We Used Beeswax to Make an Earthen Floor 100% Waterproof!

This week on OSRL how do you make an earthen floor waterproof? Take a look as we put the finishing touches on our laundry room floor. 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 and if you could do me a big favor definitely like and subscribe because you'll want to see all this come together. Now if you caught our last video then you know I finished up sealing up this north wall. Monsoon rains are coming and I wanted to make sure the areas above the bales and below the roof that it was all covered up over there and I got that done. Also just over here she got multiple layers of oil on the floor over here and it's looking real good. We might be putting that final sealing layer on real soon. Now I want to work on this room right here next. I want to work on the floor get this built up and start working on the walls. That is a lot to do but I want to get this spare room all closed off and just keep working on the line. After the spare room is the kitchen but obviously the spare room it's going to take a while to get done so let's get started y'all. It's a warm one out but uh we got a bunch of clouds out here and it's well I'm liking it. I feel like it's pretty good. Feels pretty pretty good. Of course that's uh making your job a little easier with the watering huh? Little clouds. Yeah I'm hoping it would rain so I wouldn't have to do any watering. I don't know. I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't think you're gonna get that lucky. Man you sure we won't get any rain? I don't know I'm hearing some thunder. Yeah I know. Well once you have everything watered then the rain will start. Another day another cob mix. I just want to take a moment and comment on the tenacity of this woman. All right Jess is going to help me stretch some wire. I don't have a whole lot left so I'm hoping I can get a decent amount done with this. Man we have been having some hot weather. Temps were about 100 degrees today which is no surprise for June but it looks like a storm is rolling in. Look the clouds are super thick over here. Look at this and maybe we get some rain. Very exciting. Of course I gotta button some things up if we do. Again we got some rain earlier but uh rain in June is pretty rare so I'm excited. Let's get that water. All right so let's talk a little bit about what's going on here. Of course so Jess and I we rolled this wire out here stretched it real tight got it stapled. You know I started getting some cob going down here and that's just going to be the base. I'm not doing cob all the way up but this we're going to be trying to do a sort of like waddle and daub method here to build this wall. Usually with waddle and daub you're using wood to sort of be the base of that and you're kind of sort of cobbing around it but with this we're going to be using a wire but I'll show you what we're going to do with it coming up real soon. Okay it's been about a week since I put oil on our laundry room floor and I want to take a look and kind of test it out and see if it is all kind of dried and cured. I'm excited let's check it out. I'm going to take this trowel and kind of rub it on the floor and if there's any kind of movement then it's not ready. I'm just going to kind of feel it first. It feels solid. Can you kind of feel like the oil when you rub your finger in there? It feels like slightly. Feels like oily dirt. But not I mean it doesn't leave any oily residue on your finger but it feels like like soft or smooth kind of. I don't see any movements. And the the smell has dissipated. Because it's supposed to be yeah because it had a powerful oily smell but yeah looks good. All right yesterday we did not get any rain with all those clouds and the wind. Today I don't know. We got a lot of clouds. They gave us a pretty about a 40 percent chance of rain but I don't know it's all down to the south of us. I don't know if it's gonna come this way or not. Sun's coming back out so I don't know we'll see. Yesterday low chance it looked like it was about to rain. Today higher chance maybe we don't see any rain. Well we didn't get rain yesterday either but it rained pretty close. I went down the road a little bit this morning and there was definitely some puddles out there so it got got real close just not here. Well I'm not sure if we're gonna get uh some rain rain but I'm starting to feel the sprinkles so you can hear it. You can hear it hitting the metal roof. Yeah you hear right? So very exciting maybe we'll get a little bit of rain. All right so what are we making now? I'm mixing up my own floor polish or floor wax so I'm ready to do our final waterproofing layer on the floor and I'm going to make my mix now. So basically I'm just taking what we have here which is mineral spirits and linseed oil and then I'm going to melt some beeswax and mix those all together. Mind your beeswax. One part of the solvent, one part oil and two parts beeswax. And there's the beeswax. Ready to start applying it? Yeah I think so. Once you're done with this floor can we not walk on it again? Never again. It's only to be looked at. Whoa looks like you're making some serious progress. You've been uh working pretty hard on this floor. How much longer do you think you're gonna keep going? I don't know I might have to stop soon. All right so we have been busy. We have been using up a lot of water. So between all the watering and all the cob work I've been doing, we have drained this tote almost all the way down to the bottom. We got a little bit left here. I gotta set up. I gotta fill this tote again. Put some more water in the blue barrel in the dome garden and get it set up again. So I mean rain should be coming soon. So if we can use up the water in the poly tanks I mean it's just gonna get filled up again pretty quick once the rains do start coming. So might as well use it. All right we got