Floors, Walls, and a Baby!

Well, once again we haven’t posted anything in forever! Rest assured that we have been busy nonetheless. We finished up some major steps in the finishing of our home and we also welcomed a new addition to our family on December 19th, 2016 – our daughter Everlee! It was a lot of work bringing her into the world but it has been so worth it! She was born at home, in our hand-built house, surrounded by friends and family. It was amazing, emotional, and truly life changing.

We tackled both the second layer of earthen floor and the final layer of plaster pretty much at the same time. We did one room/area at a time, starting with the floor then plastering the walls with lime plaster as soon as the floor was able to be stood on. The second layer of floor was poured using the same method as the first layer, only with smaller gravel and only 1 1/2 inches thick. We used a 2X4 laid flat as our screed guide. The lime plaster is a mixture of lime putty and mason sand and it was applied to the wall and troweled flat. At first, Mike slowly but surely applied every bit of plaster with a trowel, but eventually we switched to Holden applying it with gloved hands then Mike going behind him with the trowel. This proved to be very effective as well as much faster! It turned out really great and everyone who sees it has commented on it.

We also managed to coerce Tom into coming out and helping finish the cedar siding on the other gable end, which really made everything look more finished on the exterior.The cedar really looks good with the green roof and we think it’s going to look perfect with what will eventually be lime plastered walls. This summer we’re going to finish up the floors (finally!) and cover the exterior walls with lime plaster like we did the interior. We’re really getting close to actually being finished!

Mike working hard plastering and Cara working hard growing a baby!

You can see the contrast between the dark earth plaster and the light lime plaster here pretty well.

Lime plastering is a lot of laborious trowel work, but it turns out really cool!

Teamwork and a different approach certainly made plastering go much faster!

The light color of the lime plaster really brightened up the rooms!

By this point Holden was applying lime plaster by hand and Mike went behind him smoothing with the trowel.

Cara hanging out in the awesome finished window sill.

Mike had this down by the time we got going on the second layer of the living room.

The second layer went in fast! We just had to wait for it to dry.

The second layer would come up flush to the concrete floor of the kitchen.

In order to do these rooms everyhting had to be squeezed into another area of the house for a few weeks for each room!

They really are getting good at this whole mud floor thing.

Looking good!

It was a challenge to get all the floors to end up at the same height!

The home stretch!

After a LOT of hard work, they were finally at the last bit!

Looking a little worn out! Success!

Mike and Holden stayed up in the air while Tom made the cuts.

Another project finished!

The cedar turned out really nice!

Welcome to the world Everlee!

It feels really great to have our walls done and they turned out really cool!

You can see the recently finished kitchen in this pic. That will be another post! Everything is finally coming together!

 

 

A Living Roof For the Cellar

Although a lot of DIY construction takes longer than intended, this project has been truly long-term! We began building this cellar/storm shelter while we still lived in a camper, way back in 2011. It was our first summer on the land and one of our first major projects. Well, time goes on, we get busy and some things fall by the wayside, to be finished at an undetermined time. That’s what happened with our cellar. Once we began construction on the house the cellar became very low priority. It has been four roofless block walls for almost five years – but no more! We enlisted our awesome work party crew to help us finish it up and make it functional and it’s turned out to be really cool! We originally planned on burying the entire building but our dirt pile shrank over time and we didn’t have enough to cover it. This gave us the idea of giving the building a living roof to help it blend in to the surroundings and it has turned out great!

Summer of 2011 was a really crazy time for us. We were learning so much and doing so many new, and sometimes difficult, things. We were definitely not afraid to work, but our lack of knowledge or equipment sometimes led to us doing a bit more work than necessary. We contemplated digging out the spot for the cellar by hand with shovels, but thankfully our friends Ben and Carrie offered to help us dig our giant hole with their awesome tractor and its back-hoe attachment. This sounded like a better idea! We quickly realized the ground is so rocky that we would never have been able to dig such a deep hole by ourselves anyway! Even the tractor had to stop a little shallower than we had planned because it hit solid rock! The kids got to operate the machine and it was a lot of fun. After the pit was dug, it rained a few days in a row and it filled with water and mud quickly, but the kids took advantage of this and had fun wallowing in the mud pit!

Next we dug a small, 8X12 foot trench to act as the form for the concrete foundation. This was not easy and was done mostly with a rock bar. We started this building with help from our work party friends and this was actually our first work party! We were fortunate to have the help as we had no clue what we were doing. After a bunch more digging (rock busting) and concrete wrangling, we had a good base for the block walls to stand on.

We found some blocks for sale which had come from an old service station on the highway that had been torn down – only a quarter apiece! The only bad thing was all the old mortar we had to chip off, which took several days. The next phase of building really shows how little experience we had. We mixed up the mortar and began stacking the walls but soon realized we are not good mortar mixers. We couldn’t figure it out and our mortar crumbled away after drying! After sadly crashing down the walls we had so far and being really frustrated, we learned about a product which allows for building a block wall without mortar. It’s called surface bonding cement and it’s basically concrete with little fiberglass fibers in it for shear strength. It holds the walls together and is also waterproof. We dry stacked the blocks, which was like a Jenga nightmare at times, and then troweled on the SBC. It set nicely and we all breathed a sigh of relief that the mortar debacle hadn’t been repeated. After pouring some concrete in the tops of the blocks and setting pieces of threaded rebar in some of them so we could attach a roof plate, we were ready to add a roof and bury it!

