Starting to think mud!

With the roof on, we're back to thinking about floors. We're going to do an earthen floor, with a total of about 6 inches of mix on top of the drain rock that's already there. Melissa has started planning out the foundations of the interior walls (I'd prefer to wait to get a feel for the space, but) as we intend to do the subfloor-base layer before we start on the walls.

We'll start with this floor first since for one thing, it's mixing mud that will never be seen, so we'll get good at it before it'll be in a place that will show. For another, without the walls up this layer will dry faster, which means when we're doing the rest of the floor after the walls, those layers will dry faster (with one dry side already). Further, it will give us a nice flat surface that can still get beat up and dirty to work on while we do the walls.

So, I got back into it by making some test bricks that included Perlite, a local (!) thing that's some sort of lava from the desert. It's very similar to styrafoam... you've seen it- it's the little white dots in potting soil. It's supposed to add an insulative quality.

Here's me getting dirty:


and more dirty:

I ended up with 5 test bricks, all different recipes. It was quite surprising to see the different volumes created when not changing the total parts added. (it was always 3 parts: variations on sand, perlite and clay. And of course straw was added to all.