What No One Tells You About Lime Plastering an Earthbag Dome

If you caught the end of our last video you know we couldn't finish plastering the top of the dome because we've got a big storm rolling in and that's where we're picking up right now. Clouds are rolling in, wind's picking up and we're already starting to get some rain. This could be One of the biggest storms that we're facing right now. They promised us over an inch of rain, but you know how that is. We could get any amount up to over an inch or maybe nothing. I'm starting to laugh at it. But either way, we're already feeling some rain, so we didn't feel comfortable getting on top there and starting to work. So we're going to ride out this storm, you know, and even if we did get out there to get some plaster done, if we're getting a heavy rainfall, that's a bad idea because if the plaster isn't set, Then it could end up washing off. So there's no point in trying right now. So wish us luck and we're going to see how much rain we get. All right, well, starting just a light drizzle now. And we're going to see how this all turns out. But yeah, it is raining. So I'm glad we didn't get up there and start working because, I mean, we would have got up there and we had to come back down right away. It's crazy how that works out. Just got to work around the weather out here. It's all you can do. So far all the rain that they've been promising has not shown up. It's just been a light rain. We've had just enough rain to keep us from getting up there to doing work but not enough to really really catch a whole lot of water. We got almost an eighth of an inch so far but you know not nothing too radical. So we got all the wind but not a whole lot of rain. But there is still one chance. All the apps are saying that is a 100% chance that we are going to get rain, almost an inch of it. And that's coming up pretty soon. So we'll see. This is going to be the last hurrah for the day. And after that, I think we'll be able to get back up on top and finish off this plaster and then get to start on that lime wash. I'm ready to get it done. I guess I can give those apps a little bit of credit. They were right for once. We got rain. Came down. Hard and heavy for a little bit. Not too long. But let's see what we got. Let's see what we got. Always got to see what we got. Oh, almost a half an inch. So close. That's kind of what I was thinking. So you live out here long enough, you see the rains, you kind of get a feeling for these things. So I was pretty close on that. Nice. Yeah, half an inch of rain. I'll take it. The monsoon is just about over. One last final hurrah. Might not have to wait too long for more rains because I think this winter is supposed to be pretty wet as well. Yubi, what are you doing out there? I see you trying to be incognito. Yeah, it's funny. I saw you in your jean shirt and I was thinking, oh, it's a little chilly you're doing that instead of the hoodie. But then I realized you still have the hoodie on. I'm layered up. Actually, I have three layers on. But that's nice because it's going to warm up and then I can just take the layers off. I feel like it's not that cold, but okay. How do you do you? Doing all that plaster work, cob, lime wash, I'm using my hands a lot and my hands and my fingers are starting to hurt a lot. One of the health conditions that I have is hypermobility. It affects a lot of different parts of my body, but one thing it really affects is my joints. So my tendons and ligaments are a little more lax. than they should be. They don't support my joints very well. So my joints can hyperextend or twist and can get injured a little more easily, I guess, than the average person. So I decided, you know, instead of risking getting injured and just dealing with constant pain, I get this kinesiology tape. This is it. It's going to be the first time I'm using this while working and hopefully it supports my joints a little better and keeps them from moving where they're not supposed to be moving. It's flexible, so I can still, you know, bend my fingers and work. All right, Jess, show off those fists of fury. Ho, ho, ho, ho! You haven't overdone it a little bit, have you? I don't know. I might have. Well, we'll see how this, we'll see how it works. Good luck. All right, let's head up there. Yuvie, you ready? You ready? She doesn't know what's going on, but she's ready. All right, plaster check. Looks okay. Well, I'll tell you, that rain was coming from heavily from the south, so I think if there were any issues, it'd be on this side right here. This is where it definitely hit the hardest. Yeah, that looks fine to me. Looks real good. One of the first things I had to look at is less mud. Yes. I mean, it's muddy up here, but that's because that's from the previous rains after the cob had washed, after some cob had washed off. Right. Like, it'd be nice when we get rains up here and we're not getting a ton of mud sloughing off the roof. Because you can actually walk around this area here. I know, there was, it was a huge muddy mess the last time we had a big rain. So now you don't have to clean it up. Yeah. Before the dawn. We're moving right along. I think we're just a couple mixes away from hitting our daily goal, but I think it's going to take a little bit more to finish it. Maybe Maybe another three, four mixes. I don't know. We're going to stick it out here and try and knock it out. It's tough though. I think we're pushing it. Now we'll also have to see if it's going to rain. No rain on the schedule, but man, there are a lot of clouds out here. So fingers crossed and wish us luck. This is it. Last little bit of plaster. Can you believe it, Jeff? You can? I can. This is crazy. You ever think we, it's crazy to see all this done. Yeah. Well, that is