Not so fast! We got busy and focused on other, more pressing things (like building a house!) and before we knew it, it was five years later and we still had an ugly, roofless half-building sitting there. Work party to the rescue! Tom helped us figure out a plan and the guys got together and built a much-improvised living roof for it. The block walls were far from plumb (surprise!) so it was an adventure in carpentry, as many of our work party projects tend to be! We framed the roof with big 2X12 boards to hold the weight of soil, water, and any people who walk on it. Our friend PJ came and pushed the dirt up against the walls with his skid steer after we put in some drainage pipes along the bottom of the walls, which saved us a ton of work digging. Next we put down the decking and then built a box around the top out of some nice cedar we had previously milled. A layer of cardboard went down first to avoid tearing the fragile waterproof layer, which is made from four sheets of simple 4 mil black plastic. We checked into fancy waterproof membranes, but they were all more money than we wished to spend. We used some old carpet remnants as a drainage layer then filled the box with compost. On the front of the building, there are holes drilled in the cedar box which drain into a gutter to allow excess rain to escape. Even with the front draining, it holds moisture really well. It still feels wet several days after it has rained. It’s not quite finished, as we need to add some flashing around the boards at the top and a door, but we’ll get to it soon – hopefully not five years from now! We’re thinking of growing strawberries and some flowers with a few little paths in between. There are no leaks yet and a bunch of volunteer tomatoes came up from the compost, so we consider it a success! It just took a while!

 

Holden had fun operating the tractor backhoe. We were thankful to not have to shovel the giant hole!

Determined to finish Mike even dug in the rain.

We thought this was the end of the digging, but we still used the rock bar and shovels quite a bit more before we could build walls.

The rain led to us having a large mud pit in the bottom of the hole. Perfect chance to get filthy!

Neck to toe mud kids.

It was really tough to get just a few more inches deeper! This is the form for the concrete foundation.

That’s right. We know exactly what we’re doing!

First work party! Woohoo!

Turned out pretty good after all.

We chipped off the old mortar stuck to all our blocks with hammer and chisel. It took forever!

We stacked the blocks with no mortar. Almost finished here.

We filled all the cracks with mortar to prepare the walls for the surface bonding cement.

It was a lot of trowel work but went pretty smoothly.

Riley got in on the fun too!

Installing the box around the top which holds the soil.

Everyone looks so happy in this shot watching the dirt work.

This really saved a ton of work and made it look way better.

Another work party success!

Before adding dirt, we cleaned up around the building. There were a lot of big rocks and we wanted to plant grass so we moved a bunch of them.

I said it was a bunch! Who else does this?!?

We laid down some old carpet to act as a drainage layer.

First scoop of dirt!

It took quite a bit to fill the box. It’s about five inches deep, which is plenty for most vegetables.

Ready for planting!

There’s a little bit of grass growing now and it blends in to the surroundings nicely!

Major Loft Progress!

We recently completed some long-awaited projects in the top half of the house and they have totally changed the feel of the interior! We covered the ceiling with pine car siding during a work party and the work went really smoothly, as we are some experienced car siding installers by this point. Tom did a ton of prep work beforehand, so the majority of the boards were cut and ready to install. With him staying on the floor most of the time cutting, we then handed the boards up to the rest of the crew and nailed them up. Most of the boards were good and straight and the nail gun made quick work of attachment, as usual. It felt really good to get the entire ceiling covered and a little more trim work later made it look even more finished.

The second major project completed upstairs is the railing. This turned out amazingly and Holden, with Tom’s guidance, really outdid himself! He cut, sanded, stained and varnished 129 uprights and the top and bottom pieces of the rail. He used five different colors of stain and it looks really cool! They assembled each section of railing at Tom’s so they would install super easy at the house.

Installing the railing went really smoothly! We had to cut off the floor joist ends flush so the facing board will attach evenly, so Tom sliced them off while Holden held a tub under the ends to catch them. We handed up the pieces and attached them to the posts and the spiral staircase railing. It all came together really nicely and we have been constantly admiring it since then! It is by far better, and sturdier, than the 2X4’s we’ve had as “temporary” rails for a couple years now! A little miscellaneous trim work is left to do, and our someday-in-the-future plan is to put wood flooring over the existing sub-floor and add cabinets to the back of the loft area. But for now, it’s looking pretty darn good up there!

It feels really good to build parts of our house with the help of friends. The memories of good times are always there, built right in.We’re also incredibly proud to have our son’s craftsmanship displayed throughout the house. It obviously adds a special dimension to the value of our home (to us). Every time a project is finished, our house becomes even more hand-built!

Left side of loft ready for wood.

Right side of loft.

It went up quickly and the nail gun made it pretty easy!

Having done the other half of the house previously, we were pros by the time we did this side!

Tom cut the angled boards for the gable end while Mike and John nailed them up.

Gable end finished.

The crew.

Look at all that wood!

Mike and Holden doing the side of the dormer.

Last spot of car siding!

Holden catching the board ends with a tub.

Holden cut, sanded, stained and varnished 129 pieces to be assembled in sections to make 38 feet of railing. He used 5 different stain colors to give the finished railing a one-of-kind look

All Assembled and ready to install!

The pieces of railing were assembled beforehand which made installing them much simpler.

First section up!

A little fine-tuning was necessary to hook the new railing to the spiral stairs.

Turned out good though!

It looks so much more finished up there!

After a little trim work that’s left it’ll be all done!

It feels a lot bigger up there after the new railing added some room.

Finally an Update!

We are obviously totally blog slackers, therefore we haven’t posted about our progress in several months! Busy, busy! It has been a tough year for us, and we’re proud to have still finished so many big projects! Here’s a bunch of photos of what we’ve been doing. It’s been mostly inside stuff getting the house to look more finished. We got all the walls covered with drywall and painted and also completed the first layer of the earthen floor throughout the house. It’s really a challenge to do the floor since we have to empty an entire room, find a place to stuff everything we moved, and live without the room while waiting for the floor to dry! The next two layers are much thinner though, and will take far less time to be ready. We also just had another work party to finish up the car siding which covers the big open ceiling, but we’ll post those pictures separately soon!

