Yurt: Earthen Floor Part 3

Last Thursday evening a rather vigorous monsoon cell blew through dumping rain at the rate of 3"/hr.  We ended up with a little over 1.5" in a short amount of time.  We were sort of cringing, wondering if we'd find a swimming pool within our bond beam at the yurt site.

On Friday morning, we met with Cooper Power Solutions, LLC to sign our contract with them and make a down payment for their materials and services.  After leaving the coffee shop, we ran an errand at the post office and as we were headed in, our contractor, Brian, was headed out.  Gotta love small towns!  We had an impromptu chat about the house design.  Up walked Jen Cooper, whom we'd just met with and she told Brian not to run off as she needed to chat with him about something too. 

So, anyhow, this all meant a later start at the yurt site than normal and we didn't get going until about 10am.  It had indeed rained heavily at the site, but there were not even puddles, let alone a pool, in the yurt floor so that was good.  Some of our screened adobe was washed away, but it didn't seem like we'd lost that much.  Everything was nice a wet, so we used a lot less water than we had expected.

Brent mixed the screened adobe and water with his hands.

Hand mixing adobe and water.

We used 2x2's and a 2x4 to create sections for me to work in.  We kept them small enough that I could fairly easily reach all the way across and be able to blend sections together.  Brent brought me buckets of glop and dumped them out in my workspace - looking like huge cow pies.  I had my two trowels ready to go, one to do the main spreading and leveling and one to do the smoothing out.  I spent the day pretty much crouched.  I'm amazed my knees were able to handle it.

Setting up for first section.

First section done and starting on next one.

Close up of first section.

Getting next section setup.

This and the bond beam are my first experiences with troweling anything other than the two sets of straw bale benches we've made at previous homes.  Those were OK to be rough and meant to have some texture.  I found that, even with all the moisture we had in the mix and raining on us at times, I still made good use of the garden sprayer at times.  It really helped me blend between the sections and get a much smoother finish with the pool trowel.

We had a big tater wagon thunderstorm roll through - took about two hours for it to pass over.  Poor Suki was not a happy camper.  She and I went and sat in the truck for a bit to give her a little break.  We got some rain, but fortunately not too much and not heavy.  We had hoped we'd screened enough to finish, but we hadn't.  We ended up having to screen another wheel barrow and a half in order to finish.  The final layer was about 2" thick.  We weren't done until 7pm and we were exhausted.  It was another extra strength tylenol kind of day.

Done!  It's quite wet looking because it's quite wet.  It'd been raining.

On Saturday, we went up around 9a and put a tarp up like a tent over the yurt floor.  We want to protect it from direct sunlight, lest it dry unevenly and we don't want more moisture added to it as we want it to dry.  The tarp, a 20'x40' beast, gave us trouble.  It's not a heavy duty one as we were trying not to spend a ton of money on a tarp.  But, it gave us trouble in an unexpected way - the grommets were ripping right out of the dang tarp, tearing open a hole.  It was a bit of a balancing act to get it tight enough without putting too much torque on it.  We did see a few small puddles on the surface of the yurt floor, where, from the rain yesterday, there was still some surface water (and apparently I didn't get things perfectly level).

Tarp to protect from sun and rain.

This morning, Sunday, Brent went up to check on the floor.  He used an old towel to soak up any remaining puddles.  He then took our finishing trowel (pool trowel) and burnished the floor with it.  He had to wet down some flat/smooth pieces of wood and lay them down on the floor to kneel on.  Then worked the trowel in some sweeping motions.  The burnishing (sort of polishing) brings up some moisture and finer particles to the surface and creates a much smoother looking floor.  I took lunch up later and it does look really nice.  I do, however, see that it did make some changes to the floor that mean it isn't quite as level as it had been.  Hopefully it is more a visual illusion while the floor is still damp and not any real changes that will cause some issues once furniture is in place.  The pictures I took of the burnished floor don't really show the difference that you can see in person.

So, the next step for the floor is waiting for it to fully dry before we can seal it with linseed oil.  I've researched online and can't find anyone saying how to tell when the floor is dry.  I even reached out to a person who has installed many earthen floors and in the same climate as we are in and he can't really give me any real way to tell.  Hopefully it will be dry before the yurt gets here, which is supposed to be about September 13th.  It'd be nice to have it sealed by then as well, but we'll have to wait and see.  In the meantime, we have some "terra forming" to do.  We need to gentle the slope above the yurt and bring in some more rock to fill in the rest of the trench.  We need to treat the bender board with some linseed oil also and a few other small projects.