We finished the final coat

At the beginning of August 2011, we put the first coat of plaster on a couple of the interior walls of the house. Well, 12 tons of dry material later, we’ve completed plastering the interior walls!

Early in the month, I told Ramiah that we should get the plaster finished in September. Although there have been several other things to work on during the month, not just the house, we have managed to spend some time with our hands in the mud. Yesterday, we did two batches of plaster, finishing the boys room. This morning we were back at it, doing four batches of plaster and finishing the last walls before lunch time.

It feels good to reach this milestone. We celebrated this evening as a family, having some homemade kettle corn and wacky cake (a special family recipe).

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!

I have begun building the kitchen cabinets

I’ll refrain from offering excuses for my lack of blogging during the last however many months.

Last week I began to work on the specific design of the kitchen cabinets for the house. The kitchen space is not large and doesn’t allow for standard kitchen cabinet dimensions/design, especially when factoring in the double-basin commercial sink we purchased. I also didn’t want to pay for commercially-made or specialty-made cabinets (at least not pay someone else – my neighbor says I’m cheap, but I prefer to be called frugal).

The design phase (which actually overlaps quite a bit with the construction phase, at least when I’m the one doing it) began with the dimensions of the kitchen and the locations of the windows and door. We opted for large windows in the kitchen for the light which affect upper cabinet location and size. Lower cabinets have to fit in a space delineated by the refrigerator location and the door to the summer kitchen/porch. We will have no stove in the kitchen since we cook on the wood stove we heat with (or do we heat with the stove we cook on?) during the winter and outside in the summer kitchen during the summer. The basic setup is a U-shape with a short leg on the right and the sink in the middle under the 6-foot window (which is on the longest wall straight ahead as you go into the kitchen).

I searched the internet for information on built-in kitchen cabinets and didn’t find much. So, I made my own plans. I spent some time with Google Sketchup in order to explore my ideas about how to make them. Then, I began the actual construction.

My construction method involves using 2x4’s to frame the toe kick (with some 3/4” plywood to raise it the level of the finished floor). I also put a 2x4 along the wall at the height of the bottom edge of the counter top. I will use some 1-1/2” cherry to construct the counter top. Then, I used maple-veneer plywood for the bottoms of the cabinets and for shelves. I used my Kreg jig to construct some internal rectangular frames using 1x’s I ripped to the desired width and cut to length. Throughout this process, I continuously checked that things were plumb and level.

I secured the rectangular frames into position with pocket screws (Kreg jig, again) and connected them to one another to frame the openings for drawers and cabinets. Later, I will construct face frames for the cabinets using 1x oak boards, and then I will make the doors and drawers.

The design of the kitchen includes five drawers with cabinet space below them. We’ll have eight pull-out trays to better utilize the cabinet space. There was not a good way to make the space in the corners of the U easily accessible. The space can be used, just not very well.

At this point, I have most of the rough framing done for the lower cabinets. I will continue with them and then move on to the upper cabinets. They will also employ some custom design, but more on that at a later time.

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.

Video: House Tour, September 7, 2012

A video tour of the house filmed on September 7, 2012, just after we finished the 2nd coat of plaster on the downstairs walls.

 

http://youtu.be/8zv4w0z3T6Q

Second coat of plaster downstairs is finished

We were able to get back to plastering this last week. We spent the previous week getting the cisterns hooked up. The week before that was occupied with making hay while the weather was good for doing so.

We finished all of the straw bale walls in the downstairs by Friday, September 7, 2012. It took 28 batches to do them all. That’s nearly 3 tons more plaster on the walls once it’s all dry. So far, we’re up to 9 tons of plaster on the interior walls. That total will increase by another 3 tons by the time we’re done, I expect. I think of that as great thermal mass to help moderate the interior temperature during the year – warm in winter, cool in summer.

We hope to complete the second coat upstairs within the next two weeks.

Cistern hooked up

Last summer, we buried three 1,500 gallon septic tanks (new ones) in front of the house to serve as a cistern for rain water collected off of the roof of the house. I also contracted with a local company to install 6-inch seamless gutters on the house. However, it took them a year before they came and completed the job. Thankfully, I wasn’t in a hurry. I patiently waited for them to do the job, calling them occasionally to find out when it would happen (it was almost always, “the first of next week unless the weather is bad”). Yeah, I could have hired someone else to install gutters, but the quote I got from this company was $700 cheaper than the quote I got from another company, and it cost less than what it would cost for me to install gutters.

Anyway, they showed up in late June this summer and installed the gutters. It took me until the last part of August to finally plumb our water collection system from the downspouts to the cistern. It wasn’t difficult. Basically, I ran 4-inch Schedule 35 sewer pipe from each of the four downspouts to the cistern. I installed a roof washer on the east side and on the west side of the house.

The roof washers purpose is to divert away from the cistern the first 100 gallons of water that come off of the roof in a rain storm. This allows dirt, bird droppings, and other contaminants that may have accumulated on the roof to be washed off with the beginning rain and not end up in our household water.

I contemplated upon how to design the roof washer system for the house. The design I settled on uses a 55-gallon barrel for each one. As water flows from the two downspouts on either side of the house, it flows into the barrel on that respective side. I used 2-inch PVC to connect to the barrel with a home-made floating ball valve in the line. The initial rain off of the roof will not generally be more than the 2-inch pipe can handle. The water flows around a ball contained in the space inside two 4-inch to 2-inch reducers. When the barrel is full, the ball floats upward and closes off the entrance for the water into the barrel. This is to help insure that nothing in the barrel can be washed out and back into the line to the cistern.

For the floating ball valve to work, the barrel must be sealed. The water and little bit of air left in it when full keeps the ball from sinking, effectively closing the inlet to the roof washer. I laid the barrels on their side so that water flows in through the top bung into which a regular 2-inch threaded PVC connector threads (2-inch NPT). The other bung which has different threads (very course) can be opened to drain the water out of the roof washer barrel after a rain shower. This system collects about 50 gallons on each side of the house before the water proceeds to the cistern.

We’ve had nearly 3 inches of rain during the last two weekends. I previously calculated that it would take about 2.5 inches of rain to fill the cisterns. My calculation was very close. The cistern was full and overflowing somewhere around 2.6 inches of rain. The overflow runs from the cisterns to the pond through a 100-foot section of 4-inch corrugated drain pipe.

The last thing I did to ready the system for water collection was to install 1/2-inch hardware cloth over the gutters. I bought 3-foot by 10-foot rolls of galvanized hardware cloth and cut it into 8-inch widths with a metal cutting blade. I inserted one edge two inches under the roof metal and attached it to the top of the outside edge of the gutters with self-drilling machine screws ever couple of feet. This keeps most of the leaves out of the gutters and out of the cistern. A few leaves that get through will end up in the roof washers. The rest of them are screened out before the water enters the cistern (it’s run through window screen). Before we use the water in the house, it will run through an inline screen filter, and all drinking water will be filtered with a ceramic filter or a reverse osmosis filtration system.