Earthen Floor In Our Straw Bale Home | Part 1
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- Опубліковано 21 сер 2024
- We finished the first layer of earthen floors in our house and couldn't be happier with how it turned out! We mixed clay-soil, sand, straw, and water together and poured this over our concrete slab for a sustainable, earth friendly, non toxic flooring system in our house. We will be doing a topcoat once this is all dry followed by linseed oil to create a durable finish! Most people think the concept is strange but they also have never heard nor seen it done before. We want to show you the beauty of it all - stay tuned for future videos of the finished product!
#earthenfloor #dirtfloor #strawbalehouse #passivesolar
That's pretty awesome!
For your floor, you should find about 2-3 foot long thin pieces of wood to lay down that are the thickness of floor you are wanting to achieve. Then as you complete the area the sticks are in, move the sticks down, and fill in those spots where the sticks were. This way, you are moving faster and move efficiently leveling your floor. You can reuse these sticks throughout your flooring.
our concrete slab was not level so this wouldn't have worked for us otherwise we would have used this method. thanks for sharing though!
Can't wait to see the finished product.
Looking great!
Thanks!
Wow can’t wait to see it with the top coat, well done guys.
thank you!
Must admit, was blown away by this flooring concept.
Was expecting coils of PEX piping in the floor for hydronic heating.
I tip my hat to all your hard work and your perseverance.
thank you
Looking forward to seeing the finished work on the floor as always absolutely brilliant and your lucky to have such a great little helper on the team Looking forward to the next one 👍.
thank you :)
Its so cool to watch you guys do this!! I hope to have a chance to get my hands in something similar. Learning lots through watching you :)
thank you!
you guys are doing a wonderful job. Inspiring to say the least! I cant wait for the next video.
thank you
nice work
Thanks!
thank you in advance for your answers!
your welcome, glad we can be of help for you - this was the reason we decided to video our journey!
Quel travail👏👏🖐
Like good job thanks for sharing 👍👍👍👍👍
thank you!
Wish I could have a floor made of brownie mix. Yum!
I am building a Strawbale home can you send the link how you did the electrical boxes in the Strawbale.
ua-cam.com/video/QCJf1JHEUU8/v-deo.html I believe it was this video or the propane one you checked out
Beautiful! Are the floors rough? Can you easily glide a mop over them?
Thanks, yes they are a bit rough,I think it's from not being finished properly. Would definitely recommend using a screeter on boards to get it level that way you have more time to work on finishing correctly. A mop does glide over it, it's comparable to a concrete floor that is not polished.
Generally you should use mother rails like for concrete. Make your mother levels and then spread the mud with straight board or aluminium profile.
we didn't have a level surface to begin with so this wouldn't have worked for us; however, yes we should have done this for a final coat but we forgot!
What was the ratio of clay, sand & straw? Looks awesome!
thank you.. we don't have exact measurements, just went off what looked right. It will be different for everyone given the different materials and moisture/clay content. An APPROXIMATE idea of what we did:
3 parts sand
1 part clay-soil
1.2 parts water
1/2 part straw
@@buildingroots5873 This is the mixture you used for the floors?
Is it really necessary to build a concrete slab first? Id rather just fill with any other materials like crushed stones or more dirt 🙂
No it is not necessary. It was a way of making my husband feel better about the idea of the earthen floor holding up! :) just be sure the subfloor is SOLID!
What was your mix.
How many layers of earth did you put down. Did you put it over a cement foundation.
we went with two layers because we already had 3ish inches of concrete as our base.
Why didn't you just stain the concrete floor ?
guys, greetings from moldavia. watched all your videos. you are great . it's nice to see you work together. I am also building my own straw bale house for my rather big family. my wife and I have five growing up sons and it is very crowded to live in a city box .... actually, I have a few questions. if possible - help. First, how did you get through the winter without plaster on the walls? I mean rodents? Did you take any measures to protect the walls, were there mice? and second ... you plastered the interior walls in winter. if I understand correctly. so ... were there any problems with condensation when the lime dried. after all, all the moisture passed through the straw into the street. could it freeze inside the wall? how long did the inside walls dry? and how many bags of lime went into the interior decoration? today I am also at the stage of the beginning of plastering works, but it is already winter outside. and I don't know what to do - leave everything for the spring or ...? and I'm really worried about the rodents!
i might not be able to answer all the questions as my mind gets frazzled about remembering every part of what we did during the build! We had to house wrap the exterior as you can see on previous videos. We DID NOT have a single rodent get into our walls (other than birds making nests before the wrap haha). I believe this is because we used z flashing at the bottom then rolled strips of OSB into the house wrap and stapled these strips to that flashing (this could be one of those moments where someone might say stapling into the flashing is a bad idea🤷♀️)
the only area we had condensation issues while plastering the interior was the corner where strawbale walls meet our north garage walls that are only OSB(no bales). cold air was coming in small areas here and causing frost on the plaster during curing BUT everything turned out just fine!!! We used NHL 5 because of our extreme temps. Depending on the room - I believe it took about 7-10 days to fully dry, keep in mind we did have floor heat set to 62-65 degrees which I feel is a must if you are plastering. I can only give a general idea of how much plaster we went through. I am a little hesitant on giving you these because I am not 100%sure! I am thinking we went through roughly 80 -55lb bags of NHL5 plus 25-30bags (77lbs) of eco mortar for the interior. Our house total square feet of plaster is 4,300 (inside and out).
@@buildingroots5873 Thank you very much for your answers / it really helps me / as I understand you already live in your house / what can you say about its heat insulation? is it as good as advertised? it's just quite difficult to find those who have already lived for some time in a finished straw house and shared their real impressions / or maybe you will make a video with mistakes and problem areas that need to be taken into account by those who will go your way / again, thank you very much for taking the time to answer /
we are not living in the house so it is hard to tell for sure how much propane we will be going through. If I can remember all the "mistakes" we made I do plan to make a future video on all that, as well as updates once we live in the house.
How durable is it?
very durable, every day I am in awe and impressed and anyone that comes to see the house immediately thinks it is concrete. In fact, the question should be: how well do the things that fall on this floor hold up? - we have had a few broken plates, cups, toys, and even a phone screen crack from falling on the earthen floor.
i do have to say though, the floor gets marks ON it from chairs sliding, sheetrock (still need mop boards put on!) - it reminds me of using chalk on concrete sort of aspect
how many sqf did you do
the earthen floor square footage is 1380. thanks for watching!
Do you add cement in the final coat?
No, we want our house to breathe inside and out. cement would not allow this to happen.
Im sorry but I would expect something more organic inside of straw house than this