Earth Floor Sealed with Oil

[Music] very directly I learned you know my basic earthen floor knowledge came from Rob Bowman who learned his knowledge from Phil an Athena and my understanding that knowledge came from I need a Rodriguez who I love this part of the story she because she was a woman she was able to work with the women in the pueblos and get the stories of how to make thin coats earthen floor Portus thin coats was the main thing I understand but she gained that knowledge because she was a woman traditionally in those communities women were the ones installing the floors in installing plasters and because she was a woman she was able to receive that information because at that point in the 70s construction was very quickly going into dominantly male trade you're gonna bring in drain rock and that can vary in size and shape but mainly you're creating sort of an aquifer for water to come and go three inches is sort of minimal it's it's what you're using to level your first layer of the floor if you do more than five inches you may want to compact the first five put another five inches and compact that you wanna make sure your drain rock is well compacted so that you're creating a stable subfloor now that you've laid your rock you're going to want to lay down a vapor barrier and that vapor barrier is basically creating a barrier between the area of your floor that it's okay to bring water into that reservoir those rocks moisture could come into that space and go out but you don't want any of that moisture to move up through your floor system so in a 4 there are various options for you to insulate here in in this video we are using pumice volcanic rock have air pockets in them and can be used as insulation similar to all the layers of any earthen floor you want to level and compact loose material when you're working with a loose insulation as volcanic rock or pumice is we've laid our insulation down and now we're ready to start essentially to the earth and floor portion this structure what we're gonna do in this one is lay down three inches of road base as our platform for the earth thanks and road base varies from region to region but it is a engineered product you could get from a landscape or garden supply yards and what it is is rock and soil and silts it's different than the drain Rock in that it's got all of the sizes from one inch or whatever size it is down to fines there's no moisture content in it you'll want to either mix moisture in it or add it when you're compacting you'll go from maybe five inches of material to three inches of material so it's always good to recheck where you're at and may need to add more as you go [Music] you want to figure out what your clay content is of your soil and from their base your recipe from that so you can mix enough sand with your soil to get about 10 percent clay content in your finish you could do that various ways of Jar test stick and get your starting point of how much clay or you could actually send soil away and find out or you could just do by feel and make a few samples but mainly I start with two parts and one part soil and do a lot of field test to make sure it's just gritty enough I don't want a pretty gritty floor in the sand is like the rocks of a rock wall and the clay is using a little bit to hold it all together the mortar and when you have a sandy or mix you also will have a quicker drying time the clay holds more of the moisture takes a little while for it to get out and sand doesn't hold that moisture as long anyway lay all the mud out a couple ways of leveling your floor these are screeds that are ripped at the height of the floor 3/4 inch in the situation we want three quarter inch floor you use a rail across the screen boards to give you an estimation of where you're going to continuous record bridge [Music] so the screens as you'll see are important to not leave in the mud for very long you want to work the area and then move on if you were to have a lunch break or something you want to make sure you don't leave any streets in the floor for a while because the earth will dry up faster around that wood because it's soaking in some of that moisture and once you fill it back in you've removed them with a wetter material then you have that situation of dissimilar moisture content and pretty straight line cracks the other industry standard will say is using a laser level you set up a laser level and you use a stick in the field and you make sure that the whole floor is coming to the same height [Music] yeah this three-quarter-inch finish that we've just poured is enough you can after you would float it as you see we still trial it and you like to get it as level as possible and as perfect looking as possible so that day and then I come back and I will repress the whole floor the next day so that three-quarter inches the minimal of what you need it's enough to be a finished floor [Music] what we show in this video or one of the options is doing another coat like a quarter-inch coat and you can in that step spend some time refining those materials to make a more refined finish you can have your chopped straw be smaller and add more expensive materials like if you want it to be pigmented with an expensive pigment you could do a quarter-inch finish instead of a 3/4 inch finish and so you are spending less material resources the main reason I do a three quarter inch finish and we find that - it's done is it I'm trying to from 3/4 inch finish mud to people walking on in two and half weeks [Music] there's a pretty steep learning curve in how to work with clay because for one there's hundreds of types of play so you have to start to understand how to see what your clay body's gonna do and I thought I had gotten that down I'd been using the same clay body in Portland for years and so I knew it was two parts and to one part play but one part dry clay is what I always did and then one day I did a floor and all we had access to was that same clay body but it was soaking wet so we did two parts and one part clay buddy and the floor was like a lakebed you cracked everywhere the floor is now ready for oil it's all dry your colors on it's looking beautiful and it's ready to be oiled drying oils are what we use on earthen floors drying oils our oils that polymerize as they dry meaning they interact with oxygen and turn into long polymer chains giving them flexibility and strength so drying oils that are typically used are linseed oil and tung oil in floors also a solvent in the floor oil to help the oil that's sticky and thick get deep into the floor it's feminine in its sense of flexibility like you can sculpt it and you can have your kids around you can have your grandparents around you can have people around and not feel like it's too dangerous the aesthetic of an earthen floor is like no other floor both visually and up-close as well as far it's got a just a subtle feel you can tell it's been touched by a human hand and then walking on it you know we work to make them flat but there's still that touch of the human hand is and played that floor and you could feel it [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Nito Project

Views: 1,875,497

Keywords: Earthen floor, cob floor, Sealing an earthen floor, earth floor insulation, how to, alternative flooring

Id: TSIsEF3nybA

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/JohnnnyCupcakes]

Cool, but doesn’t feel ”primitive” once you introduce rock deliveries, plastic vapor barriers, and laser levels.

[u/Apotatos]

I'd be really interested to see if the tarp could be substituted by bark or large leaves and the oils being substituted by limestone mortar/plaster. This has the potential to increase the durability of many long-term builds, and id love to see if it can be done only with primitive means.