We all got in on the painting action. This is Holden beginning to paint the second coat on the living room wall.

We left the posts showing the same way they do on the exterior straw bale walls.

Our utility area, mudded, taped, sanded, and ready to paint!

We love how the color turned out with the cedar trim.

We removed everything from the kitchen to pour a concrete floor. Mike is leveling the form with Tom, who is just outside of the photo.

It was a big deal to completely disassemble our kitchen for this project! Being kitchen-less for six weeks or so if we made an earthen floor here was a major reason we decided to do concrete instead. We cook a lot!

Our friend Jim came to help with the pour and was crucial to our success! He knew what he was doing and kept us on track from the start. Thanks Jim!

After we hauled it all inside from the concrete truck with wheelbarrows, we screeded it smooth with a long, straight board.

Jim brought an awesome concrete float and did an amazing job of tediously working the liquid floor until perfectly smooth.

It cured amazingly quickly to us, since we’re used to the earthen floor drying slowly! We plan to cover it with ceramic tile eventually.

Mudding the kitchen drywall. Notice the curved post and the attempt to cut the sheetrock to match the curve.

The color looks nice with the cedar post.

See, we had to hook the stove back up as soon as possible!

Texturing Holden’s ceiling. It was our first time ever doing it and it turned out really good.

This photo shows the swirly pattern of the texture brush and what it covers up.

Taping the wooden beams before painting Holden’s newly-textured ceiling.

And the paint!

Time to finally get the first layer of the earthen floor finished throughout the house!

We had to make it fit against the sandstones we have under and in front of our wood stove.

It was tricky keeping it level all around but it worked out pretty good!

Behind the stove.

Mike setting up form boards for the next portion. This entire portion was tricky to keep level because it was in the middle of a few different areas of finished floor. Everything has to end up the same height!

Working under the stairs was fun!

Buckets all day! Awesome job by the mixer, Holden!

It was challenging to plan a course of action at times but it all seemed to come together pretty nicely.

Covered! No more gravel floor anywhere!

The second layer of floor will go almost to the top of the rocks.

Nothing like some ceiling drywall hanging to get you in weird, uncomfortable positions.

Use your head!

Brandon came over to help and quickly realized he’d been had. No fun!

We tried a bigger texturing brush in our room, but we definitely prefer the thicker, swirly pattern left by the smaller brush we used in Holden’s room. Always learning!

Cleaning beams.

Everyone worked together and knocked it out pretty quick!

We really like how the color turned out!

The custom cherry trim made from tree to board by Holden and Tom is incredible as always!

Our room is complete except the final coat of plaster and the floor! Yay!

Tom and Mike got up on the gable ends and attached soffit to the underside. We’ll attach wood siding over the house wrap eventually.

They made a few repairs as well because we had some leaks during rainstorms on this side! Good thing the walls are straw bale and plaster! The water evaporated out pretty fast and the wall was back to being dry! 😉

Spiral Staircase Finally Installed!

For the past two years and four months, we have used a ladder/stairs that Cara and I built from simple 2X6 lumber and drywall screws. The kids have both become so acclimated to them that they fly up and down them, but they have always been a little intimidating to visitors, especially those of the short and young variety (and a few of the fully grown visitors as well!). We found a cool steel spiral staircase for sale on a local want-ads type website and we had to get them, knowing that is what we had envisioned being in the house from very early on.  We got a great deal and were all ready to install them right away. Well they turned out to be a little more difficult to assemble than expected and we needed to have the floors more done to figure out where to put the base of the pole. Well, we finally got to the point where we can put them up!

First, we got out the hand sander and Cara, Holden, and Riley sanded every piece of the staircase to roughen the painted steel so it would better take our coat of black paint. It’s a bit ironic to be painting them black since they were originally black until the folks we bought them from painted them beige. Cara, Holden, and Riley all helped paint too. It all looked as good as new when finished!

After the paint dried, our incredibly handy friend Tom came over and again was indispensable to the project (thanks again Tom!). We spent a whole day thinking about how we wanted them situated. We had a too-close wood stove to consider since the varnished treads and painted metal could be effected by the heat, so we made the steps go up to the left instead of right. If the treads went right, they were right on top of the stove and looked wrong and wouldn’t have been functional at all. We had to build a temporary platform to put the pole on and figure out where the final height of the one-square-foot concrete pad needed to be poured. When we got all the treads on the pole and set into place, we realized we didn’t quite have room for all the treads! Back to the drawing board! We figured it out for the final assembly but it was a little weird having a little concrete square to show for our entire day’s work! We built a simple wood form and poured just under a bag of concrete mix to make the pad. Tom returned the next day and we got to work on the final assembly!

We started by sawing the ends of the floor joists even and attaching a face board to them which would have the landing tread attached to it. Next we stood the base and pole on the concrete base and slid each tread down the pole, heavily scratching the pole and it’s nice fresh paint job! We’ll definitely have some touch-up painting in our near future! The landing went on last and then the placement of the base could be determined. We attached the landing to the face board with lag bolts and some hefty screws firmly attached the other side to a 6X6 cross-beam. Starting at the top, we slid one tread at a time up the pole and hooked it to an upright piece. The holes in the uprights helped us know where the treads went, but we had to make sure they were in the right place in the adjustable bolt-slots so all the treads would fit this time. Luckily Tom did the math the night before and all went according to plan. We used a level to get each tread as flat as possible and tightened everything down.