the IBC tote over here all filled up. We're filling up the blue barrel in here right now. This isn't gonna take long at all. All right and now we're filling up the last thing the wicking bed and again I don't think this should take too long. We're all set. Well today is Yuvia's anniversary. She's been with us four years now. Can you believe it? So we got her a little treat on a hot day. We got some frosty paws and I think she's gonna enjoy it. You want a frosty paw? So I'm ready to start working on this wall and what I'm going to try and do here is get some straw and just kind of shove it down into the wire all the way down to the bottom. Just kind of fill all this with straw. Then I'm going to go over with a clay slip try and get that all muddied up and what I'm hoping for is sort of like a lightweight sort of cob wall. So not straight cob but kind of just a straw going over with mud and we'll kind of do that and we're going to see I guess Yuvia likes the new room. Yuvia you comfy cozy in here? Comfy cozy? All right. Okay well I just started this wall. Look it's probably it's like three feet high already. Well I took a few minutes to do it and I like the look of it already. It's kind of cool with the straw and the wire. You know obviously we'll mud over this eventually but it looks kind of cool. I'm kind of debating whether just to kind of keep going up from here or if I should start the mudding process up to a certain point. We'll figure that out but yeah pretty cool. I like it. All right Jess is here with us and we're going to put up the next layer of wire and we're going to build up on the wall from here. Very exciting. All right so what is it you're doing here that you're so painstakingly trying to do? The wax has been sitting for a couple of days now. It's kind of dried out and now I have to buff it or polish it. So that's what I'm going to do. Okay and you're thinking this does a couple of things right? Well it's going to remove the excess wax and kind of spread it out evenly but it might also kind of push the wax deeper into the floors. So a necessary next step. All right so we're looking good. I'm going to put another set of boards going across here and then for the final roll of wire and I'm not really sure how I'm going to get a straw inside there for that last lift. So this should be interesting. Jess is in the middle of her karate training. Wax on wax off just like Miyagi taught us. All right so I got the rest of the wire attached up here and I kind of left this side a little loose. You see I don't have a whole lot of room here so I left it a little loose and I'm hoping that I can just kind of reach in stuff the straw in and then seal it up and just go bay by bay. So we'll see how this works. All right and it's all done. The top doesn't look nearly as good as some of these other layers you know because I had to just kind of finagle that straw in there. But it still doesn't look too bad and one of the quickest walls I've ever done. Almost kind of looks like a full-on straw bale wall if it wasn't so thin. All that's left to do is some mud and so very cool. But I'm thinking about leaving it like this for right now. Jumping on this wall and getting that started. So kind of close in this room so to speak. So how's the waxing been going? Pretty slowly. But you're just working on the stuff in between the tiles right now right? Yeah not waxing, buffing. Buffing right. Yeah also I have been cleaning the tiles as I go. Unfortunately I kind of wish I had wiped them down like immediately after applying the oil and the wax because now all that is like cured onto the tile. So I have to scrape it off. Lesson learned on that. Yeah. So it looks like you got a new tool there. Well not a new tool per se but a new attachment. And you're going to try this for the larger areas right? Yes. You don't want to just work your fingers over those larger areas of the floor? That would take forever probably. Not that you wouldn't be opposed to doing something like that. I would do it if I had to but I'm going to try this. So it's just like a buffing pad that's attached to a drill. Now you're playing with power. So I've never done this before so it's going to be interesting. So I'm going to try to keep this at a low speed. Apply even pressure and not like press real hard into the floor because I you know I'm just trying to smooth the wax out not trying to like obliterate it. So let's give it a shot. So what's the verdict on the tool? It's okay. I don't think it's designed for earthen floors. I think it's more designed for cars. Yeah but I think it it worked okay. Might save you a little time. Yeah. So the one area of the floor over here I was not very careful about making it smooth so it's kind bumpy and rough and it was tearing up that buffing pad. So it it worked a lot better on the smoother area but I think it did the job and probably good to go here. Nice. All right. So an excellent job on this floor. A little wax on, a little wax off. So what can we expect now that the floor is all buff? You know we put the oil on first. Have four coats of oil and we could have stopped there really and that makes a pretty durable floor and it seals the earthen floor. But this is going to be a laundry room and so we're going to be using water in here and just to give it some extra protection and make it waterproof we wanted to put that wax on there. And I finished with my wall over there. So yeah I'm going to then do the south wall that same way then I'll start getting some mud on it but uh very cool. Kind of a cool lightweight way to kind of do a wall and then you know then we'll throw some mud on it and it will be all done. Kind of excited to see how this all works out at the end. So thanks so much for watching. Really appreciate you joining us on this journey. Don't forget to give this video a big thumbs up and we'll catch you in the next video. All right, bye!