We laid flat a long sheet of purposely made water resistant plastic, then started to build the box for our tipi floor. We used a mix of earth, cow manure and a little bit of cement for the "concrete" floor. And we got hundreds of recycled beer bottles from the recycling depot in the nearby village, to lay down as both filler and insulation (as the air locked in the bottles insulates more than the earth). We decided to pour the floor by sections, very much in a pizza slices style and separate the sections with scrap wood from the saw mill (also part of the farm). Like this, most of what we used, apart from the plastic and the cement so far, was natural, found on site or recycled waste.

It took us about two weeks to get the digger to excavate and dig (more a matter of getting someone to do it then actual work time), the truck to work and bring the rocky earth, the recycled beer bottles (3 trips of a trailer full each), box and mix and pour the concrete over top of aligned bottles laying on a tampered bed of earth. We decorated the floor with a spiral of sea shells we found on the nearby beach to give it some spirit and increase its natural feel. And as the shape of the tipi is a cone, it felt like it made sense to put a spiral on the floor shooting to the center, where all the poles join together in the air.

Once that was done, we were pretty stocked, we could already see the size and shape of our tipi! But next was the canvas mission, off we went for another two weeks of sourcing a cheap canvas, a sawing machine that would work with it, and last but not least... saw it together as a tipi!

Of all the tasks involved in building the tipi, sawing was by far the hardest. Because there are 20 metres of canvas to feed in the sawing machine, and it all jams and the thread breaks easily. I ended doing most of it as my partner had lost all enjoyment for it. We eventually got there, cut the doors, and the holes for the pins to go in where the two ends meet above the door, and there was a big handfull of canvas bits left over. It was quite incredible, we had just ordered the perfect roll, 33m by 2.20m, for our 6m diameter tipi.

When the canvas was ready, a mere two weeks later. It was time for the final test: matching the canvas on the poles !!! So we got the poles and the canvas up there, and put it all up together, three of us. There is a proper way of rising the poles, three for starters, then adding the others on by one in a specific order to interlock them nice and tight. Then a rope comes to lock them all together at the top. Once we got that sorted, which took a while as it takes someone to climb at the top to jigsaw everything nice and tight, and do the knot, we went on to putting the canvas up. For beginners like us, it wasn't child's play at all: the canvas weights a lot, and you've got to lift it all up at once at the top of a pole, up to 6 metres high !!! That's how hard it gets. Once you get it up there, if you are lucky and it ended up at the right height, right where the poles cross, you've got to wrap it around the pole structure to "close the jacket". It sounds easy but in fact, it takes a bit to get it all adjusted onto the pole structure as well. I actually ended up sawing the poles by 20cm to make everything shorter so that the canvas would actually reach about 10-15cm above the ground, which is what is recommended. After a couple of days, we got it all right, and we could then rejoyce in the pleasure of sitting inside the tipi, around the fire.