We finished up by hooking on the hand rail, which was one of the trickiest parts of the whole thing! We ended up having to drill a few new holes at the top and bottom because the stairs had twisted the opposite direction in the previous house they were installed in and the rail wouldn’t twist the way we needed it to. We wrangled it into place and Holden screwed in the cherry wood treads he custom-built for the staircase a few months ago with Tom in their woodworking class. Tom had some gorgeous seasoned cherry he had milled from an old tree which he knew would be perfect for the stairs. Holden planed, jointed, assembled, sanded, and varnished them, bringing out a nice reddish-brown luster. You couldn’t find a more made-from-scratch piece of woodworking! They are truly incredible and he couldn’t have made a more beautiful and sentimental, yet functional, addition to the project. They really make the whole staircase look so elegant but, frankly, a little out-of-place in our still-unfinished home. When we get to a certain point though, they will match everything perfectly!

We’re proud and excited to have this big addition to our home finally (almost) completed with the help of the whole family and our amazing friend Tom. Barbara came over and helped Riley with a difficult crochet project too, so thanks to her as well! We just have to add a few bits of railing at the top and do a bunch of touch-up painting and they’re complete! We’ll post some pics of the final result when it’s all done! This is going to be a big year for the house building, as we intend to finish several long-time ongoing projects before the end of the fall, including the floors and all the plastering that remains! On top of that the railing for the loft and the car siding on that side of the house will be completed and that will really make it all blend nicely. Wish us luck!

Don’t forget to click on the pics to make them bigger!

Way back when the house had no walls, we built these “temporary” wooden ladder/stairs. Cara did good with the drill!

This was a trial stand-up, but you can see how long these stairs have been in use!

That was easy !

Fast forward to more than two years later and they have been working fine all this time. But, time for some real stairs in this house!

First we had to sand the pieces so the smooth painted metal could be repainted by us.

All ready to paint them black.

Riley rolling on some black paint.

It wasn’t very fun, but the pieces all look much better black, which was their original color before the people we got them from painted them beige.

Mike and Tom wracking their brains.

This was a trial run, soon to be completely taken back down.

The form for the small one-square-foot concrete pad upon which the base for the pole will be attached.

Tom had the fun job of reaching over the rail to saw the ends of the joists even so a face-board could be attached.

Mike and Holden attached the face board to the joist ends.

This is the pole being set into place. It looked great freshly painted, but got really scratched up sliding the treads off and on a few times!

The landing was really awkward to get slid on to the pole.

We used a level to set all the treads in place while attaching the uprights at the same time.

Such precision!

Each tread has four set screws that hold the ringed end in place on the pole. They are no fun to tighten!

Riley got to walk up them first, since she will be using them the most.

Holden screwed on his custom-made cherry wood treads and the black hand rail got wrestled into place.

The view from above is really nice! The treads really make the whole thing, and we’re loving them!

A New Year’s Look at the End of 2014

Today is the first day of the year 2015! We spent the tail-end of 2014 doing various fun things mixed in with a lot of hurried mud work! We tried really hard to get the earthen floor’s first layer done throughout the house, but we did not get to a small area around the wood stove and we still have a gravel floor covered with carpet in the kitchen. We did get more done than we thought we would because we had some really nice, warm days after it had turned super cold early in the fall. We had given up since it was so cold and resigned ourselves to waiting for the spring, but we got a week or so of much warmer weather and got to do more floor mixing and pouring. It is awesome to have this much of the floor done! We also wanted to get the second coat of plaster done throughout the house, and we finally accomplished it in the past few days! In the spring, we’ll finish up the first layer of floor and start the second layer in other areas and then we’ll do a little plastering on the outside walls and finally be ready for the final coat, a lime plaster.

In late October we had a fun time with some friends (and strangers) during a local get-together at which Mike was invited to share his knowledge of the local fungal flora by leading a group on a mushroom walk/hunt! It ended up being pretty popular and a ton of fun! There were at least twenty hunters, many kids included. We were transported to the hunting area by a tractor pulling us on a big trailer, through a field, and to the trees on the other side! Great fun was had by all, although some stuck it out in the woods longer than others. It was discovered that little kids are awesome mushroom hunters, as they are low to the ground and they get really excited when they find a big, fat mushroom and are therefore motivated to find more fungus! We ended up finding a big pile of puffball mushrooms which were a brown variety about the size of a grapefruit! We made it back to the hosts’ house eventually and Mike, along with PJ, his awesome helper both in the woods and in the kitchen, got the bounty ready for cooking. They peeled the puffballs, revealing the spongy, marshmallow-like interior, and sliced them into pieces. They were then dipped in egg wash, rolled in flour, and fried in hot oil. Mmmm….. Delicious! Seriously, everyone got to try some and they were all impressed! Even self-proclaimed mushroom haters who were convinced to try some were amazed at how tasty these crunchy-on-the-outside and soft-on-the-inside fried fungus were! A few of the kids were hard to keep away from the finished product and might have eaten every single chunk if we had let them! Puffballs are definitely a little-known local treat, and sharing this gourmet fungus with so many friends was a great experience!

Every year, a goal of ours is to have a fresh salad from our garden at Christmas time. We’ve made our goal the last several years thanks to a simple hoop tunnel we build over one of our raised beds. This is an easy and effective way to extend the growing season and have fresh home grown food for a longer time. You just need some irrigation tubing, some big pieces of plastic (we used house-wrap), and some duct tape (of course!). We used the tubing to make half-circle hoops and stuck them into the soil, making a skeleton to hold the plastic covering. We used leftover house wrap, which worked great since it’s the perfect width and it can be cut to length, which was also good since our beds are about twenty-five feet long! We planted radishes, spinach, kale, chard, and tons of lettuce back in September, but it was a few weeks too late in hindsight. The plants never did get very big as we had some really cold weather before they had a chance to grow very much. Next year we’ll get the seeds in the ground a few weeks earlier, when it’s still hot. That will be easier since we also got a water spigot ran down to the edge of the garden! Now watering the garden will not be a dreaded battle with the hoses! We plan to set up a soaker hose on a timer so our veggies can survive the hot, dry stretches in the summer even when we can’t get out there to water often enough! Well, the pictures prove that it’s worth the effort! The last greens from the hoop tunnel were picked the day after Christmas! It feels (and tastes!) good to extend the season of fresh veggies straight from our garden. Now a couple months of no gardening will give Mike a break from tending it and we will cherish that first salad in the spring even more!

