Beech hardwood floor in the guest room

At the beginning of December, we put down the first of the hardwood floor in our house. We worked to get one room painted and ready for the floor. We chose the guest room because it’s out of the way (not a traffic area).

Painting involves mixing our own paint (based upon a recipe I came up with after several experiments and trials). It’s basically a clay-based paint. The first coat has a lot of silica sand added to give texture to the walls. Technically, you would call this an Alis. It’s actually a thin plaster. We brush it on with paintbrushes, trying to get it even. It not only provides a nice texture for the walls, it helps cover up imperfections in the finish coat of plaster. The second coat of paint is the same recipe but without the sand added. This brushes over the first coat, brightening the walls (white) and making sure the texture is locked into place (the sand can be rubbed off the walls before the final coat).

Once we painted all of the walls and the ceiling in the guest room, we installed the hardwood floor in the room. The wood we have is from some trees we cut and which a friend milled, planed, and tongue-and-grooved for us. It’s been sitting in the house for a couple of years waiting.

In the fall of 2013, I bought a flooring nailer. It was a good deal, although it was a refurbished unit. I never tried it out until it was time to install the floor. Well, it didn’t work right. I wouldn’t drive the nails or staples in all the way, leaving them about 1/16” above the tongue. I tried everything I could think of to get it replaced or repaired, but there was no honest way. At that point, I spent five minutes with a file modifying the base plate, and now the nailer works fine.

We spent two or three days laying the floor, and it turned out quite nice. We used American Beech in this room. Some of the logs sat waiting to be milled longer than ideal which resulted in some spalting of the wood. Spalting is wood coloration caused by fungi. If left long enough, the wood will rot, but spalting does not mean the wood is rotten. It adds additional character to the floor. Some people pay extra money for spalted wood.

After we installed the floor, I made some templates for finishing the window seat. Then, I cut the necessary curves in some Maple hardwood flooring that I bought and which is slated for the window seats/sills. I nailed these boards in place except for the last one at the outside edge. I need to rip it to the proper width, curve the two ends, and then round the top edge a little. I will also install a board along the wall underneath the outside edge board.

I’m pleased with how the floor and window seat turned out. It will be nice when we have all of the floors and window seats done.

Plaster and paint

Work on the house was delayed during much of the spring and early summer because of other demands upon my time. These were important activities, many of them involving spending time with and being a father to our children. It’s a blessing to have a plethora of things to do.

We have spent time during the last few weeks on plaster and painting. We still have the upstairs walls to finish plastering and two walls in the pantry. We’ll finish those in the next few weeks. Completing the plastering before the weather turns cool is important – it needs to be warm and dry enough for it to dry properly.

We’ve also spent time painting interior walls. This is a one of those things that we want to have completed before we begin to put down the hardwood floors. The paint we’re using is some that I’ve developed a recipe for. There are several different varieties of natural paint. The one we’re using uses wheat paste as the binder.

Using a natural paint is important to me. We have natural, earthen plaster walls, and it would just be wrong to put a synthetic, latex paint on them. One of the benefits of earthen plaster is its ability to “breathe.” It naturally absorbs and releases atmospheric moisture (clay is hydrophilic), and it also allows moisture in the straw in the walls to pass on through rather than get caught. Moisture in the straw would not be a good idea. With clay-based plaster, moisture that naturally gets inside the wall will be able to get out. Many people don’t realize that moisture within walls is a factor in stick-built houses, too. The inside environment, especially during the winter, is warmer and more humid than outside. Moisture in the air will naturally move toward a less moist environment. It will move through a wall. If it hits a cold, vapor-impermeable skin on the outside, it will condense within the wall. Some wall construction methods may be able to handle this condensed moisture, but straw bale is not one of them.

So, how does paint affect that? On the outside, it can have a greater effect if it prevents moisture from getting out the cooler side. On the inside, it may be less of an issue. The general rule/idea is to have greater vapor-permeability on the outside of the wall than on the inside. So, maybe latex paint would be alright on the inside, but why use it on natural walls? If I go to the trouble of mixing and putting 12 tons of earthen plaster on the inside walls, why would I want to cover them with a plastic coating? It just wouldn’t be right.

So, I’m making paint. Sure, it’s not washable, but neither are the walls. If you put enough water on them and scrub, you’re going to take off part of them, and I wouldn’t really like that! You can’t treat these walls like that; they have to be cared for. They aren’t concrete and they aren’t drywall – and I’m happy they aren’t. If you bang something into them, you’ll likely make a divot. They are organic in composition, shape, and function. So, the paint that goes on them must also be.

