We Thought It Would Be Easy... It Took 2 Months to Finish Our Yurt!

We're Eder and Eliezer. If you're new here we're a young couple that bought this piece of land with an abandoned house here in Portugal for 47 000 euros. In the last few weeks we have been clearing the land, finding ruins and building a simple structure to put a yurt. We're learning everything from scratch but the main project is the abandoned house but for now we're focusing on finishing our yurt. With a yurt on the land we can finally start living here to complete other interesting projects like a cabin, compost toilet, sauna and any other interesting things that pop into our head. But in this episode we face some challenges finishing putting up our yurt. Okay so yes I know it's a big jump cut but this this is the yurt. But let me tell you what happened. Because these yurts are gifts from Eder's mom and she had these yurts for over 15 years. Yes it's normal that they are a little bit bad in some parts like the door part here that's all ripped. Or this part here which is super important which is also very ripped. And also if you go inside the yurt come here. Yeah and look how nice is the yurt anyway. But you see that a lot of parts are the tissue, the canvas is not that much good. Here you have a hole for example as well. So while mounting the yurt we realized that we have to do some repair here in the whole canvas before actually moving here and putting our stuff here like a bed and stove and table and everything. Look how big is this space. Look it's tall you have this this wheel here with a lot of natural light coming in. It's pretty like it's very pretty if you think about all these walls here all all of these woods going that you can see the woods. This space is really nice. Imagine this with a bed with a little like tv there like a sofa a little stove there with a wood burner over there. This is going to look really good but we need to do it in the right way. So here's what's going to happen. Let's go outside. For the repairing process we've decided to start researching marinas because here in Porto where next to the sea there's loads of places that repair sails and canvases. So what we're looking to do is take off this canvas and we actually have another canvas that's brand new also hasn't been treated that we're going to put on the yurt today just to experiment and see the size of it because that's actually really quick to do. So this canvas is complete it's five square meters. The other new canvas that we want to experiment today and put on is four. We realize it's not worth leaving the yurt in this condition. As a solution to repair the fabric of the yurt I thought of the guys who repair sailboats. The materials are really similar and they would have all of the right equipment. We want them to treat the fabric to make it waterproof again, clean the moldy green parts and fix all of the rips and tears. Since we live in Porto we thought it'd be easy to find somebody to help. So what we're going to do now is take off this canvas. So the first step is untying all of the ropes. We know that by taking down the yurt and doing everything now we will avoid problems in the future because in the end we are actually planning to live in the yurt. It was a little frustrating taking it down because it felt like we were taking five steps back. You can see really well this part here that it really needs some cleaning and some love but that's the last roof panel so that's quick that cost that was about 10 minutes we can do that. My mum gave us two yurts so I thought since they were the same size the other canvas would fit this yurt too but I was wrong the canvas was way smaller and it didn't fit. That's when we realized that both canvases are custom made to fit the specific yurt so yet again we had to take it all down. Guys this has been really stressful this whole afternoon trying to taking the canvas off and we assumed that the other canvas we had which is the same size would fit on this yurt but I called my mum and asked her why is it fitting and she said that it's not made for this yurt so we've taken everything off because right now it's just not working and the other canvas we've already brought up to the car because we're going to take it to the guy at the dock to basically try and get a quote and see how much and how much it's going to take to repair and how much time because we want to get these things up and it's just it's been really stressful but yeah we're gonna go meet him now and see what he says. We found a guy at the boatyard in Porto who could help us he showed us a pvc material we could use instead of the heavy cotton canvases he said that this pvc material was way better as it's water resistant and a lot more durable. We left our canvases there and we were told to come back a week later. In the end it took more than a week for us to get back to the land because all of the wildfires that were happening in the north of Portugal. We've come back after the wildfires have gone crazy in Portugal we couldn't even get to our land two days ago because the fire was so out of hand and it was really scary but we've come back we didn't put the tarp on the yurt and we left it open so now everything's wet which is really annoying but what I want to do today is oil all of the oak that this yurt has and when the yurts are going to be finished they should be finished around next week we can put the yurt protect the wood and everything will be To hydrate the wood again and protect it because this is oak these are oak beams what my what I've been suggested is to