Inner City Farmer

One MRI, three cortisone shots in the back, and countless hours of physical therapy, and the Inner City Farmer is back! Sort of. To finish up the the earth floor in the Man Cave (or Brandy Library, if you prefer) I needed to employ the services of Frank Meyer, and I am so glad that I did because Frank is simply the best. He’s easily in the top three or four out of all the earth floor makers in the world. Think about that. It was like having Michael Jordan stop by to help me work on my jump shot.

Frank took care of applying the first coat of linseed oil to seal the floor and left me to do the rest. He heated the oil up so that it could be spread thinner. Even so the clay was “thirsty” and the floor drank up four gallons of the stuff. For the successive coats the oil hasn’t needed to be heated, but I have thinned it by adding some Citrusolv, which I got at EcoWise. The Citrusolv helps the oil dry quicker and it makes it smell better, like oranges!

I have added four coats total at this point and plan on adding one more. It’s taking about two days for each coat to dry. But soon–within a week?–the process will be done, and we’ll be able to start using the room! For those interested in learning more about earth floors, a good article was written about them in the New York Times several years ago, and, of course, Frank is one of the main people featured in the article.

Guess who’s back playing in the mud? After staying indoors for what seemed like an eternity away from the summer heat, I have emerged from my summer hibernation. Several weekends ago, I was given a metal tool shed that will finally give me some place to store all my tools. It came with a roof and four walls, but, alas, no floor. Most people would have simply poured a concrete slab and called it good. But, as you surely know by now, I hate concrete worse than I hate Nazis.

So I started digging a square hole in the ground.

Then I dug trenches on the outer edge of the square hole so that water would drain away from the future floor.

Next I filled in the hole with all the septic gravel that was left over from making the earth floor in the Man Cave.

After erecting the tool shed, I then starting digging clay from my pit/future pond in my back yard. Thanks to the drought, the clay was rock hard so I soaked it in water, let it dry a little in the sun, then sifted it through a wire screen.

Just as I did on the previous earth floor, I used two parts coarse gravel and one part clay for the first layer. It’s like slicing cold butter into a flour mixture when making a pie crust. All the little bits of butter/clay should get completely covered by the flour/sand. I then pounded this layer with a tamper.

I’m going to let it dry a little–the clay was still quite moist when I mixed it with the sand–before I start on the next layer.

Now that I have stained all the trim, the Man Cave is one step closer to completion. It took so long for me to get around to doing this because (a.) after so many workshops in a row, I needed a break and (b.) I wanted to make sure I got the right kind of stain.

It would have been so easy to drive to Home Depot and pick up a can of toxic sludge for ten bucks, but I chose to stick with my theme and conducted some research on more environmentally friendly stains at Eco-Wise here in Austin. They had several products that fit the bill, and I ended up choosing a fir green stain made by a German company called Osmo. It’s made “mostly” from readily renewable, natural ingredients. and when dry, it meets European safety standards for use on children’s furniture and toys and resistance to perspiration and saliva. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better for you than the junk Minwax cranks out. Perhaps the greatest praise I can give it is that I spent five hours slapping it on my wood trim, and never once did I feel like I’d been huffing gasoline out of a paper bag beside some dumpster.

The only real drawback was the usual one: a quart of the stuff set me back $37. But when I think about the brain cells I saved and the damage I didn’t inflict on the natural environment it seems well worth it. I am giving this product two thumbs up, especially because it has such a high coverage rate I was able to stain all the exposed wood in the room with just a single quart.

I usually don’t like to publicly divulge where I get my free building materials from, but in this case I have no fear that the rock pile at the Austin Memorial Park Cemetery will be picked clean any time soon. To truly gauge just how big it is, do a Google map search for its address and then take a look at the satellite photos. Right next to the green field you will see the rock pile, which, believe it or not, has grown twice as large since that picture was taken. I harbor dreams of building a house entirely out of stone.

After receiving so much help on my project, I jumped at the chance to help someone else get a little closer to finishing theirs this past weekend. Sarah and Brent, who I first met at Tempe’s first earthen plaster workshop, are building a straw-bale house between Manor and Elgin, and they threw a work party on Sunday. Admittedly, I was a little distracted by my son’s antics–getting boric acid on his hands was the worst–but I was able to lend a hand at cutting the bamboo they’re using to pin the straw bales into place. I was joined in this task by Aaron and Nathan, a Canadian who just happened to stop in Austin while on a bike tour of America helping to raise funds for Athletes of Africa.

My initial impression of the house was that it was quite a bit bigger than most of the natural-building structures I have seen. Its Great Room is the size of a high-school gym, which makes it perfect for storing and keeping dry all the straw bales that will be used.

Having seen the wonders of straw-bale construction firsthand, I am now considering using it to build the future guest house in my backyard (estimated completion date: 2012). The thick walls are perfect for maintaining cooler indoor temperatures on the hot summer days here, and they look really cool to boot. Thanks, Sarah and Brent, for letting me partake in the festivities.