it folks. That's the last of the plaster. We are done with this. Man, that was almost a day and a half's worth of work. 22 mixes. Our usual goal is 15, but here we got 22. We pushed it and we got it done. Man, that is it. We are finally done with the plastering and that was 22 mixes today and I am beat. This is tough. I don't want to leave you guys with the impression that this is easy work, but with two people, we got this done in, what, a couple of months? I mean, it's still not quite done. We still got to do the lime wash, three coats of that, so still a lot more to do. But man, what a huge accomplishment, and this dome had been sitting unprotected for so long. So, you know, You know, we just got that cob layer up there. And already those heavy rains were washing that away. We didn't want that to wash. All the hard work we literally just did. So, I mean, we absolutely had to get this done. People compare protecting the outside of the dome, plastering and stuff like that. Some people compare that to even being tougher than just building the dome itself. If you're thinking about building with earth bags, like earth bags, super adobe or whatnot, plastering is a lot of work. So keep that in mind. All right. Yuvie, you find a comfy spot? She found those straw bales. She loves laying on straw bales. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Yuvie, all comfy? All right, good morning, y'all. We are back at it. We are about to do some lime wash. We got the plaster all done. No rest for the weary because we are getting right back up there and starting the lime wash process. There's not much we can do. We got about About one bucket and then we're tapped. We gotta go back into the city. You know, um... So we're about to start the lime wash process and I had the idea and I've seen people in the comments also had the idea to use a roller to apply the lime wash instead of a brush but apparently that's not a good idea. All right ma'am first mix ready to go. The lime wash while it looks like paint It is not paint and it functions a little differently. I would love to use a paint roller. I think it would make things go a lot faster. It might be a little easier, but a paint roller, it's going to lay paint on top of a surface. And that is just going to be sitting on the surface. And with the lime wash, we want it to bind to the lime plaster. And the lime plaster, it's porous. You got these grains of sand in there. And you got to really work it into that surface. To do that, you really need a bristle brush. And you have to apply it in a certain way. Not just you know slap it on, you got to get it moving in different directions to really get it into that surface. And another reason why we can't use a paint roller for the lime wash is it's really difficult to get an even coat. of lime wash using a paint roller and if we get an uneven coat where some areas are thicker than others it could cause some instability in the lime wash and it might crack or have other problems. no uh no lime wash in a day we're out of lime and we're out of time or maybe we're just out of lime uh so we need to get more like we got half of that Bottom section done. We just ran out so we need to make another trip up to Tucson to Originate Natural Building and pick up some more lime. It's the only place we can get it. All right let's go. We are finally in town. It's always a long drive to come to the big city but we are here outside of Originate. Let's uh let's get that lime. Uh, what a cool shop. It's right on the edge of Dunbar Springs, which is a very cool place. If you're ever in Tucson, go check out Dunbar Springs. Uh, they're doing a lot of, they always do a lot of really cool stuff with, uh, rainwater harvesting. So it's a really cool neighborhood. And this shop is just like kind of right on the edge of that. And if you're building naturally in the area, it is definitely the place to visit. So we always go there for their, uh, for their lime, but, uh, they have so many other things too. Oh, I was really enjoying looking at all the kind of reclaimed materials they had there. Which I know they had, but we never got a chance to go to the back there. So that was really fun checking that out. Yeah, the reclaimed materials was definitely fun. If you're ever into that kind of thing, if you're building in the area, check that out because there could be some hidden treasures for you. They have a lot of other materials too that You know, I was just checking out the lots of different tile. It looks like they might have like various like paints and dyes and stuff like that. Anything you would need for natural building. For natural building. Different paints, dyes and sealers and all kinds of stuff. And the people there. Really helpful and knowledgeable. Very knowledgeable. If you have any questions, they probably have the answers. Yeah, so a very cool place. It's probably the only place that we can get the kind of lime we use for this building. So very handy that it's not super close, but close enough that we can get to it. So very cool. A big shout out to Originate and like I said, if you're in the Tucson area and you're building naturally, go check them out. Well, it's great to be back after our trip and the work has to continue. So I'm gonna get up there and start doing some prep work. Just some things I gotta do for the next stage of the project. So we're about to finish off the first layer of the lime wash and I can't wait for that. But there's just some small things I gotta do before we finish that off. Okay, so we got some of these areas where we got these little screws popping up. And so I'm gonna get these cut off. Are you sure a hat's a wise choice for today? That looks like a captain's hat. Gotta strap it down. Alright, so Jess and I are about