leangreen.org recycled renovation on a low-budget ration

Our household operational head of security, Dom Diesel the Dog, reports that our security threat level has drastically decreased from orange to green since the installation of a locking mechanism on our barn doors.  The photos show how it works:  a bolt is recessed into the door frame and plunges into a round keeper in our new redwood sill.  Brian mortised out the wood in the door so the locking mechanism lies flush with the door, allowing the big door to slide open without obstructing its movement. He bolted the sill into the foundation of the house. The old-growth redwood was salvaged from an old Berkeley home, had been lying on the ground for almost 100 yrs and still in beautiful shape.

Dom is now taking a nap.

We could pay someone a few thousand dollars to mud the walls. But why start subcontracting out jobs now? Being broke helps motivate us to find alternative solutions that are leaner and greener. Our latest adventure: mud, real mud, free from the backyard mud. And it's going on our walls.

A gypsum wall finish is a standby for many reasons: it's white, smooth, easy to paint and a cheap, abundant natural resource. It dries quickly and therefore requires some skill to apply. The endless sanding creates dust. Silica is not something you want to breathe day after day (because it would take us weeks or months to do ourselves). Joint compound additives (i.e. vinyl, formaldehyde) are not as benign as gypsum's main ingredient, calcium sulfate. While it's not tremendously expensive to do it yourself, getting a quality job in a short time frame would take funds away from other projects. And then we'd have to paint, another expense and more time and more gallons of goo to manufacture and trash. As we learned from deconstructing the old house, anything painted gets sent to the landfill.

In the meantime, we know that the backyard needs to be re-leveled so that we can seamlessly walk out of those big barn doors onto a patio, an outdoor extension of our kitchen. We've seen the American Clay plasters in "green home" tours. The way the walls absorb and reflect light makes you want to avoid shiny plastic paint forever. But it's expensive, which seems odd if it's just clay. Isn't our own soil full of clay?

To see if it was even feasible, I visited Sasha at Villa Sobrante, a home retrofitted with strawbale and clay. Sasha teaches classes on clay plaster and shared on-the-wall evidence that clay plaster is doable and durable. She recommended an informative book full of recipes and inspiration: Using Natural Finishes by Weismann and Bryce. According to the book, the clay content of soils used for plaster should be at least 15 percent. Our soil showed promise. It formed easily into a ball or log and retained its shape when dropped from head height. We dug up several samples, added water, shook them up in glass jars and waited for the soil layers to settle. We waited days for the water to clear (a sure sign we had lots of clay). Here's how it finally shook out.

Time to process the clay for our walls.

After chopping the house in half and cutting out the floor for the stairs, we added a 6-foot by 10-foot overhang into the new addition. Someday this floor will support Brian's desk/computer setup (we think). It's been a good storage spot for the time being, but it lacked a floor. We wondered if we should get some other flooring material: cork, tile, linoleum, brown paper bags. We've recently settled on just leaving the whole second floor covered in the existing 3/4-inch douglas fir boards. It doesn't have a sub-floor, which is a concern for sound transfer, but it's solid and tight-grained with lots of character hidden beneath a few coats of paint. We plan to sand and finish them at some point.

To finish the overhang, we've been trolling craigslist and calling local salvage yards for floor patch material. No luck until this week. We found a big pile of 3 1/4-inch wide boards at Heritage Salvage in Petaluma, about 40 miles north of us in Sonoma County. Gary and Brian installed it yesterday, feathering it into existing joints, and it looks gooood. What's even better: Heritage Salvage is a candyland of salvaged material. We have our eyes on some 7-inch wide doug fir boards from a hops warehouse. The former floor could become our new ceiling.

Well we finally had the electrical inspection only to learn that the rough framing and rough plumbing inspections had never been completed, obviously both things that need to be done prior to closing up the walls. One of the rough framing tasks that needed completion was installing the post and beam that supports the 2nd floor overhang. This was engineered to be done with 4x4 lumber but since it is exposed we were hoping to find larger dimension wood possibly on the cheap.

Last Saturday we headed to the re-use store in Oakland to see what they had on hand. We lucked out and found two 6x8 doug fir beams that each had more than enough length for our purposes. After going in to pay Jen returned to inform me that they only charged us $5.50 for the wood! Instant karma rewarded me with a broken windshield as I was loading the wood into the truck.

Back home we began to process the wood, planing it and cutting it to size. Since these beams support a floor that has already been constructed we could not join them with a mortise and tenon (picture trying to slide a lego into place). Instead we had to get the post installed first since we had placed a rod into the foundation prior to pouring to act as a hold down. Then position the beam above it in such a way that it was actually holding up the floor to some degree. Taking a lesson from the house lift I took the jack from our vehicle and positioned it on a ladder and began to jack the floor up until I had enough space for the beam to be comfortably installed. Once in place the jack was lowered and the floor was sitting nicely on the new beam.

What is left to do is mainly for the plumbing inspection (I'll call both framing & plumbing inspections at the same time). It is a requirement to preform a dry vent test, which is not dry at all. This involves filling all of the dry vents in the house with water to ensure that there are no leaks. In order to do this all drains must be completely plugged. This includes our shower, toilet, kitchen sink and even the main drain to the sewer. To do this we'll have to remove our toilet and insert a tube that gets filled with air to block the drain, same goes for the shower, kitchen sink and main sewer drain. Needless to say timing for this will be critical, hopefully we can do all the work and have the vents ready for testing on a Sunday with the inspection called in for a Monday leaving minimal "camping" time.