On Apr 8, 2006
Dear Shelter Systems:
I am interested in your yurt/dome shelters (either the 14′ or 18′) for my back yard to use as a place to do healing work (and perhaps some shamanic drumming and dancing).
I know that you recommended putting it on the ground rather than a deck, and that sounds good but I have a question. When it rains we can get up to 2 inches of water in parts of the yard where the yurt-dome would be. Truth be told, that would be ANYWHERE in our yard. We live in the Sacramento Valley at 0 degrees sea level.
Before we put up the shelter, we need some landscaping done in our yard — i.e. grading and drainage, and we want to do that first.
My question is, would the foot high berm you talked about building up, and then putting the floor on, and then setting up the shelter, work in a place with so much rainfall, or is it impractical to put it on the earth in such conditions? I’m hoping that we don’t need to build a deck and insulate it, but I’d like to know if it would be impractical to put it on the earth.
thanks,
Francesca Reitano
Sacramento
Francesca
The idea is to build a small hill with it’s flat top big enough for the dome to sit on. If you get flooding of only 2″ then a 1′ high area will work. Water only moves up hill a few inches. You will still need a tarp to keep the ground dampness from entering your dome’s space. Your tarp needs to be keep inside the dome and the edge of your mound should be sloped gradually down and away from your dome. This way when it rains water will flow down and away from your dome.
Sincerely,
Robert Gillis