26: Subflooring and first finished floor layer

After finishing the lath, it was time to start thinking about the flooring. This part was one of the two most interesting parts for me (the light straw-clay insulation being the other) since I had never done it before, and didn't even really know how you were supposed to do it. I bought a pamphlet from online for a couple bucks - one by Bill and Athena Steen. It was very helpful, but you can only get so much from a few pages of text and some line drawings. So, like a good science student I decided to do some experimenting.

With the same earth I used to make the light straw-clay, I made a couple test tiles of different formulations with different amounts of sand:



As you can see one of them cracked much more significantly than the other, so I went with the uncracked formulation:



Then, with the finish floor formula figured out, I went ahead and started putting in the subflooring. The subflooring was just straight earth, pulled out of the ground moist, but not moistened any further I raked it smooth and then tamped it with the tamper. The subflooring layer ended up being about 4 inches thick:



After the subflooring layer was solidly tamped, I mixed up a batch of the final finish mixture and applied the first of the two finish layers. This lift was about an inch thick and was much wetter than the subflooring. Here's a wheelbarrow of it:



And the first corner getting filled:



Chris troweling it smooth:



A little tamping just for good measure:



And finally Harper in his blue hat playing with some cracks that had formed in the first finish layer: