At la-a-a-a-ast…

Our house has come along.                                                                                                            Our baling days are over.                                                                                                                  And life is like a song.

Before and after picture of the bales with plaster

Sit back and pour yourself a libation. This is going to be a long posting.

The universe worked in our favor last week — we were finally able to plaster the outside of the house! Yaaaaaaaay! We had lots of good help from our friends and subscribers. Perfect weather as well, cool, overcast days to begin with culminating with warmer and sunny to finish.

The weekend before September 10th (plaster gurus were coming from New Frameworks in Vermont) we were plugging up holes in and around the straw bales using clay slip knots that we made from coating long strands of straw with the slip and then twisting and knotting them to fit into deep spaces and to give the plaster something to cleve to. Because we had finished stacking the bales while there was a wrap on the outside we weren’t able to see how the bales met the outside plane, nor each other. Therefore, lots of stuffing had to be done before the plastering could begin.

Evan and Jonathan coating straw with the clay slip

Phyllis helping plug holes

Anyone who joined us for plugging holes worked at the ground level while Jonathan and I did the scaffolding bits and pieces. Just having an extra hand handing us of this stuff  was a HUGE help. Thanks to Phyllis, Jane, Nancy and Dick for coming out.

Our plasterers, Ace and Shane arrived at the house at 8 a.m. Tuesday morning and started organizing the site. Shane was setting up the scaffolding on the south gabled end (the big wall) while Ace was writing out the base plaster recipe on an old door near the sand pile where we had bags of clay and lime as well as fresh manure and chopped straw at the ready to be measured into five gallon buckets. There is an art to this people, you don’t just dump everything in. Ace gave us and our volunteers for the day, Oli and Anthony, a tutorial on how to do the mixing. Here was our base plaster recipe, which we had to do in half batches because our mortar mixer was a weenie.

• 2 buckets of sand, added separately
• about 3/4 water
• 1/2 clay
• 1/4 lime
• 1/4 manure
• 1/4 chopped straw

Ideally you have all these measured out in the buckets ready to go. The key was to add them in order, with a little bit of water at a time to keep the plaster moving in the mixer. We had rented a mortar mixer (different from a cement mixer. The mortar mixer has hard rubber strips attached to the paddles). If you click on the pictures below there are descriptions.

J.B. and Josh with their mounds of plaster on the second day

Oli and Anthony with their batches of plaster

Mixing station. Plaster was dumped into the wheelbarrow and then dumped onto 4×8 sheets of plywood.

Quite the process–plaster stations set up on the scaffolding made up of more buckets  with plywood on top and a pulley rope to haul up, yet more buckets partially full of plaster to be distributed to the different plastering stations.

Day 2. set up on the west side of the house

scaffolding with plaster stations. Farm buildings in the background.

Ace loading up the first buckets of plaster attached to the pulley rope

Plaster mix. You don’t want to fill the buckets more than half-way because they are HEAVY

This all done by a “tender” who was very important to have on site. As important, I would say, as the people mixing and troweling. J.B., our farm apprentice, volunteered the first day and I did the job the second day. That is not an easy job. My neck and shoulders were so sore the next day from hauling on that rope, shoveling the plaster into the wheel barrow then into the buckets.  Oiy vey! It was a lot of heavy lifting keeping those plaster trays filled. J.B. definitely earned his keep. Give that man more vegetables!

We had to do more prep work once Ace and Shane got up to the top of the gabled wall. They had to affix contega tape where the blown in insulation sat on top of the bales behind the insulweb. Remember, this is up at the peak in the attic space.

The netting on the contega tape helps to marry the plastered bale to the insulation making an air barrier and helping to seal the envelope which is the purpose of the plaster. You press plaster into the straw underneath the netting and again over it and onto the rest of the bale. The thickness of the base plaster was probably between 1/2″ to 3/4″.

The first trowel of plaster went on around noon. According to Ace and Shane, that was epic. I was pleasantly surprised that we nearly finished that wall by 6:30 p.m. I say “nearly” because we ran out of mixed plaster. So close. We were all excited though. Originally, Ace and Shane were only coming for two days but we begged them to stay for three and they said yes. We were able to get three walls done in three days–quite the accomplishment, my opinion.

It is a two trowel job. That is Ace, troweling and Shane in the background. Of course, Jonathan showing his skills….

Josh and J.B. did the second day of mixing plaster and then Anthony and Oli came back on the third day before they went to their jobs. They said they really enjoyed doing it! Put that on your resume, it’ll look great, I told them.

It was a happy/sad day on Thursday afternoon to see Ace and Shane leave, but they had other work to do back in Vermont, dammit, for other clients. We could not thank them enough for coming out though. Oh.My.Gosh. What a relief to get this done. Mostly. It took until that Sunday to finish the last wall on the east side. What left over plaster was shoveled into buckets with lids and placed into the house on the first floor. We will use these when we start this process inside. Oh yeah, baby. There is more. There is always more.

It should take two weeks for the plaster outside to cure and then we can fill in any cracks with caulk or, gasp, spray foam. By then we should have all the wood siding covered with preservative and stain (both sides) and we can put that up. Marcus, our go-to-construction-advice-guy, recommended we use pump jacks (about $80 at Home Depot) to reach the high elevations rather than scaffolding. Boy, I am learning all sorts of cool things on this job: ladder scaffolding as opposed to regular, mortar mixer and concrete mixers, pump jacks…Ow! that’s my head starting to burst from so much information.

As for plastering the inside of the house, we have to first round out all the bales around the windows and doors using a chainsaw, as well as set in the electric into the bales. Then we clay slip the bales, like we did outside, base plaster and then a finish plaster. We will still be mixing the plaster outside and then having to use a ramp to get the plaster inside using a wheel barrow. That is a bitch. You have to, have to get a running start. It is even better is you have someone in front of the wheel barrow pulling it up. It took me five attempts to get up that damn ramp when I was finishing the wall on the deck side. Man, that was frustrating. It was Thursday, about five o’clock, all our help had gone and Jonathan was walking the dogs before their feeding and I was determined to finish that wall. I had put 8 shovels full of plaster in the barrow and it turned out it was one too many. It tipped on my fourth try up the ramp so I lost about half a bucket. Turned out that was all I needed to get up the ramp. Man-o-petes, I don’t know how anyone can do this for a living. It is hard work. Friday morning, knowing I had another wall left to do, I made an appointment with my chiropractor for the following Monday….

Stay tuned. And thanks for following along.

Phyllis helping plug holes

Evan and Jonathan coating straw with the clay slip