Originally, I was going to let the wall color be in the finish coat of plaster. However, that didn’t work. Instead of coming out a nice white, they end up gray when the plaster dries. Maybe there was another way to mix the plaster, different ingredients to use, or something, but I didn’t do it. Because of that, our application involves paint.

It’s been fun developing my own paint recipe. I’m not sure I want to share it, yet. I've thought of maybe selling natural paint in powder form. Just add water. The natural paints you can buy online seem to cost an arm and two legs. The paint I’m making doesn’t have to cost that much, and in powdered form, it’s dry, not too heavy to ship, and will keep for a long time. It’s important to use what you mix up, because if you let it sit for a couple of days, the wheat paste will begin to sour, and that’s not really pleasant.

I mix the paint with an electric mixer. I wore out two cheap ones – the plastic gears inside aren’t made to handle a lot of use. Last week I found two heavy duty ones at thrift shops for about $1 each. I put the dry, mixed ingredients in a bowl, add water, and then mix. It get beaten pretty vigorously. If more water is needed, I just add more. It can be mixed to whatever consistency, thick or thin, that I desire.

Anyway, enjoy the photos of the painting we’ve been doing. There’s still quite a bit more to do. It takes a minimum of three coats. The plaster really soaks up the first coat. When it’s fully covered, it really looks nice. I’ve mixed the paint to an off-white color. Originally, it was going to be kind of a light yellow, but I’ve adjusted it to be more white than yellow. It really brightens things up!

If I don’t blog, did it really get done?

Well, the winter is over, although spring tried to drag it closer to summer. During the winter, I built a fire in the highly inefficient wood stove in the house occasionally. I would say once a week on average I would get a fire going, stuff the stove with as much wood as possible (mostly dried sycamore – not something that would burn for long, but it’s what I had), and close it down. After we stopped work on the house last fall, the indoor temperature was about 60-65 degrees. Adding only a little heat inside, the temperature bottomed out in the house at around 45 degrees. I’m looking forward to seeing what it will be like with a continuous fire when we’re living in it.

I did a few things but not much on the house over winter. Without keeping a lot more heat in there, plaster wasn’t going to dry well. And, without a more efficient stove, that was going to be problematic. Wintertime seems to have other things to commit my time to, anyway. Also, the day light period seems to be shorter for some reason.

I was able to accumulate a few things for the house (I’m still accumulating, actually). I bought interior doors. They are 3’ by 7’ solid core doors that were intended for a doctor’s office, but they had too many. I’ll have to cut them down to the right size and face the edges, but I think they’ll work well (they’re heavy, too). We also bought a kitchen sink. We wanted a stainless steel double sink with double drain-boards. To get what we wanted, we ended up buying a commercial sink.

In march I bought plumbing supplies for running the water lines. I decided to use PEX tubing which I had never worked with before. A friend lent me crimping tools, and I bought all the supplies locally. All the water supply lines are in. I still have to plumb the range boiler for the hot water (heated by the wood stove), but the lines are stubbed out for doing so. I’m actually going to plumb a similar tank on the summer kitchen with the wood stove we’ll use out there for hot water in the summer time. Because of the location for the two stoves, these will be two separate systems with valves to manually select which one to use.

After completing the water lines, I started on the drain lines in April. These are now completed, too. I still have to arrange for a septic system to be installed. We were going to just have a gray water system, but we decided to go ahead and do a full septic system. If gray water isn’t handled properly, it turns into black water. As long as we have water in the cisterns, we’ll be able to use flush toilets. If water gets low, we will use sawdust (composting) toilets.

In addition to the pressurized water system, we will also have pitcher pumps in the house. The plan is to have four: one in the kitchen, one in the mudroom, and one in each bathroom. I just ordered an Oasis Pump – the description of it online looks quite good for our purposes. If it meets expectations, we’ll get more.

On Friday of last week, I decided to mix up some plaster. We quit a few batches shy of having the 2nd coat done last fall. I put one batch on in the morning, and then the 3 younger children joined me in the afternoon. We put 3 more batches on the walls in the afternoon. Two more batches will finish the 2nd coat. That means, the first and second coats will amount to more than 19,000 pounds of plaster – and that’s only counting dry ingredients. By the time the finish coat is completed, we’ll have somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 tons of plaster on the interior walls! That should be a good thermal mass.

