We often try to come
up with things that we love about winter, if for no other reason but to ease
the pain of frozen fingers and toes. But in all honestly, there is a lot to
love about it. The garden has provided the foods that our bodies crave during
the cold season; roasted root vegetables, pumpkin and silver beet frittata,
potato and leek soup etc. The wood stove is on, which means scrumptious wood
fired meals without trekking up the hill to use the oven in the caravan. We
don’t need to irrigate the garden, and there’s minimal weeding to do. Snow on
the distant mountain tops is beautiful. The wildlife hangs around later than
usual in the mornings, and comes out earlier in the evenings, so we get to see
more of them. The cats are cuddlier.
One of our favourite
things about winter is the sun’s rays filtering through the trees on a foggy
morning. What we didn’t expect is how magnificent these rays would be filtering
through the clerestory windows in the house, and can only imagine how amazing
they will look when hitting the stone wall.
A seven day strawbale
working bee has been booked for 29 November to 5 December, so we now
have a clear timeline and deadlines for things that need to be completed before
then. Whilst we’d confirmed that our bales were safe and sound, booking in the
workshop prompted us to visit the farmer, Kevin, and see the bales that will
soon become our walls. We were shocked to find that Kevin has never been inside
a straw bale house, as he usually only sees the timber frame when he delivers
the bales, so we must rectify that when the house is finished. He threatened to
keep me locked in the shed to work on the farm, then deliver me back to Karim
along with the bales in November, but I managed to escape.
We’re hoping to
install the first layer of earthen floors in the dining and lounge rooms soon,
so that it hardens enough for us work on when we raise the walls. We were going
to use the dining room as the “trial”, but succumbed to our friend’s
recommendation to do one square metre trials to get the correct proportion of
clay to sand; because too much clay can cause cracking. This is the process
that we followed:
Step 1: Remove any
rocks and organic matter from the massive pile of clay that was stockpiled
during the earthworks, and soak it in a pool made from hay bales and tarps for
at least one week prior to using it.
Step 2: Build some formwork
to do the trials in, with fibro as a base, 100mm deep timber edges (the total depth of the three layers
of earthen floor), with 50mm deep removable strips of timber around the perimeter to
screed the first layer.
Step 3: Remove the 10mm
layer of ice that formed on top of the clay pool!
Step 4: Shred some
straw (not hay) with the whipper snipper.
Step 5: Gather the ingredients.
Our first trial is 2 buckets of sand, 1 bucket of clay, ½ bucket of straw, ½
bucket of cow poo as a binder and to add strength, ½ litre of wheat paste and 1
glass of powdered milk (the proteins provide cohesive bond and flexibility).
Our second trial will be 3 buckets of sand and 1 bucket of clay, plus all the
other ingredients.
Step 5: Mix the sand
and clay on a tarp.
Step 6: Mix in the poo,
straw, wheat paste and milk, which looks like, well let’s just say “very
unpleasant”.
Step 7: Roll the mix
into balls and slap it onto the floor.
Step 8: Knead the mix
in with your knuckles.
Step 9: Use a trowel
and some muscle to compact the mix, then smooth down the surface.
Step 10: Admire the finished
product.
Step 10: Use your
fingers to poke holes in it, which will help bind the second layer.
The third (final)
layer will receive seven coats of burned linseed oil, and then be polished with
bees wax. If we don’t like the colour of the floor once it dries properly, we
can also add a natural pigment to the final layer. Doing the trial has been
exciting, having an earthen floor just “feels right”, and makes us look forward
to living in a home surrounded by natural materials inside, while we admire
nature outside.