Most of the past couple months have been spent playing in the mud though! We (mostly Holden and Mike!) got a LOT of earthen floor mixed and poured! We came really close to our goal of finishing the first layer everywhere in the house, but didn’t quite make it! We are about to begin work on installing our spiral staircase and that has made it necessary to plan a little more for how the floor in that area will be done. We are really glad to have as much as we do though! It’s great to have a solid floor rather than gravel with carpet on it, that’s for sure! We’ll finish the first layer in early spring and then we’ll do the second layer throughout the whole house. It will take much less time and materials than the first layer, as it is much thinner and will dry much faster.

We did finally finish the second coat of plaster inside the house, which was a major goal we were glad to reach before winter! Holden has become the main plaster mixer, and he’s getting really good at it! He pumps out buckets of consistent mud while the rest of us put it on the wall! Mike does the higher-up areas and the hard-to-do spots like window sides and sills. He always has to go back over everyone else’s work and make it all smooth and pretty – so picky! Now after a few more finishing touches, the interior is ready for lime plaster, which we will be putting on in the spring. It goes on with a trowel and will definitely be an adventure in itself!

Well, we’re chugging right along and it feels like we’ll never be “done” with our house, but when we look back at what we have done in the last few years, we realize we’ve really accomplished a lot, and nothing can stop us when we set our minds and hearts to something. We hope others will be motivated by what we’ve done and see that if we can do it, they can too! So many folks we’ve met want to live differently, freely, but they are unable to make the leap! We advise doing it NOW! Take the plunge and free yourself to live the life you want!

Don’t forget to click on the pictures to make them bigger! 😉

Such a well-captured audience! Everyone had fun and hopefully learned some things about the local fungus!

Mike brought these Honey Mushrooms to cook up in case we got skunked on the hunt.

PJ was a big help! Him and Mike cooked up all the shrooms we found and brought for the whole crowd!

Peeled and sliced puffballs ready to fry.

The first hoop going in.

The skeleton is up!

We covered it with some house-wrap.

A simple structure to extend the vegetable growing season.

We can uncover half the bed when the weather is nice.

Harvesting is a little challenging, but it’s fun to hang out under cover with the veggies in from the cold!

Freshly picked lettuce and greens the day after Christmas! Pretty good, eh?

First row of the area in front of the front doors. This connected the living room and dining room floors that were already dry by then.

One row done!

Mike’s getting to be a pro at this!

Beautiful earth…

Nowhere to go!

The last bit had to be screeded from outside!

Here’s how it looks now. We put rugs down since it’s still the rough first layer. It’s cool to have no more lumps!

We finally got the second coat of plaster done in Holden’s room.

Mike tried to level the straw window sill as much as possible before covering it with mud.

The sill turned out good and the whole room looks much better.

The bathroom plastering was awkward! Lots of bending, stretching, and contorting into twisted positions. Plastering in the bathtub is always fun!

To add the second coat to the kitchen area, the sink had to be taken out to get behind it.

It looks so much better now! We didn’t realize it would make such a difference!

The earth window sills are great!

Mike spent a few days filling in the inevitable cracks around the edges. Tedious, but it really makes a difference!

Many Hands Make Light Work

We had yet another fun and productive day recently, as it was our turn to host our group of friends for the latest work party! We all spent the day getting dirtier than most people are comfortable with getting. One of the great things about earth plaster is that it requires no prior experience to participate. Although most of the members of our group had done plastering before, some had not but they caught on quickly. It’s fun to watch how “newbies” look when they get that first blob of mud in their hands and they smear it on the wall carefully and wonder if they’re doing it right. All the uncertainty fades as they soon realize how hard it would be to do anything wrong! If it sticks and you’re putting it in the right place, you’re doing it right!

We got an entire exterior wall covered with the second coat, the north wall. We had hoped to get TWO walls covered that day, but unforeseen obstacles thwarted those plans, as they so often do. The first layer, which we applied two years ago, was one of the first times we did earth plaster and we had not found our source of good clay soil yet. We dug the dirt from our land and it turns out it had very little clay in it! The resulting coat of plaster dried into a dusty, crumbly, and somewhat fragile base for our current layer. Usually the base coat provides a sturdy foundation upon which to apply the next coat, which should be easier to apply onto than the straw had been. In this case, the base layer tended to crumble and even fall off in some places when we applied the fresh plaster. Luckily, we have had a lot of experience with different materials and have become pretty good at mixing a customized batch with properties that are specific to the situation. We made a nice and wet mix, with more clay than usual to make it extra sticky and bind to the base coat more effectively. We also had to continuously soak the wall as we worked our way down it because the plaster really wouldn’t stick to the base coat when dry at all!

Our work party friends are awesome though, and everyone pushed on even though it was slow-going. It was also really frustrating when the spot you just finished came peeling off a few minutes later and you had to do it all over again! All in all, it looked better than we thought it would look by the end of the day and we were grateful to have had the help.

We must mention the great work Holden did supervising the mixing of every batch of plaster! He helps Mike a lot with plastering (and the floors) and he is getting quite good at producing a good, consistent mix that goes on easily and looks good after drying. He did good at showing the guys how to get a good mix and how to prepare the ingredients too, and soon we were all humming along like an assembly line.

