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Step 2Alaskan GerTees
Creating Livable Spaces
Wilderness Gertee, Wood River, AK -- 2004
My first attempt was small. The walls were only about 4 foot high and maybe 10 feet in diameter, with an open interior fireplace made of big rocks (don't get them from the river!). Used mainly as my guest hut and bath house, this was built out of all scrap materials laying around the Denali Wilderness Lodge on the Wood River, Alaska. For a more complete story about how gertee developed, go to http://nord.twu.net/acl/gerteepictures.html
Here's what I used to build it:
FRAME -- 5 foot thin lattice fence boards, tied together with strings into one long wall piece. It easily rolled into a manageable tube. I found the idea of tying them with string online in an article called something like "How to build a weekend yurt." It was fairly mindblowing to realize the walls can be tied together, which totally eliminates the drilling holes and fitting them together with nuts and bolts portion. Every one of my Gertees are either tied together or held together with plastic ties. They do need to be adjusted after being folded.
ROOFRING -- an odd piece of metal bent into a circle, held together with cut wires. I used the traditional Mongolian design with two main beams holding up the roofring.
ROOF POLES -- were all about 6 feet long pieces of wood. I put cup screws in the ends to hook them on the metal roofring.
DOOR FRAME -- was 4 boards nailed together to form a rectangle.
ROOF COVER -- 'was pieces of scrapped tent bottoms and airplane covers cut into swatches and glued together with carpenters glue. I sealed the seams with that orange insulation spray.
EXTERIOR WALL COVERS -- were a bolt of cotton material I found that was leftover from a remodeling job in the cookshack.
INSIDE WALL LINERS -- were blankets and sheets from the discontinued employees laundry room. As long as the outside wall covers are high enough off the ground to allow air intake, inside wall materials, tucked under floor rugs/mats, acts as an airvalve and helps keep the smoke moving upwards above the firepit and out the roof hole. When there's a liner in place the smoke will hover at the level where the inside liner stops. At Denali we had to stay on the floor to keep the smoke out of our eyes, and keep the door shut!
How I put this together
1. I laid out half the 4 foot pieces of wooden slats about a foot apart, then crisscrossed it with the other half of the wood to make it into a lattice. I cut a bunch of twine and tied the sticks together at every cross. This took a few hours. Once completed I rolled it up and stood it on one end. Then I slowly opened it up and formed the circle. It was this point when I realized I might just be able to actually finish it.
2. So I went and searched through piles of construction remenants and fished out a piece of metal wire that was about 3 feet long with a 3 inch side with large holes. It bent easily into a circle so I clipped a wire and used it to tie the ends together.
3. I fished out all the long boards that looked close to the same size (approx 6 feet). I put screw hooks in the ends of most of them before I ran out. After that I pounded nails in the ends and bent them into hooks.
4. I got 2 very tall pieces of wood 2x4s and nailed a piece of wood to each bottom. I can't remember exactly but I either tied the main roof support beams to the roofring or nailed it.
5. I gathered up all the materials I found in the cache and storage areas. Selecting the most damaged tent bottoms, I cut out useable large pieces. Laying the swatches out on the ground I made a patchwork out of the tent scraps and airplane covers and glued them together with carpenters glue.
6. Then I found wood close to the size I needed to make the door and nailed and tied it together to form a 2 and 1/2 foot x 4 foot door.
T-Junction's GerTee -- 2007
T-Junction is in the Chitina Emporium in Chitina, Alaska. It's one of the original buildings built during the copper boom in the early 1900s. For more on that go to http://www.kennylake.com
Owner Catherine Fletcher-Gilbert is a local expert in Alaskan wild plants and herbs who learned all about local picking from a woman who used to be known as "the talker." Now Catherine makes her own handpicked teas and tinctures and has developed a natural bug repellent. Catherine loved to idea of GerTee immediately. She got a frame from us in June 2007 to be used as a tea house for her summer visitors. I charged her costs for the 18' frame package without roofpoles because she can get her own spruce beams off her property. Even 14' is fairly spacious if you don't intend to have an inside fire. Stop by and see her if you're in the neighborhood this summer. http://www.campredington.com
Tim Redington built 3 roofrings for me. The first one was very beautiful but unuseable. The second one I have in my roof at home now. Catherine's was the third one. Tim made it up at Tangle Lakes where he was working building cabins for Nadine and Jack. One of the other guys on the job had drill bits and he made the holes. (Tim has since purchased the same drill.)