use linseed oil and you just put it on a natural kind of material I'm using a cut up pair of linen shorts I have and you just the wood I think will soak it up because this has not been treated in a while so I wanted to do this before we get the yurt canvases back because it will really just make the wood so much more vibrant and give it more shine and Applying oil to the wood helps it last much longer it also helps to hydrate the wood and it gives it a great smell and shine So the weather's not so great but today's gonna be a great day anyway because we're on the way right now to go and grab the yurts so the guy just rang us and said that the material for the yurts and that means that we're going to be able to mount the yurts we're going to be able to put up the yurts today hopefully I mean it's a bit rubbish that it's raining and yeah not really nice but we'll have the yurt which is the most important thing one thing that we've discovered is that Bozor hates the rain he did not want to go and pee this morning he was not interested he wants to be snuggled up on the sofa with Eliezer you know we're paying 800 euros for the guy to fix the yurts we expect a good work and we can put it to the test straight away today because if it's not waterproof we'll know Arriving to check the fabric a key part of the roof was missing so we had to go to the factory to fix the rest of the yurt because the other canvas was so old and had several issues we decided to make a new wall out the pvc material it's used a lot on boats and the guy said we'll never have any mold or water issues again so what we're doing now is because we need to replicate these holes to this for these toggles to attach on the on the yard ceiling we need also to make a hole to pass this little string so he gave us this material which is amazing I'm finding it's really good now we just do like this we have a perfect hole these wooden toggles are essential for us to attach to the new fabric because they connect the wall to the roof luckily the guy provided us with all the right equipment so we could do it way quicker and faster in his factory than on our land finally the finished canvas is ready to put up there's literally nothing else that we need to do thanks again for helping us with this project now let's go back to the land and put this canvas on the yard right guys today everything is ready to finalize the first yurt here we have the canvases treated all good and clean we have the steps for the stairs there's just one mistake that we did that we didn't protect all the wood properly so it's all like moldy and wet but it's not the end of the world so let's start but first let's do the stairs everything was almost ready today it was supposed to be for doing the finishing touches and a few things we had left grab the wood you have already measured cut a 90 degree angle to fit perfectly at the top of the deck but it needs to be a perfect fit now that it's cut we need to make the steps we used some thick leftover wood to make the support for placing the wooden boards on top everything will be really secure because we're fastening everything with these big screws and to secure the stickers to the deck use these choice hangers and some large screws obviously this has to be done on both sides now grab the wood we bought a really thick one to last a long time the final step is placing the wooden boards on top to see how it looks and lastly to protect the wood from rotting use a good deck paint now that i've explained everything we're going to build the stairs all that's left is to assemble unscrew everything together how's that feel good yeah yeah okay so the stairs is complete the only thing that is left to do is to paint and to add the joist hangers but because it's on the slab of concrete i wanted to paint underneath as well so the wood doesn't rot so yeah now we have a stairs to go in and out of the yurt it's kind of a chunky style thick wood we went gary the guy who came to help us actually bought this wood and said it would be the best i kind of like it though it's really really chunky i need to guys put you on something if you live on a farm or you know or doing work like this we highly recommend crocs we've just got our first pair even though leo's has got the same matching and this is not sponsored no it's really good it's honestly we got inspired by gary he was here helping us and i said wow i really love your shoes crocs they're so comfortable and when you know when i'm carrying something heavy i need to i need to you know my foot not to slip four by four mode that's not going anywhere really comfortable as well highly recommend yeah if you crocs want to sponsor us we are open because it's really good seriously we love them now with the stairs done we need to focus on assembling having a cuppa cup of tea mate yes very nice to take a break and have some tea and some biscuits on our stairs we've just made oh yeah get out of me and today this will be ready yeah i really like these stairs to sit on they're so comfortable yeah i think this is a new tea spot yeah definitely since the canvas is new we need to remove all of the wooden toggles from the old canvas they are super important because they hold the wall to the roof after removing all of the wooden toggles we had to reattach them to the new pvc canvas once again we put the roof on the yacht in my head we did everything right treated all the roof canvases we made a new pvc wall and there was nothing that could go wrong but as we quickly realized the wall canvas was not fitting correctly onto the yacht the problem was