While the rest of us were playing in the mud, Tom was busy building two small sets of steps on our deck, which were long-overdue. They ended up being a really nice addition and we are enjoying the new stairs and their safe and sturdy awesomeness. We’re very thankful for Tom taking on that project alone.

As always, the work party was productive and everyone had a good time. We’re really cutting it close, but we think we’re going to meet our goals of getting the second coat of the exterior done, finish a few walls inside that need their second coat, and pouring one more small area of earthen floor before the cold weather hits and drives us inside for a few months. Also, it’s tough to work with dirt when it’s frozen!

Wish us luck in getting where we need to be!

Don’t forget to click the pictures to make them bigger!

When you first begin a big wall like this, it seems like it will be impossible to ever cover this much area! We must dive in anyhow.

Bub did an awesome job! He was unsure of his ability at first, but after just a few minutes he got the hang of it!

Cara’s a real pro at this plastering business by now! A muddy beauty who works as hard as any man – impressive, eh?

Holden was in charge of the plaster mixing team! He did great and so did everyone else! The flow of plaster-filled buckets seemed to be never-ending! Great work, all!

Working around windows is always tedious and requires great care to look good in the end. It’s a good feeling when you complete an area like this and it looks so much better than it did before you began.

Barbara was awesome and showed no hesitation to get good and muddy!

Amy is Bub’s wife and she was as new to the whole plastering thing as he was. She caught on quick though, and really worked hard!

This is probably the most labor-intensive step of the entire plaster mixing process. Adding chopped straw by hand is much more tiring than you would assume!

Mark brought his old heavy duty drill to use alongside ours. Good thing he brought it, because ours broke a few minutes into the day!

Most people who are sifting clay to prepare for mixing it into plaster do not look as happy as Bub does here! Quite the hard-working, yet pleasant, fellow he is!

Mike was fighting with the higher-up areas a lot. Some of the straw-stuffed, tar paper covered areas are not nearly firm enough to provide a good, stable base on which to add the new layer.

Unlike most of the work parties we have, the women got to participate in the work this time! That’s one of the best things about green building – just about anyone can do it, no previous skills or experience necessary!

The plaster mixing crew, hard at it!

John is to blame for this hand print on Phanie’s backside – caught mud-handed!

It looked pretty darn good and we got all the way down the wall!

Tom awesomely offered to put the stairs on our deck for us while we all got covered in mud! Thanks Tom, they were much-needed!

These are the side stairs. This is where we will build an outdoor kitchen soon.

It’s nice to have these sturdy, safe steps instead of the giant, stacked sandstones we were using.

Summertime and the Muddin’s Easy

Well, here in Mid-Missouri, we have had a mild summer, similar to last year. The last few weeks have warmed up, but fall will be here before we know it. We’ve spent a great deal of the season playing in the mud! We have finished most of the second coat of plaster on the interior walls, and we are almost done with the first layer of earthen floor throughout the house. The center of the main living area, where the wood stove is located, is the only area to be done still, but it has to wait until the living room is dry so we can move all our furniture back. We have decided to pour a concrete floor in half of the kitchen area, mostly where the appliances sit. The kitchen is the highest-traffic area in the whole house, so it would be very much a pain in the neck to have to wait several weeks for an earthen floor to dry and not be able to use the sink, or the stove and refrigerator either. See, the best course of action when building a house is usually to build the floor BEFORE you move in! Alas, we had no time and had to move in long before we were ready to pour the floors. Also, the long drying times would have made it take even longer to move in. We’ll be covering the concrete with tile eventually. 

The floors will have three layers all together. The first layer, which we are just now finishing up, is the thickest by far, and therefore takes the longest to pour and to dry. We are thrilled to not have gravel floors any more (well, almost anyway)! We’ll be stopping with mud work for the cold months soon, so in the spring we’ll start on the thinner second layer and then the third, finish layer in the summer. The other two layers dry much faster than the first. 

The walls are getting their second coat of earth plaster: we’re racing to get it done! This coat is really thick because there are vertical boards, called “furring strips” which protrude from the walls due to an oversight during the bale-raising. That’s okay because we will end up with an extra thick coat of plaster on all the walls, which increases their thermal performance. They will hold warmth and coolness for longer and enhance the comfort level of the house overall. In the spring, we’ll apply the final layer, which is a lime plaster – a mix of lime putty (soaked for two years!) and fine masonry sand. It will be dyed a terra-cotta color and applied with a trowel in a layer less than an inch thick. The exterior of the house will have its second coat finished (or almost so) during our upcoming work party. It will get a final coat of a lime plaster in the spring as well. We’re still a ways from finished, but we’re getting there!

We’ve had a lot of help recently from Mike’s brother Brandon and his girlfriend Carly. They are interested in learning some natural building skills and hope to build their own straw bale home some day. They have been a valued help with plastering walls and doing work on the floors as well. Also, Holden has become the resident mud mixer, as he has gotten really good at turning out a really good plaster and floor mix. He is a really dedicated and hard worker and his help is invaluable. Our friends and neighbors Jim and Tammi came out one weekend and helped get some floor work done too. Jim is a super hard worker and Mike even let him do something other than carry heavy buckets of mud back and forth all day! He figured out the mud-screeding and helped with every aspect of the floor building that day. AS usual, we would not have gotten as much done without the help of good friends and family!

In addition to playing in the mud, we have been keeping busy in many other ways this summer. We have had a very plentiful garden, despite the dry season, eating our fill of heirloom tomatoes for the past few months. We grew a few foods we’ve never grown before and had some delicious harvests as our reward. Holden has been making us very proud with his budding woodworking skills, building pieces which we’ll cherish for the rest of our days. Riley has been a huge help in keeping the house running while we’re all so busy, and she has been a big help to Cara when she goes with her to help her with a work day. All of us working together has yielded some impressive results! 

