Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been focusing on making the second story room livable. After finishing all the cob above the windows and around the rafters, I was really, really excited to get some plaster on the walls. Watching the cob walls get dressed in a smooth plaster was one of the most satisfying moments of this project for me… to have one room of the house start to feel complete is the realization of a lot of hard work and planing, and it feels great!
Last week we started off by testing our mix on the bench in the first story. Our mix was one part soaked lime to three parts sand, a little bit of light yellow ocher pigment, and a small amount of alpaca fiber and deer fur. I’ve been lucky enough to inherit some lime that’s been soaking for five years! And the alpaca fiber was given to me by a nearby farm, while the deer fur has been laying around from some hide tanning projects. (The pigment and the sand were purchased). After plastering the bench, we decided to leave the fiber out of the rest of the mix, as it was clumping up into some hairballs…
Here’s a picture of the plastered bench:
We started plastering the upstairs last week, and got half of it finished the first day, with the rest of the room finished within the week. In the end it took about three batches of plaster, with each batch being 4 full five gallon buckets of material.
As a side note… always wear gloves when working with lime! The first day plastering I could only find one of my gloves, and was too eager to plaster to waste any time looking around. The lime dried out my skin, and ate some holes in my fingertips that were pretty painful. I’ve been vigilant about wearing gloves during the days since then…
I need to take some better photos soon, but here’s a couple from the first plaster session:
After finishing most of the plaster, I couldn’t wait to remove the tarps from the floor. Those tarps have been hiding the beautiful wood floor since last summer, and I’ve been eager to get rid of them. They were actually cobbed into the wall about 1/4 inch, so I had to cut them to remove them. Once I got the tarps out of there, my friend Steve came over, and spent hours and hours sanding the floor boards. Now instead of a clay/straw/tarp floor, our floor looks like this:
Greg came out a couple times lately, and in addition to helping me plaster, he worked on building a small door for the second story, completely out of scrap wood. With a small window at the top and a cat door at the bottom, it’s looking pretty adorable. This door is 3’3″ tall, and around 23″ wide…
Greg started working on some shelving, too, and once the shelves are done and the floor is finished, that room will be complete!
And because my cats are so cute…
here’s a picture of Bastet sitting in the round window:
earthen acres 