to, we want to finish up this first layer of the lime wash on the bottom half of the dome, bottom half of the top of the dome. So we're trying to get that done. Meanwhile, while I'm mixing and she's going to apply this lime wash, I'm going to go around, I'm going to cut some of the screws that are protruding from the eaves and clean up some of this dirt up here, just get it a little more clean. That's going to be for the next phase of what we're doing up here. You're going to have to hang on to something today. This is crazy. And just walking around the dome with the lime wash. It's bright. But not bad for a morning sesh. We're really moving right along here. It's looking really good. I think we started right around over here. Look at this. We got all the way around here. We're probably three quarters of the way done. This is amazing. Yeah, it's just, it's super windy out here. And so, um... It's definitely tough moving right along, but I think, I think we're still doing a pretty good considering. I don't know how you're holding up in this wind. It's wild. Wild. I was talking to them a little bit about, um, I didn't want them to get the wrong idea about what we're doing up there. Some people might look at it and might think, Oh, just like covering, uh, Putting some plaster on there doing lime wash, it's easy work. I don't know, what do you have to say about that? If someone thinks that, then they've probably never done it themselves. I didn't realize myself how much work it was going to be. Initially I was thinking I was going to just finish off the whole top of the dome by myself. I'll just do a little bit every day and then, you know, if I was... actually going to do that it would probably take me I don't know maybe years to finish it's a massive amount of work. Even if you focused on it like maybe you could have done it yourself maybe before the next month too but it would have taken a while. The majority of the work is what you've been doing and I don't know if we've really shown that on the videos at all but like while I'm I'm applying the plaster. You're running up and down from the roof to the ground. Gathering the materials and carrying it up there and this plaster especially, you know, that's mostly sand. That's heavy stuff. It's a lot. It would be too much for me. And I think even for just two people, it's a lot. Part of that's how big we decided to make our dome. It's a lot of surface area to cover. Yeah, it's difficult work. And it's tough on the joints too, right? It's tough on my hands. That makes perfect sense. But you shouldn't have to wrap them today, right? I'm going to try not wrapping them today. Do you think you still get some joint pain from applying the lime wash? Possibly. All right, well. See how you do without it, but if you need it, we'll take the time and wrap it up, so. All right, so before we started work today, I saw some people in the area building with straw bale, and they were giving away some chopped straw. So we can always use straw here. I definitely had to take advantage of it, and so I ended up picking up a few bags. Well, six bags to be precise. So we can always use straw. A big thank you to them. This is definitely going to come in handy, so we were pretty excited to be able to pick that up. It's fortunate to have so many people building kind of in a similar method because, you know, there's always a chance for materials you don't need to pass on to others, so it'll be good. Jess is getting that prep work done. Now, Jess is extremely tired because we worked hard yesterday trying to get as much of this done, and look how much we got left. We don't even have that much left. Like maybe we'll be out here like an hour or so and we'll have all this knocked out. You excited to have this first coat done? Yeah. Yeah. We're basically going to knock this out. We don't got too much left to do here. Very exciting. Now remember we'll have this first coat done, but we got to do two more coats in. So still a lot of work to do before the top of the dome is finished. But I think when we start getting on to the second and third coat, I think Jess can do a lot more of that herself. It should be a lot easier than even this first coat. So I'm going to start prepping things to get ready for harvesting water off of the top of the dome. So I'm going to add more tanks down below, get this sealed off, and get the piping ready. So maybe by the winter rains we'll be able to collect some water off of the dome. Very exciting. Doing the lime plaster and putting the lime wash over that, that should protect the dome pretty well. But I guess the lime wash, it usually lasts like three to five years after application and then you just add another layer over it. While we could do that and it wouldn't be too difficult, we were thinking there is another option that would last longer. You can get a type of masonry paint that works really well on lime plaster. It's vapor permeable, and it will chemically bind to that material, so it actually, it doesn't just sit on the surface, it actually becomes part of the wall. So we're looking into that. The reason why we didn't put it on right away is because it's very expensive you know before we have to put on another layer of the lime wash maybe we'll see if we can do that you know down the road and that will last I think at least 20 years but maybe longer. Well see that's an option if you got the money and yeah maybe that's something we'll do down the road we'll just have to save up some I need some money and then... Save us some work down the line, but yeah, pretty cool. All right, and with that, we are done. We're done. Oh, my goodness. Yes! Oh! Haha. Major props to this lady, such a hard worker. She got it done, y'all. Great job. It's looking fantastic. Way to go.