With the cold on its way, we’ll be doing indoor housework other than mud walls and mud floors, but as soon as the warmth returns, we’ll be mud-mixing again! 

This set of pictures may seem jumbled, but we put them in the order in which we did these things. We would plaster a room and then do the floor, plaster then floor, plaster then floor. We had to move entire rooms of furniture and cram them into too-small spaces while we waited for floors to dry. We had our bedroom in the living room for a while and right now our living room is crowded in the small area around the wood stove! It will be nice to have everything back in their places…until spring when we have to do it all again!

Mike’s brother Brandon has been coming over to help with all the dirty work quite a bit! This is him with his girlfriend’s cousin Darian, who came out with them a few times. Playing in mud always brings out the smiles!

Our bedroom got the first chance for a second coat of earth plaster.

As the plaster on the wall dries. Mike and Holden start leveling the board which holds the first row of mix in place.

Holden is learning some amazing skills from Tom! This custom shelf for our bathroom is all cherry wood he milled and it’s beautiful!

Holden attached the shelf to the bathroom wall so it would be more secure and not fall on anyone!

This is some trim that Tom and Holden prepared for the interior of the house.

Brandon’s roommate Davie even got in on some mixing for a bit.

This is our precise-as-always cheat sheet for our floor mix.

Our friend and (country) neighbor Jim came and worked really hard on the floor with Mike and Holden. He’s the only person Mike has allowed to spread and level the mix after it’s dumped in place. Lucky!

I wonder how many buckets of floor mix have been carried in and dumped so far?

It’s a great feeling to get to the last part of a room!

The transition from one room to another can be interesting. This one was pretty co-operative though.

Mike has become a mud-screeding master! Look at him, all Zen.

This part was tricky since the first layer of mud floor has to end up lower than the adjacent concrete floor. A level has been close by throughout the floor project.

Two rows and the “hallway” area was finished!

Cara discovered an awesome way to fill the spaces between furring strips much more quickly than we had been doing. Instead of smearing on small handfuls over and over, we take large handfuls…

…And toss them at the wall! This makes them stick really well and a lot of material can go on at a time. Awesome!

After several handfuls of plaster are splatted together, they cover a large and deep area pretty quickly. Then you just smooth them down and move on to the next spot.

Mike is always in charge of high-up and hard-to-reach spots.

The window sills Mike made all look really nice. They’re so deep and we love the natural curves!

While we plastered the kitchen, the floor of the bedroom was drying – slowly.

With the sills and the rest of the second layer done, it was time to start the floor in the kitchen.

Brandon came to help again and we started by removing a bunch of gravel from the floor to get it to the right height.

One row down!

The view from the loft of the kitchen floor in progress.

Holden tamped the gravel to avoid settling after being poured.

We had an awesome garden to nurture us in the midst of all this work! This is one day’s harvest!

Here’s our mix of different potatoes we grew this year. This is the first time we’ve had success with potatoes, so we were thrilled!

We really got a good harvest of tomatoes this summer. So colorful!

Home-made pickles from our home-grown cukes! These are in brine and ready to ferment. Best. Pickles. Ever.

We picked a bunch of elderberries to make Elderberry Elixir for the winter

Cara used her grandma’s very-often-used old aluminum food mill to squish the juice out of the berries.

We made a lot of Elderberry elixir We like to have it in the winter and it makes a great Christmas gift!

The living room wall is the best example of the protruding furring strips. It was our goal to completely cover these with the second coat. It really takes a lot of mud to fill those spaces!

Filling it in from bottom to top!

Look, no more furring strips!

Mike worked hard on the window areas and they look incredible! We’re glad we made the choice to have earthen sills rather than the wooden ones we had planned initially.

We left a “truth window” in the east wall. It is framed by cedar and is a look into the interior of the straw walls.

This is the biggest portion of floor yet!

Almost done, from above.

The largest floor we’ve done yet, finished (with the first layer at least)!

All Hands On Deck!

We have been planning to put a deck on the house pretty much from the get-go. Well, our turn for a work party came around and we decided it was time to tackle that project and have a nice place to sit and relax after a tough day. We succeeded! In just that one day, Mike and four other guys built the entire deck minus the railing and stairs. It covers almost all the front of the house and wraps around the left side to just past the kitchen door. The following week after the work party, Mike and Holden took a day and put on the railing to almost complete the job. We have not built the stairs yet, but we’ll get to that soon 😉 !

Once again, we saved a lot of time and money by utilizing our group of awesome and skilled friends that make up our work party to do a job which, if done alone, would have taken longer and would have been much more difficult. We are so, so grateful and proud to have formed and maintained such a wonderful group of hard-working friends. Besides the great help we’ve gotten from the work parties, we have also completed several impressive projects at all the other members’ homes as well. Thanks you so much, all of you!

We did decide to use treated pine for the deck. We know it isn’t an environmentally sensitive choice. But, we firmly believe that if something is going to greatly extend the life of our home, or some part of it, then it is the wiser choice, even if it may not be the ideal choice environmentally or ethically. The process of treating wood for outdoor use is very energy intensive. It also involves permeating the fibers of the wood with very toxic chemicals to slow the function of bacteria and fungi which aim to dissolve the wood into food. If we had used untreated timber, even cedar or locust, we would get nowhere near as many years out of those boards as we will with the treated ones. Actually, this is the only treated wood in the entire house except for the 2X4s  which form the “toe-up” on top of which the straw bales are stacked. We feel good about the choice even though it is a definite compromise of our commitment to natural and local materials. We plan to stain it a beautiful cedar-ish color some time before the winter comes.

The deck pretty well transformed the entire look of our home! We love how it has turned out, and it makes the house look more finished, which is comforting. We have spent a good amount of time on it already and it is a sure thing we’ll be hanging out on the deck for a long time to come.