Yesterday and today, we mixed and applied 4 batches of finish coat. These batches are about 100 pounds of dry ingredients each, half what the batches for the other coats. These batches have gone on the walls in the master bedroom. The process involves applying the mix to the walls by hand. I then trowel it smooth. After it begins to dry, I buff it with a piece of yogurt container lid. This helps to smooth it out and close up the pores by pushing the sand into the plaster.

We’ll keep working on things. The objective is to get this house done so that we can move in. We’re getting closer.

Twelve batches into the second coat

The second coat (also called the brown or infill coat) of plaster takes a lot of mud. Of course, we already knew that based upon our plastering experiences two years ago when we finished the exterior of the house.

The recipe that I’ve been using for the second coat is different than the recipe for the first coat (also called scratch or discovery coat). The first coat has a fairly high clay content. I used 1.5 parts clay-rich dirt to 2 parts sand. It can be done with equal parts clay and sand (there are variations depending on the clay content of the dirt being used). The more clay there is in the mix, the more cracking that occurs when the plaster dries. This is because clay expands when wet and shrinks when it dries. So, as the plaster dries, it naturally shrinks, and the shrinkage causes cracks (something has to give somewhere). For the first coat, that’s not a big deal – the cracks will be filled by the next coat and will actually help the second key into the first.

For the second coat I started with a mix using 1 part clay to 2 parts sand, but I’ve adjusted that on the last four batches to 1 part clay to 2.5 parts sand. Although cracks on this coat of plaster aren’t a real problem because they will be covered by the finish coat, I would like to minimize them as much as is realistic.

I’ve noticed that cracks are more apt to appear in areas where the plaster is thicker on the wall, presumably because the thinner areas surrounding the thicker dry faster, shrinking as they do. The thicker areas take longer to dry and are still wet enough to be weaker and therefore the first place to give. Less clay in the mix will allow less shrinkage and fewer cracks. The important part is that the plaster be strong enough, a characteristic dependent to a large extent upon the clay which is the substance that binds the plaster together, that makes it work (sand and water doesn’t make a good plaster).

We’ve mixed 12 batches of plaster for the second coat so far. We started in the kitchen, because I want the walls there to dry so we can put up the green board. They are mostly dry now, with only a few areas still damp. The weather played a role in that – it was humid and overcast with rain for several days. That’s not good drying weather. But, drier weather has returned, allowing the process to continue as needed.

The kitchen windows were the first ones I did with the second coat. They went well. The greatest challenge is above the windows. Somehow, gravity seems to work against me, causing plaster to fall. Sometimes it’s because it sticks to my hands more strongly than it sticks to the first coat, I think. But, once it’s pressed in firmly and troweled, it does fine. It’s just initially that a fair bit falls to the window sill. I pick it up and use it anyway (it’s not like it’s going to get dirty).

After the plaster is troweled and shaped, the windows look good. The important thing is to get the shape on the walls with this coat. Around the windows that means the curves I want. On the rest of the walls, the kitchen walls excepted, the idea is to even them out and give them the shape and smoothness desired in the final product. There will be a few areas that will need a third coat, though – some of the low spots require 4 inches or so of plaster, and that is too much at one time in some areas.

After the kitchen, we moved along the wall into the dining room. This wall has the most area to be plastered of all the wall sections. It’s 14 feet long, 9 feet tall, and has only one window. We finished it yesterday and then moved on to the living room walls. As you can imagine looking at the photo (to the right – click to enlarge any of the photos), the areas above the braces on the timber frame present some challenges because of the limited space to work in.

The wall near the chimney behind where the wood stove will be located presented the challenge of plastering behind the chimney. It wasn’t too bad, and, thankfully, it will not be seen anyway. This section of wall will require a third coat in places because of the depth of some low spots.

We moved on from the chimney, around the front door and to the double windows in the living room. We didn’t finish the living room walls today, but we’ve got a good start. It should only take one more batch to finish the second wall. The front wall is done.

We mixed and applied three batches of finish coat on the interior packed walls in the master bedroom earlier in the week. Interestingly, the finish plaster that we put on the upstairs walls a few weeks ago did not dry white as expected. It is white in places, but not as uniformly as I anticipated, like it did when I did a test patch last year after buying the kaolin clay. The only difference I know of in the mix is the addition of wheat paste. I bought some dried wheat past to help bind the plaster together, and I think it is keeping some of the clay from working to the surface when I hard trowel and buff the plaster. That’s okay because we’re going to paint all the walls with a clay paint anyway. The wheat paste does a good job binding the plaster, though, and it keeps the clay from dusting off if you rub on it. It makes a nice finished surface.