that the new pvc wall wasn't wrapping around the entire yacht and we didn't want to stretch or tear it so we had to remove it and keep trying but while we were pushing to get everything finished eliezer twisted his ankle in stressful situations like this it's better to stop what you're doing have a cup of tea and take a breather okay we found out that we're building the yurt the wrong way look at that and i also twisted my ankle the yurt has walls and ceilings and we were putting the ceiling first and then the wall but we need to do the other way around walls first and then ceiling honestly this yurt has tested our patience it feels like this product is never ending and there are always new problems that arise it's been really tiring assembling and disassembling everything but we know that it will be worth in the end when everything is ready we are going to make this yurt beautiful here you can see clearly how flexible the yurt structure actually is and we thought that by removing some roof bins we could adjust the walls and raise the roof to fit the pvc wall but the adjustments weren't changing anything every time we made an adjustment it would fall back in the same position and in the end we decided to disassemble the entire roof at least by removing the roof we managed to fit the entire pvc wall now we just need to put the roof back on and place the canvas on top to complete everything it seems easy but it's not back on the land trying to finish this year today is not really the best of days it's raining it's pouring but we're gonna have to try and finish this because the weather's gonna be like this for the next couple of days everything that we have to do today is adjusting we don't have to create or build anything so let's go inside so three days ago when we put the yurts because we had to redo everything and put everything back again everything was more tight together we waited three days and everything because of the heavy weight of the wheel and all the bins everything kind of dropped a little bit so now the yurt is more fitting together and it's easier to adjust what we're gonna do now is try to put these walls as much here as possible so it fits with the canvas there and then put the canvas outside because yeah this is a little take from the canvas that's from outside when it rains the rain comes inside so we're gonna put outside and no more rain here yeah easy i think it's easy work it always looks easy let's go everything was practically ready this day was only meant to finish off the few things that we had left we made one of the biggest mistakes there was a part of the wall that wasn't in the right place and we thought we could just quickly adjust it but that turned out to be one of the worst decisions that we made after we started adjusting the wall the weight of the roof began to collapse everything was very heavy and difficult to adjust eliezer and i started getting really stressed all this work just to redo everything we were already at our limit we were so had to find a solution on how we could fix the situation guys that day trying to put up the yurt in the rain was one of the most stressful things i've ever done it was just too much to film everything because we i was trying to hold the roof of the yurt while we were trying to adjust some things and sometimes it just doesn't make sense to position the camera there was no time um i cried i cried in the rain eliezer was stressed we were stressed it was a stressful day but i can finally say that today we have the yurt basically ready tour time now that the yurt is ready we can finally give you some true it's a very simple yurt uh but uh very hard to make in the end for people that never made something like that everything is flexible so it makes everything much harder okay it's done let's talk about what's here right so you're coming to the yurt with these stairs i find amazing they're strong thick i like that the three steps you come to the deck here here is still going to add some stuff like some some strings for people to not fall when you put some chairs here for coffee here we found the solution for the rain issue for because it's not waterproof we paid a guy to waterproof but in the end it's not waterproof so we got this plastic now we're still gonna make it nice you know but for now this is what's gonna help us with the with the issue and let's go let's go inside right like i said it's a 25 square meter yurt we have two windows i think it's like three meters high it's a perfect space for bedroom living room and kitchen it's all round 360 degrees uh for now it looks like this this wood like that is all black because it rained the other day and it wasn't prepared waterproofed and that's why we're still gonna do something about that but everything looks great it's all in place nothing is moving and it's done we don't have to do anything about the structure in this yurt anymore so okay guys now it's time to make this yurt look nice look livable put some bed some kitchen some stuff decorate and that's what we're going to do on the next video a full decoration in this yurt for making livable so we can start actually living here in this land but that's going to be for the next video in the end we managed to set up the yacht this was a journey that tested our patience to the limit but at the same time we learned so many lessons at least when we assemble the next year we'll know exactly what not to do stay tuned for the next video because we're going to completely transform the yurt from the inside thanks for watching and we'll see you guys in the next video