leangreen.org recycled renovation on a low-budget ration

Between the bare, smooth drywall and our clay plaster, we need an adhesion coat to make the clay stick. No one wants the clay to delaminate into a slump on the floor. As a first coat, sand and its sharp, gritty texture will help bond the clay to the wall. To make the sand stick, we mixed it with wheat paste, a remarkably cheap and simple, do-it-yourself binder.

Wheat Paste Recipe

1. Whisk 1 cup of white wheat floor and 2 cups of cold water into a smooth paste (no lumps).
2. Boil 6 cups of water.
3. Maintain a rolling boil and slowly add the wheat flour mix into the boiling water, whisk constantly.
4. Keep it boiling while stirring until the paste is thick and slightly translucent. Cool before use.

We did skip one suggested adhesion coat ingredient: fresh manure. Manure on the walls is where our green line ends. It didn't seem necessary. The 2 part wheat paste to 1 part sharp sand recipe worked very well (so far).

Once the wheat paste cooled, we mixed in sand and applied with a paint brush, then a paint roller, both worked well. It doesn't need to be pretty, we were after good coverage and gritty texture.

As the adhesion coat dried, we tested recipes for the clay plaster coats. We'll apply two plaster coats: a base "scratch" coat made of our yard clay and a "finish" coat made primarily of kaolin clay. We procured the kaolin from a local pottery supply shop in powdered form. It's mined from Georgia, U.S.A., a bit farther than we'd like, but its white color is the prize. Our brown yard clay ends up turning any room into a cave, which could be an interesting but limited effect on some walls. With the white kaolin clay, we can add pigment to create a rainbow of color options. We don't want our walls to compete with all the douglas fir trim, so we'll probably keep the finish clay a light, earthy tone. For now, we're focused on the first "scratch" coat, bring on the brown!

Over and again we've read complaints that UltraTouch cotton batt insulation is painful to cut. During a test run installation in our garage, we struggled with cutting the batts on the ground with a 2x4 straight edge and resharpening our Leatherman blade.  It was a two-person job.  The cuts were messy. We often resorted to ripping the batts with our hands so when we stuffed the insulation in the wall, the batts didn't always fit perfectly.  If some of the batts were perforated to accommodate non-standard stud spacing (as the bag claims) that might have helped, but we didn't find any perforated batts in our 16 bales.

During the week-long insulation marathon with Gary, we developed a quicker, better method for installing the denim batts. Using sawhorses, a base, quick grips and a utility knife, Gary perfected the quick and clean cut resulting in a precise friction fit that completely filled the wall cavity. Cutting became a one-person job, making quick work for a two-man team. Changing blades often, every three or four long cuts, was key. We wish someone had done this for us, so we're sharing our how-to cut technique below.

Since competition and the threat of public humiliation spark motivation, we have decided to share our Wall of Shame. In the spirit of New Year's resolutions, January 2010 marks a renewed commitment to The Official Wheeler Street Fitness Quest 2000 Chalkboard Wall of Shame. Formerly recorded on our kitchen cabinet, back when we had a kitchen, this friendly competition tracks a completed set of various fitness exercises.

Here's how it works: each time you do a set, you get a check. For instance, in December (above image), Jen (yellow checks) completed 10 sets of sit-ups while Brian (red checks) only did 1. If you get twenty checks in any exercise within the month, you get an "all-time" point (on right). In December, no one got any all-time points but somehow Brian had points from November when we weren't even really playing yet. But by January (below image), Jen scored three all-time points in the Sit Up, Push Up and Balance-board Squat categories. Brian also chalked up two points for 20 miles of running and 20 sets of push-ups. The first person to get twenty "all-time" points decides the destination of our next trip...plus bragging rights. To equalize handicaps and keep it challenging, we've decided that each time you achieve an "all-time" point, you have to up the ante on your set. So Bri's Push-Up set went from 30 to 35 this month, while Jen's went from 15 to 16.

So far, it's a close race with no clear indication of a leader, although we're developing our own favorite categories. Of course we've convinced ourselves that being healthy and fit is an easy win for our lean and green goals. Yet questions remain: Can the chalkboard fitness quest save us a gym membership? Can we stave off the next flu scare with our outrageously healthy immune systems? And can Jen finally prove to Brian that she's the real athlete in this relationship?

Last night we ate our first harvest from the raised bed garden. We'd like to think the fresh and healthy nutrients helped heal Brian's femur. Maybe a dose of heavy metals in those leafy greens fused the bone to the titanium rod for extra strength. More likely, we just poisoned ourselves.

Urban vegetable gardens are in the news as green strategy for healthy local food, but given the remnants of lead paint and leaded gasoline in our yards, some caution might be wise before eating from city dirt. Widely used before being banned in 1978, "lead is one of the greatest public health hazards facing urban residents." Lead in soil becomes a health risk when directly ingested or breathed as dust, a particular concern for young children who like mud pies. Garden produce, if it has accumulated lead in its tissue or has soil particles adhering to it, can also be a hazard if eaten.

As the paint flaked off our old redwood siding during its storage sojourn in our backyard, I wondered how much lead has settled in our soil. So back in February, I shoveled 12 different samples from around our backyard (to a 7 inch depth), mixed them in a bucket, and sent a handful in a ziploc sandwich bag to the University of Massachusetts Soil Lab for a soil test including a toxic metals report.

According to the lab's brochure, lead is naturally present in all soils, generally in the range of 15 to 40 parts lead per million parts of soil (ppm). During our soil test an "extracting solution" removed a reproducible fraction of the total lead in our sample, resulting in 27ppm of extractable lead. Based on this extraction, they estimate the total lead level at 401 ppm. 4 in 10,000 sounds like decent odds for the lottery. What about the chances of poisoning, a slow and untimely death, nervous twitches, inability to functional mentallee?

In California, 200-500 ppm of lead is commonly found in city soil, but levels of 1,000 ppm or more is considered hazardous waste by the California Department of Health Services. According to UMass, less than 500ppm is a "low" lead level, however, other sources (such as University of Minnesota) recommend that levels exceeding 100 ppm should not be used for gardening because of risk to children, however plants can be safely eaten from soils with levels up to 300 ppm. We're pushing the limits, but the lab report measures another major factor affecting a plant's ability to uptake lead, pH levels.

Apparently, a pH of 6.5 of higher immobilizes lead uptake by plants. I was relieved that we're at 6.6 pH, although it's also relatively easy to increase pH by adding lime. Some plants, like citrus and blueberries, prefer the acidity of a lower pH. With our Mediterranean climate, we're looking forward to ...