29: Final floor layer

With the heating coil in place, it was time to jump back in the hole one more time to dig out and mix the final floor layer. This was going to be the thinnest and most wet layer yet, with a slightly increased amount of sand to hopefully prevent some of the cracking that had happened to the first finish layer.

Here's a photo of the wheelbarrows ready for the mixing:



And a bucket of the final mix with the last layer partially covering the heating coils:



The floor progressing:



The whole floor, after the first troweling, still extremely wet:



Another view:



After this I don't have any more good photos - my camera started having intractable technical problems, which was definitely a bummer. To finish off the floor, I went and troweled it smooth two to three times a day for the next 5 or 6 days. By that time it was clear that there were going to be some cracks that I was not going to be able to trowel out, so I dug out some of the most clayey earth from the hole, and pushed it through window screen material with my hands to form a thick, very smooth clay slip. This slip I troweled onto the floor in an extremely thin (less than a millimeter) layer, filling the cracks as I went, kind of like grout. I did this three times, and each time the cracks became smaller and less noticeable. After the third time I decided that it was good enough, since you could see the cracks only if you got down on your hands and knees to look. I let the finish floor dry for a couple more days and then started work on finishing the interior.