It looks like the walls in the bedroom may dry mottled in color, too. There are a few cracks that have developed as the plaster is drying. I’m going to adjust the amount of clay in the recipe. My books recommended more clay in the final coat than I expected, and I went with their recommendation. I think less clay will still work fine and will allow fewer cracks. I need to get some silica sand so that I can mix up some plaster with it to repair the cracks. Masonry sand, even when screened through a window screen, has too many large pieces to make a good patch plaster. I’m going to want some fine silica sand for the clay paint anyway.

In the next few weeks, I’m going to experiment with the clay paint, mixing up different batches to find a recipe that I like. It should be fun trying it out with additives like mica powder and/or mica flakes. I also have some natural yellow ochre pigment to see if I can come up with a nice pale yellow.

A little finish coat and some photos

On Wednesday this week, we decided to put the finish coat of plaster on the walls above the open, center section of the house. I wanted to get the scaffolding out, and we needed it for doing these walls.

I purchased some wheat paste from Natural Craft Supply the previous week which arrived this week. I can make my own wheat paste for less money using high-gluten white flour, but the product I bought is easy to use and works well. The idea with the wheat paste is that it works as a binder in the plaster. Basically, it’s a glue made out of flour (traditionally, it’s been used to glue wall paper to the wall). It helps to hold the plaster together more strongly and keeps the surface from dusting off when it’s dry. It works, too.

Our recipe for the finish plaster was to screen 5 gallons of sand through a window screen (it is amazing how many rocks can be screened out of sand). Then, we mixed in 3.25 gallons of dry, powdered, white kaolin clay by hand. Once that was mixed, we mixed in 1.5 pounds of wheat paste (about 3 cups of dry powder). The next step was to add water and mix thoroughly. It’s amazing how much water it can absorb – about 4 gallons.

We found that it is easiest to smear the plaster on with your hands after dampening the wall (we use a garden sprayer) and then trowel it as smooth as possible, adding or removing material as necessary. After the plaster has begun to set up a little as it begins to dry, I came back over it with a pool trowel to take out trowel marks from the previous step. I tried buffing it with a yogurt container lid, but I liked the trowel better.

The plaster looks gray when it’s wet, but it dries to a white color. Later, I will mix up an alis to paint the walls with. An alis is a clay-based paint (clay, fine silica sand, wheat paste, and water). This will help even out the color (white because we’re using white clay – I’m not intending to put in any pigments) and seal up the finish coat a little more.

Yesterday, the boys and I straightened things up in the house and swept the floors. We also removed the scaffolding from the center of the house. I took a few photos to share.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The photo below is one from three that my camera stitched together – the beams are not really curved like that.

Mud on the walls in the upstairs bedrooms

When we finished plastering the kitchen walls, the only thing left to do downstairs was the pantry. We decided to save it until after we finished the first coat upstairs. I mixed up a batch of plaster and got the boys busy putting it on the walls while I worked around the windows.

I was thinking of putting boards above the windows upstairs because of their location. It turned out that I could plaster above the windows on the ends upstairs, though. So, I had to take down the support boards I had under the bales and put up chicken wire. The bales were actually wedged in very well and didn’t move without the boards to support them.

Then, I had to prepare some oak boards for above the windows on the rear of the house upstairs. I planed some boards from some trees we had cut and milled about 8 years ago. Then, I edged them, cut lap joints, and cut them to the proper length before nailing them in place. They turned out really nice and finish out the windows well.

 

Plaster, studs in the kitchen, & underlayment

Last week we were able to get back to plastering the interior walls full time. We finished the small section in the master bathroom that needed done and moved on to the upstairs walls in the center, open part of the house. We also plastered the wall and around the window in on the landing upstairs.

Another project was to install 2x2 framing on the kitchen walls. I’m going to build in the cabinets and wanted a smooth surface against which to build them. We’re also going to have tile backsplash above the counter and below the upper cabinets. There needs to be something to attach the cabinets to, also. I’m going to put up green board (moisture-resistant drywall) on the kitchen walls. The straw bale walls will be plastered behind the drywall to make sure they are well sealed.

