How To Make An Earthen Floor Durable and Water Resistant

This week on OSRL. She is about to start waterproofing everything so I'm very excited to see that process get done. How's it going everyone and welcome back to the domestead. Now if you're new here my wife and I were building our own home off-grid here in the Arizona desert. Now if you could do me a big favor definitely give this video a big thumbs up and definitely subscribe because you'll want to see all this come together. Now if you caught our last video then you know Jess has spent a lot of time going over these tiles getting them clean getting the areas in between them just perfect and now she is about to start waterproofing everything so I'm very excited to see that process get done. I know you are too so let's get to it. While she's doing that I'm going to be working along the rest of this wall. I got a taste of kind of closing up this next room over here making sure everything is all the way up tight to the roof and I'm going to keep going down this wall and just getting everything nice and watertight because monsoon rains are right around the corner so we'll want to make sure this is buttoned up. So we got areas up here like right here right here I'll just make sure that cob is going all the way up to the top make sure some of these bales are just kind of filled in like right around here between the bales and the window. It was something Jess was kind of working on before she got into trying to finish up the floor of the laundry room so I'm just gonna jump onto myself and get that done and that's kind of what you got to do with this type of lifestyle is you know a lot of things got to get done there's always something to work on and if something's pulling us in one direction the other person can kind of jump in and kind of help out fill in where it's needed so that's what I'll be doing. All right so what are we doing? Well I'm just about ready to seal the floor up and waterproof it but before we do that I want to make sure that it's fully dried out. We want to seal moisture out of the floor we don't want to seal it in. Makes sense. So one way you can test for that is to tape down some plastic to the floor and kind of leave it overnight and see if any condensation builds up on the plastic. So even though the surface of the floor might look dry and feel dry there could be moisture deeper down that's still coming up and coming out of the floor so we're gonna check for that. So I got just a couple sheets of small small pieces of plastic here and I'm going to tape it down. I was thinking what do you think like maybe one over here and one over the tile? Sounds good to me. I'm using painter's tape because I'm thinking like maybe it'll stick down without kind of disturbing the floor when we peel it up. You aren't playing around with this. Does it need to be like airtight? No but I figured it would probably be better if it's sealed all the way down. It'd be a little easier to see any moisture so it doesn't like escape. All right well let's check this tomorrow. Okay the plastic has been sitting overnight and let's check it out and see if it's dry or not. What does Yuvie think? She's checking it out. All right well what is there to see? Anything? That looks it looks dry. I'm not seeing any moisture on there. This one also do not see any wetness. All right well sounds like a winner to me. Uh-oh you know what that means. What does that mean? It means we can proceed to the next step. Uh-oh next step. You've a girl next step. You ready? She's ready for the next step. All right so what are you up to? Okay we're ready to start oiling the floor. So we have some linseed oil and mineral spirits and I'm going to mix it. We're going to do three to one ratio oil to the thinner. What do we got? This isn't OSHA approved. You need to have labels on there but I guarantee you that is boiled linseed oil. Yeah I was kind of wanting to not use the boiled linseed oil. That's like a common thing they have in hardware stores and stuff. But it goes through a processing that is not great. But if you want to go the other route and get the untreated linseed oil it still needs to be heated. And that's a little bit harder to find that and plus it's more expensive. And I didn't want to try doing that process ourselves because it's kind of tricky. Might not even work that well and it might be a little dangerous. So this is what we got. So we've got to deal with the chemicals a little bit and but it's cheaper and it's ready to go. Yeah and then we'll just make sure everything's well ventilated because it's curing. Gotta be careful for these winds just blowing everything around. All right all right on a level of one to ten with one being you're not excited and ten being the most excited you are in your life. Where are you at? Somewhere in between. You don't even want to put a number to it. Oh are you going to open the north door as well? Well you got good ventilation already. Got the window open over here. So is this going to be a no-shoe environment here pretty soon? Yeah. There's a bunch of pieces of straw and dirt that blew back onto the floor so I'm gonna clear that away as I go just with the paintbrush. I think a broom might be a little too harsh and it might scratch things up because at this point before the floor is sealed it is more prone to getting scratched. Now I think if you had a floor that was just all you know earth and flooring normally you would start right along the walls and brush a line along the edges of the floor but since we have tile here you know a lot of the edges are not getting sealed. I'm going to be doing it a little bit differently so I'll just start on this side and work my way over. And your goal is to try and get like four coats on today? Yes. Now I think the way some people do the oiling is they might do one coat at a time let that dry for a day or two and then do the next coat and also they have different kind of mixtures of the oil and thinner but what I was reading from someone that has a lot of experience with earth and