Change of Season

Saturday was one of those gorgeous late November days you dream of having on a weekend: sunny, upper 60's and light wind.  Friends and I spent the bulk of the day happily tackling several tasks on our sailboat.  Until precisely 4:23, when the weather signaled that it was time to quit for the day.  We could hear the wind coming with the cloud bank, and practically instantaneously, the wind increased from a near calm to 30 mph gusts that whipped debris into our fresh paint (damn!).  The temperature dropped 10-15 degrees over the next 30 minutes.

So how is this relevant to the house?  Earlier that day, the interior temp was in the mid 60's.  Sunday, was a brutally windy day (gusts to 40 mph), with a high temp in the mid 40's with mostly cloudy skies.  The house sat un-visited with the windows closed and the heat off.  Monday morning, with the wind still gusting to 30 mph and overnight lows around freezing, I came in around 7:30 to find the interior temperature at 57 degrees.  But at least the sun was out!  By 11:00, the passive solar brought the temp up to more respectable:

I guess the framers were right when they said I'd be able to heat the place with a candle!  Perhaps the more noticeable experience is stepping inside and hearing the noise of the roaring wind diminish to virtually nothing!  The house has no creaks or other indication of the nasty weather outside.  And all thanks to simple stuff like sand, straw, wood, clay and paper!

Pigmented Clay Plaster

The plan all along was to use a pigmented finish clay coat as the finished color of the Light Straw Clay walls.  I have enjoyed working with the American Clay products.  They have an easy to follow system, an extensive array of colors to choose from, and best of all--excellent instructional videos on their website.

I'm doing two coats: the first has one packet of pigment per bag of LOMA clay.  This is the roughest mix they have, and is a good base for the final layer, which is finer-grained (Porcelina, in my case).

One tip they list is to use a 7-gallon mixing bucket to avoid creating a mess during the mixing process.  After looking into it, I found this would be hard to source, and relatively expensive.  It turns out, I had a 5 gallon bucket that I had already cut the bottom off of.  Problem solved for free!  I just stuck this in the black bucket and had no trouble mixing, even though I didn't caulk the white extender in place.

You can see the plaster going on, with the darker sections at the bottom right.  This layer is only the thickness of a credit card (about 1 millimeter).  Despite pre-wetting the clay, the clay layers were drying so fast that it was hard to blend the fresh plaster into the previous row.  Perhaps colder temps (it was in the mid 70's and pretty dry), or a better pre-wet would help with this.  Lessons learned for the final layer.  Three test spots are visible on the right.

Here is a closeup of the three test patches in cool, morning light.  The one on the right is what I placed on the walls: one bag of pigment to one 50 pound bag of plaster mix.  Middle is two bags of pigment, and the left is three.

Same test patches in warmer afternoon light.  What would you pick?  I'm going with the middle one.

This shows the first corner at the end of the day, with the sort of splotchy drying in progress.

And the same area fully dried in warm evening light.  With a flash, this looks very washed out, so I didn't include that photo. 

I'm quite pleased with how the transition came out between the drywall above the window and the clay plaster on the Light Straw Clay.  Thanks to Kate for the glass art!

Wish I'd cleaned off the window sill for the picture.  I wanted the wood to protect the corner, figuring it would be prone to damage.  In the end, I think I prefer the look of the solid wood window sill that I built in the kitchen and bathroom.

This is also a preview for the next post: Tadelakt