The photos are of the day we delivered it to Chitina, about 25 miles down the Edgerton from us. The boys were hanging around doing what boys do and we just kind of took them with us. They were a hoot because they had NO idea what we were putting together. But they pitched right in and for the first time I got to watch and take pictures of the actual assembly in process.
Making the wall sections
1. Lay down an 8 1/2 foot foot roofpole, or measure it out with anything that will stay straight.
2. Place one wall slat forming a perfect L shape with your guideline.
3. Put another slat down with the the tip flat over the top of the L slat, placing it at a 10 oclock, leftward angle downward so that the bottom tip of the slat rests against the roof pole (or whatever you use to make a straight line).
4. Place another slat about 10 inches to apart next to the first slat on the right. Do this along the entire legnth of your eight foor pole.
5. Lay another layer across the top of the first row, exactly the opposite way.
6. Use the short broken pieces (some slats will break beacuse of knots in the wood) to shore up the ends.
7. Open bags of ties. Note: zipties come in all sizes and levels of quality. The cheap ones break. It's better to tie your walls with twine than to use crappy zipties. 8" pices of thin cut wire also works but it pokes out and gets a little bit dangerous when you move the walls around.
Tie them together every place the wall slats cross or connect. Make it tight as possible. These move around a bit if you roll up the walls so they WILL need to be adjusted every time.
Now you have an eight foot section of wall. Make as many as you need (or want). An 18' ger is about 48 feet around + the door so about 52 feet total. So for that you need 6 of these 8 foot sections. The door frame takes up 3-4 feet of wall space so it ends up being about 50-52 feet around. These walls can really be stretched too, but if you stretch them out too wide your roof poles might not be long enough. My math sucks so if you want exact dimensions there's a wonderfull instructable posted by another person (add link) with very detailed building instuctions. Catherine's wall sections were 16 feet long. We made three of them.
The next two steps have pictures of how the walls go up, the roofbeams attach, the door fits in, the covers go up, and then a few of my recycled decorating ideas..
Wilderness Gertee, Wood River, AK -- 2004
My first attempt was small. The walls were only about 4 foot high and maybe 10 feet in diameter, with an open interior fireplace made of big rocks (don't get them from the river!). Used mainly as my guest hut and bath house, this was built out of all scrap materials laying around the Denali Wilderness Lodge on the Wood River, Alaska. For a more complete story about how gertee developed, go to http://nord.twu.net/acl/gerteepictures.html
Here's what I used to build it:
FRAME -- 5 foot thin lattice fence boards, tied together with strings into one long wall piece. It easily rolled into a manageable tube. I found the idea of tying them with string online in an article called something like "How to build a weekend yurt." It was fairly mindblowing to realize the walls can be tied together, which totally eliminates the drilling holes and fitting them together with nuts and bolts portion. Every one of my Gertees are either tied together or held together with plastic ties. They do need to be adjusted after being folded.
ROOFRING -- an odd piece of metal bent into a circle, held together with cut wires. I used the traditional Mongolian design with two main beams holding up the roofring.
ROOF POLES -- were all about 6 feet long pieces of wood. I put cup screws in the ends to hook them on the metal roofring.
DOOR FRAME -- was 4 boards nailed together to form a rectangle.
ROOF COVER -- 'was pieces of scrapped tent bottoms and airplane covers cut into swatches and glued together with carpenters glue. I sealed the seams with that orange insulation spray.
EXTERIOR WALL COVERS -- were a bolt of cotton material I found that was leftover from a remodeling job in the cookshack.
INSIDE WALL LINERS -- were blankets and sheets from the discontinued employees laundry room. As long as the outside wall covers are high enough off the ground to allow air intake, inside wall materials, tucked under floor rugs/mats, acts as an airvalve and helps keep the smoke moving upwards above the firepit and out the roof hole. When there's a liner in place the smoke will hover at the level where the inside liner stops. At Denali we had to stay on the floor to keep the smoke out of our eyes, and keep the door shut!
How I put this together
1. I laid out half the 4 foot pieces of wooden slats about a foot apart, then crisscrossed it with the other half of the wood to make it into a lattice. I cut a bunch of twine and tied the sticks together at every cross. This took a few hours. Once completed I rolled it up and stood it on one end. Then I slowly opened it up and formed the circle. It was this point when I realized I might just be able to actually finish it.
