.  And now, added to this, we are living in a self-designed, family constructed 700 square foot yurt.  However, in spite of all this, I’m actually very vanilla and conventional.

Damon, my husband, is far from vanilla.  He looks like a normal (but very hairy) guy on the outside.  He’s humble and down to earth, but has boundless amounts of energy. His energy allows him to dream big and to achieve these dreams. For example, he ran 54 miles one day to see how many miles it took before he found his breaking point.  It wasn’t a race, he didn’t get a medal or a shirt, he just ran it Forrest Gump style (without the tall tube socks) and just kept on “run’en.”  He lives carefree of what others think and is very true to the man God created and intended him to be.  And simply, he’s happy.

His energy and drive brings all sorts of “adventures” to our lives.  Instead of going on normal Mexico/Florida spring break trips in college, he was either snow camping and ice climbing with friends or convincing his girlfriend (me) to take a 100 mile canoe trip on the Root River to the Mississippi River just for the fun of it.  His dreams and energy have spurred us to hike, climb, and backpack all over the US and internationally.  Adventures have been had and memories have been made from backpacking desolate llama paths in Peru to swimming in hot flowing rivers in Iceland to name a few.  

We did most of our traveling before children came into the picture, when we had much more time, energy and money.  So now our adventures are closer to home.  We lived in Minneapolis for many years, but once we started to have children we wanted to be closer to family.  We are blessed with a huge family. My Father in law is #11 out of 17 siblings.  It’s truly an amazing family.  They mostly live within 40 miles of where they grew up.  There are TONS of cousins and the family is a tight knit group.  It’s been an adjustment moving from the city where you schedule play dates 3 weeks in advance to having 4 uncles unannounced stop in for coffee one morning.  Coffee leads to lunch and I’ve learned that you always should have something in the house to feed at least 6 people in 30 minutes. They always have great stories, can really jab at each other while loving each other deeply. Its genuine and simply one of the largest blessings in our lives.

So what made us decide that a Yurt was the way to go? Oh, such a good question!  Which I continue to ask myself at times,“why again was this the right answer?”

Keep walking with us, I might need a hand to hold.