Yurt: Earthen Floor Part 1

Today began with us laying out the two sheets of 10' x 25' 6 mil plastic and me cutting it to fit the dirt floor of the yurt (so inside of the bond beam) while Brent began screening and hauling up another 20 five gallon buckets of sand.  When I finished with the plastic, I went down to help with the screening.

6 mil plastic and 2nd layer of sand done.

Once that was done, it was time to work with the coarse adobe layer.  I had previously screened some of our dirt with half inch wire mesh.  So, we put 5 FULL five gallon buckets into our wheel barrow with a large two fisted handful of chopped straw (bought in a compressed "brick" at Tractor Supply) per bucket.  To make the mixing easier, we added one bucket at a time, mixing with straw each time a bucket was added. 

Mixing Adobe and straw.

That was then used to begin a pie shape wedge of adobe that we thought would end up about an inch think.

1st pie wedge of coarse adobe layer.

We used the garden sprayer to wet the sand before dumping the adobe/straw mix onto it and then used the leveling rake to help evenly spread the mixture.  Brent then used the tamper to tamp it all down.  I used a piece of 2"x4" to tamp the adobe alongside the bond beam where it was hard for the tamper to get in.  At first, we were misting each bucket of mixture after it was dumped and after Brent raked it level-ish, I was spraying it again before he tamped.  The tamper built up in the clay quite often and needed frequent scraping.  We backed off a bit on the amount I sprayed before he began tamping and fewer scrapings of the tamper were required.

Tamped (left) vs untamped (right).

The layer tamped down quite a bit and we got less than an inch from it.  So, we figure we will either be doing thicker layers for the next two or doing a fourth layer overall. It was another fairly long day.  It took the two of us about 7 hrs or so to take care of the plastic, the second layer of sand and the first layer of adobe.

First layer of adobe done!

First layer of adobe (coarse) close up.

We fairly heavily misted the entire yurt floor with the sprayer and then covered it with a tarp.  It is hot and dry with a bit of a breeze and we don't want it drying out too fast.

Tomorrow we will mostly be screening clay/soil together through quarter inch hardware cloth to create a little finer adobe mix.  This will also be mixed with some chopped straw, but a smaller amount.  We are going to need a lot, so that's probably about all we'll do tomorrow.  It is easier work than today's so will give us a bit of a break.