2. So I went and searched through piles of construction remenants and fished out a piece of metal wire that was about 3 feet long with a 3 inch side with large holes. It bent easily into a circle so I clipped a wire and used it to tie the ends together.
3. I fished out all the long boards that looked close to the same size (approx 6 feet). I put screw hooks in the ends of most of them before I ran out. After that I pounded nails in the ends and bent them into hooks.
4. I got 2 very tall pieces of wood 2x4s and nailed a piece of wood to each bottom. I can't remember exactly but I either tied the main roof support beams to the roofring or nailed it.
5. I gathered up all the materials I found in the cache and storage areas. Selecting the most damaged tent bottoms, I cut out useable large pieces. Laying the swatches out on the ground I made a patchwork out of the tent scraps and airplane covers and glued them together with carpenters glue.
6. Then I found wood close to the size I needed to make the door and nailed and tied it together to form a 2 and 1/2 foot x 4 foot door.
T-Junction's GerTee -- 2007
T-Junction is in the Chitina Emporium in Chitina, Alaska. It's one of the original buildings built during the copper boom in the early 1900s. For more on that go to http://www.kennylake.com
Owner Catherine Fletcher-Gilbert is a local expert in Alaskan wild plants and herbs who learned all about local picking from a woman who used to be known as "the talker." Now Catherine makes her own handpicked teas and tinctures and has developed a natural bug repellent. Catherine loved to idea of GerTee immediately. She got a frame from us in June 2007 to be used as a tea house for her summer visitors. I charged her costs for the 18' frame package without roofpoles because she can get her own spruce beams off her property. Even 14' is fairly spacious if you don't intend to have an inside fire. Stop by and see her if you're in the neighborhood this summer. http://www.campredington.com
Tim Redington built 3 roofrings for me. The first one was very beautiful but unuseable. The second one I have in my roof at home now. Catherine's was the third one. Tim made it up at Tangle Lakes where he was working building cabins for Nadine and Jack. One of the other guys on the job had drill bits and he made the holes. (Tim has since purchased the same drill.)
The photos are of the day we delivered it to Chitina, about 25 miles down the Edgerton from us. The boys were hanging around doing what boys do and we just kind of took them with us. They were a hoot because they had NO idea what we were putting together. But they pitched right in and for the first time I got to watch and take pictures of the actual assembly in process.
Making the wall sections
1. Lay down an 8 1/2 foot foot roofpole, or measure it out with anything that will stay straight.
2. Place one wall slat forming a perfect L shape with your guideline.
3. Put another slat down with the the tip flat over the top of the L slat, placing it at a 10 oclock, leftward angle downward so that the bottom tip of the slat rests against the roof pole (or whatever you use to make a straight line).
4. Place another slat about 10 inches to apart next to the first slat on the right. Do this along the entire legnth of your eight foor pole.
5. Lay another layer across the top of the first row, exactly the opposite way.
6. Use the short broken pieces (some slats will break beacuse of knots in the wood) to shore up the ends.
7. Open bags of ties. Note: zipties come in all sizes and levels of quality. The cheap ones break. It's better to tie your walls with twine than to use crappy zipties. 8" pices of thin cut wire also works but it pokes out and gets a little bit dangerous when you move the walls around.
Tie them together every place the wall slats cross or connect. Make it tight as possible. These move around a bit if you roll up the walls so they WILL need to be adjusted every time.
Now you have an eight foot section of wall. Make as many as you need (or want). An 18' ger is about 48 feet around + the door so about 52 feet total. So for that you need 6 of these 8 foot sections. The door frame takes up 3-4 feet of wall space so it ends up being about 50-52 feet around. These walls can really be stretched too, but if you stretch them out too wide your roof poles might not be long enough. My math sucks so if you want exact dimensions there's a wonderfull instructable posted by another person (add link) with very detailed building instuctions. Catherine's wall sections were 16 feet long. We made three of them.
The next two steps have pictures of how the walls go up, the roofbeams attach, the door fits in, the covers go up, and then a few of my recycled decorating ideas..
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Nov 1, 2011. 9:56 PMNomadsanity
says:
You might consider a simple solution to the ties slipping around while the wall sections are being moved. Just put one staple into the slat around the ziptie or string and it will keep the fastener right where it is supposed to be despite movement in the wall.
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