flooring is that that's not really necessary to do that. The oil you just want it to be able to penetrate the floor down maybe a half inch and it'll all just cure at the same time so the different mixes and the drying times it doesn't make a significant difference so I'm gonna do it the way that that person was recommending. It's kind of crazy like seeing the amount of oil that's getting absorbed. Oh I bet I bet. That's what we want though we're not just coating the surface it's getting absorbed down into the top layer of the floor. Yeah this coat's probably going to take the longest and it's going to absorb the most oil. I know this from doing the kind of this kind of thing with wood. All right how's it coming? Good so I got that bigger area done. How are you doing on your oil reserves? Oh under half. Man that gust of wind knocked both of our those empty garbage cans. Took one of them like all the way across the driveway area. I swear I believe all the rest of the coats will go faster because right now it's going to be thirsty and it's going to suck all that in but you are making some good progress. All right almost done you just got a little corner left huh? Yeah. Are you getting enough ventilation here uh you're not getting uh too high from all those uh paint thinners? Well maybe a little bit but uh there is a lot of air moving through here so. You're wondering about a fan but uh I was kind of right with that Crosby breeze right? Yeah. This is the windy time of year so no fans needed. All right almost would you say you're almost finished with coat number two? Halfway done with coat number two over halfway done. Over yeah. You still got this whole section to do right? Yeah. Okay and uh how many times have you had to refill? Is this your third jar? Yeah. Oh but how are you enjoying it are you liking it? Is it tough? Um I don't particularly like it it's a little bit stinky. But the high is all worth it. I mean the high of getting a job well done. Yeah. And not the turpentine. Not the mineral spirits. All right can I just uh walk right through here to get to the cabin area? It's right there. Prepping for uh coat three? Yes. I think I'm gonna also oil these boards by the door. While I'm doing the rest of the floor. Okay. And while Jess has been busy oiling up the floor I am busy out here working on this wall. As I stated in the last video I'm just trying to get every area above the wall just close it up between the wall and the ceiling. Obviously we got a little gap here a little gap here and then above the window which would be easy I'll just put another board. Also I want to close up any areas like this and uh areas like this get this straw covered with more cob. Monsoons are coming up so if I can get this wall a little bit more water tight that would be excellent. All right the board's fully oiled up that looks good. So you gave it a little cleaning too huh? A little cleaning a little oil looks good. Uh so coat three of the oil are uh is each coat getting subsequently faster? Yes. Okay you're moving right along and it's probably not soaking up quite as much oil from the uh the brush right? Correct. Nice nice. This is exciting. Did I step on its family or something? Coat number four. So how's coat number four feel? Oily. And going on even is this the smoothest coat yet? Yeah. Yeah you're you're rocketing through this. This should be the last coat. How do you tell what you've oiled and what you haven't oiled? Um it's a little difficult but I just have to look to see what the shiny part is. That's uh the part I just oiled. Okay and uh with that mix that is it. We're uh we're all closed up up here. Closed up along the top. Closed up along the side. Got a lot of those bales covered. I am still not quite done. Maybe another mix or two. Probably work on that tomorrow and just get some of these areas over here where around the bales. Get that covered up. Anything where the bales are a little bit more exposed. When the heavy rains do come we'll still probably need to cover this up. Like just in case we get some pounding rain from the north. Now I gotta get a board up at the top here but yeah we're getting there. It's looking real good. All right well it is officially summer. We are in a little bit of a heat wave. Temps today over 100 degrees. It was a hot one. But you know we still got to get out here. We still got a lot of work to do. It was a good day to get some chores done and a good day to get some work done on the house. And work still continues on this wall and I've been working hard on covering up some of the straw as you can see. And I'm just going to keep working on that. I gotta see if I have material to get the area above this window covered. I'm going to do that right away. You got some hot days out here for sure but you just got to roll with it and try and drink a lot of water and take breaks when you need them. Working at our own pace out here. Now that I've got that board in place we're looking a lot better. It's looking real good and then now I just want to kind of again just get a little bit more cob over some of these areas. Just a few areas and then maybe and then I think I'm going to pop over on the inside. Not a lot so I think I think we're almost there and then now I'm going to get focused on that spare room over there. All right so a lot of progress on the outside. I'm really excited that we got that area closed up on the outside. The north all those little gaps are filled. That's fantastic. Then of course we're sealing the floor here. Great as well. I'm excited about all the progress. And next up is I'm going to be working on that spare room. Getting that closed off and situated so really exciting. And then you got the final layer. Is it the final layer? Yeah. And the final layer of the floor is coming up soon hopefully. Then the floor will be done officially. All right y'all so thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate you tuning in and joining us on this journey each and every week. Thank you guys so much and we'll catch you guys on the next video. Bye.