So, once I finished the studding, we plastered the kitchen walls with the first coat. Around the windows and the door, the plaster will be shaped to meld with the surfae of the drywall.

One other project we completed last week was to put down 1/2 inch plywood underlayment upstairs. We have hard wood (oak, maple, and hickory) boards for a subfloor upstairs which also makes the ceiling downstairs. The underlayment will provide a more even surface for installing the finished hardwood floor on later. It will also serve to keep some of the dirt and mess from plastering from sifting through the cracks. Actually, we’ve already had a fair bit of dirt work its way through the cracks and fall from the ceiling downstairs. So, before we could put the underlayment down, we had to clean out as much of the dirt as we could. We used the air compressor with an air nozzle and a vacuum to get as much as we could. We also put down red rosin paper before the plywood. We’ll have another layer of the rosin paper under the finished hardwood.

Mud in June

I’ve let a few weeks pass without posting, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been working. Actually, there were two weeks that we took off from work on the house (not completely, but mostly) for a variety of reasons, including Anne and I celebrating our 22nd anniversary and my finishing up my summer classes.

We continued from where were left off in the last post by finishing in the hallway outside of the guest room and also plastering the walls in the main bathroom. Smearing mud plaster on the walls is not difficult. We just make sure that on raw bales or packed walls that the plaster is worked into the straw well. This first coat provides the foundation for the rest of the plaster, making it important that it is keyed into the straw well. Around the windows, this involves pressing the mud into the straw through the chicken wire used to curve the edges. The straw in these areas is mostly parallel with the surface. On the regular edges of the straw bales the ends of the straws are oriented toward the surface which is much easier to work the plaster into.

One difficulty revealed itself above the back door. Above the windows and the other doors, I used chicken wire to hold the straw in the right shape, but above the back door there was no where convenient to attach the wire at the top above the door. So, I didn’t use any wire and instead just shaped the edge of the bales. This part was fine. The problem was the board that I used to support the bales above the door – the plaster didn’t stick to it once it dried. I’ll have to remedy this later.

Once we finished the bathroom, we moved on to the master bedroom. We plastered in the closet, the walls in the bedroom, and in the master bathroom. We had all the walls except for a small section in the bathroom finished before we ended up taking off the two weeks.

Continuing to put mud on the walls

There were several things to do this last week that did not involve the house, but we were still able to mix and apply several batches of plaster.

On Monday, the boys and I worked all day plastering the walls in the laundry room. We mixed seven batches of plaster and put them on the walls. Each batch weighs around 240 pounds wet. Once it dries, it’ll lose about 40 pounds per batch (a five-gallon bucket of water). So, that’s 1,400 pounds of thermal mass on just these four walls alone. If we count all the walls we’ve done so far (including the walls we did on Friday that I haven’t mentioned yet), it figures out to about 3,500 pounds of thermal mass, and we’ve only put the first coat on a few of the walls. There is still the second coat on the straw bale walls to be figured and a finish coat on all the walls. I find it interesting to think about the mass of the plaster that will help moderate temperature and humidity (clay is good for that) when the house is done.

I took the photos today of the plaster we applied last week. So, you can see that it is drying nicely. It’ll be cured within the next week, I expect. The places where it is thicker will take longer to dry thoroughly, but there’s not really any hurry. The only concern is mold. If the weather cools off and it is damp, the plaster won’t dry quickly like it does when it is warm with a good breeze blowing through the house. We had a few areas on the walls that we packed with slip straw last fall that grew some mold on the surface because the drying conditions deteriorated after we packed them.

I’m not really worried about the mold. It seems to originate in some of the straw that is used in the mixes, probably because of the presence of mold spores. It can only survive and grow in moist conditions. I have discovered a safe way to kill it and prevent it from spreading – white distilled vinegar. We sprayed walls that grew mold after packing last year, and it took care of the problem. There have been a few places where some mold appeared on the surface of the plaster when the drying conditions were not ideal recently. A little vinegar kills it quickly. I’m sure if it was a major case, not just a little here or there, that there might be some other remedies needed, but this one is working for us.

So, after doing all the walls in the laundry room, we didn’t get back to plastering until Friday. We only had the afternoon, and we worked in the guest room. We were able to get 2 walls done. We’ll finish this room tomorrow if all goes well. And, we’ll do a few more walls, too. It is reasonable for us to finish the first coat on all the downstairs walls this week.