Our next post will be highlights from various mud/dirt work projects we are in the middle of now. The floor is coming along and we’re plastering the second layer on as many walls as we can as quick as we can. It’s a lot of work, but we can feel that we’re getting so close to having a finished home! Well, maybe not completely… not sure that will ever be the case…

Figuring it out…

The deck is to wrap around the left side of the house and end at the propane tank. Slick is wondering what the heck is going on around his home!

We wasted no time getting going! The posts were set on concrete stands then hooked together and stabilized by horizontal 2X6s.

Mark and Bub made a good team!

John and Mike had fun working with each other for the majority of the day. We used simple square paving stones for the posts against the house. The taller (and more expensive) stands were unnecessary since the deck isn’t a very tall one..

As always, Tom figured out the entire layout by himself! We just explained our vision and he made it reality!

The floor joists went up quick and we were ready to put on the deck floor boards.

The artistic ladies of our work party group created some wonderful flags for a prayer flag string to hang from the finished deck.

The knots in the pine boards are cool! It was really satisfying getting that floor down and walking across it!

We were almost done for the day at this point and shows how much work we got done in just one day! Teamwork + Skill = Results!!

The corner of the left side was the trickiest area, but we pulled it off nicely, we think.

The final row of boards was the biggest pain in the neck of the whole project! It involved a lot of cutting notches for posts and ripping big, long boards to the correct width.

John and Mike proudly admire the group’s handiwork.

A somewhat-ragged crew after a hard and productive day’s work. Thanks a ton, fellas!

It seems as though you’re hanging out in the trees when you look down towards the creek from the deck. Beautiful Ozark woods!

Holden and Mike added all the railing, just the two of them, in just one day! Holden is becoming a very valuable assistant to Mike in a great deal of important projects, and their dedication to quality really shows in results like this!

We plan on having an outdoor kitchen here just outside the kitchen door, and the deck wrap-around is the first step in our vision for this spot.

A Really Late Catch-Up Post!

Well, it’s been four months since our last blog post! We have completed a few things, started some more, continued work on a lot of ongoing projects, battled illness, and managed to survive the end of the harshest winter we’ve ever experienced! Whew! We’re now deep into the spring and have been working hard every day getting the house closer to completion, while still managing to keep up the daily house work, tend a huge productive garden, and manage to have a little fun while we’re at it! So this post will catch up to the present, which has us focusing on dirt work – earth plaster, the earthen floor, and a little cob work. We’ll limit this post to mostly pictures and captions so we don’t end up boring you to death with every detail of every project we’ve worked on for the last four months! The next post, which we will put up before four months from now, will be about our deck building work party a few weekends ago!

Be sure to click on the pictures to make them bigger!

We had another work party putting up car-siding, this time at the ceiling peak and on half the gable ends on both sides of the house interior.

We had our arms over our heads for the bulk of the day. That gets very tiring and we surely all felt the burn by the afternoon. The nail gun was a huge help!

It’s a lot of pain in the neck work to put up this car siding, but it looks so good when it’s done, it’s worth it!

This picture sums up the status of our house quite well. There are a lot of in-progress projects and many things appear to be half-finished (because they are). We know it will all be done some day, but it’s hard not to stress out about all the things that are on the to-do list, as it is quite the long list!

While the sound of the saws and nail gun/air compressor were ringing in our heads, the ladies of the work party surprised Cara with a wonderful Birthday Blessingway! They pampered her and showered her with gifts and love, all without her seeing it coming!

Cara was surprised and glad to be pampered a little!

We got a bunch of free insulation – thanks Scott! – and used some of it to sound-proof the interior walls and ceilings.

The walls were just sheets for a long time! This is the wall between the kitchen and our bedroom before it was covered with drywall.

Although there was a bit of cussing heard throughout, Mike and Holden got most of the drywall hung and it awaits mud and tape – another unfinished job!

Mike was on a ladder quite often for a few days. It ended up looking pretty good! Mike’s getting decent at hanging sheetrock, but don’t tell anyone!

This is a really special gift Tom and Barbara made for Cara when hospice was called in for her grandmother and we all thought the worst. Each individual, hand-carved bead celebrates her grandparents and their homestead where she spent a lot of time as a little girl. Each one is made from a tree or structure that represents a place near or on their old homestead in Cook Station, as well as many memories. Thanks so much, Johnsons!

We had another good year for morels and we fried a bunch up with some venison and had us a true Ozarkian feast! Delish!

Mike’s brother Brandon and his girlfriend Carly came out and helped put the second coat of earth plaster on the front of the house. They were awesome help!

This is a really cool picture Carly shot of the plastering fun. Even two of the dogs are there!

Brandon caught on really quickly and was plastering like he was a natural almost right away! Maybe it’s in the blood?!? 🙂

We were glad to be covering the front of the house with a nicer looking coat of earth. We’re all getting pretty good at it!

It’s so dark when the plaster is wet! We’re happy with the second coat, which will eventually be covered by a coat of lime plaster – when the rest of the house is at the same point!

This little guy visited our window one day and just hung out for a while.

Holden and Riley hand-tilled and prepared all the garden beds when the first warm days were upon us. It’s a lot of hard but rewarding work tending a large garden, and we all pitch in as we can.

They’re now prepared for planting! We spent the next three months planting, weeding, cultivating, and de-bugging. Actually, it seems we were so busy with those things, we neglected to take any pictures of us doing them! It’s all so brown and gray…

And a few short months later, as green as can be! We have been building the soil in these beds for three years and it has really paid off! Everything we’ve planted this year so far has thrived beyond expectations! Cara had to stand on a truck to get high up enough to take these shots! 🙂