leangreen.org recycled renovation on a low-budget ration

To mine the backyard dirt for its valuable clay, we first sifted out the earthworms, rotting leaves, tiny rocks and other non-clay chunks.  We built three sifting frames with different metal mesh sizes:  1/2-inch, 1/4-inch and 1/8-inch grids.  We dug a pit in a spot where we'll need to remove soil for leveling the patio, and sifted the soil through the three different meshes (big to small) and deposited the sifted clay in a big plastic tub.  Once we had the tub half full, we added water and mixed with our drill-powered paddles.  It made a sloppy mess and our backs hurt a bit, but it was also sorta fun.  We reminisced about childhood mud pies and dirt bombs.  We have yet to immerse ourselves into the tub, but we imagine that a mud bath will be rejuvenating once we finish plastering all the walls and ceilings.

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.

In an attempt to keep progress moving with materials we had on hand we took on finishing the walls in the downstairs bathroom. On a not too recent weekend (circa 2008) we found some cheap oak flooring leftovers on craigslist. With some ideas about what we could use them for we went and had a look. Much of the pieces were rejects due to knots or other aesthetic imperfections which didn't bother us much so we loaded it all up, drove it home and then shuttled it upstairs (blurry picture included to show the precarious wood stack). And there it sat becoming a makeshift, multi-level, wobbling sort of table/obstacle, a tablestacle - that sounds too anatomical, how about obstable. The obstable remained in place (albeit with frequent rebuilds from various collapses) until Jen came up with using it for the walls of the downstairs bathroom.

Once a firm decision was made we started planning and then attaching. In preparation we had to fir out some of the studs to get a level plane as well as add some nailers since many of these pieces are shorter than the 16" on-center span of the studs. Initially I tried using my pneumatic stapler to attach the pieces but found that shooting through the tongue I couldn't get a steep enough angle to keep the staple out of the way of the groove for the next piece. This led to the tedious process of pre-drilling the tongue and hand nailing using finish nails...slooooow. Fortunately while relaying this to my neighbor after the first day he let me borrow his propane powered pneumatic finish nailer that sped things up considerably.

Now we are trying to come up with a nice way to hide the hydronic tubes that run directly behind the toilet, but for now we are happy to have warm wood 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.