Limecrete floors.

I've been making a new floor in the living room.  The old one was oak parquet with dry rot, so out it went and we then needed something to replace it with.  A solid floor sounded good.  We wanted a limecrete floor, and spoke a lot to Mike Wye, who offer a lot of good advice, and I read up about it in various books, read method statements from various companies, etc, etc.

 Work in progress

 Turns out that the aggregate (graded, coated LECA or foamed glass aggregate) used in the UK isn't made here, and to ship it across would be too expensive.  Limecrete floors are done here, but LECA balls are used, like the ones used for hydroponics.  Problem is, this is like making a floor from wee marbles: completely unstable, especially as lime's tensile strength is far too weak - much weaker than cement.  So sod that.

World's biggest rice krispie cake.

What I ended up doing is something a little different.

I used gravel of the same size as the recommended LECA size in the UK to act as a capillary break under the lime slab.  No insulation value, but hey: just wear socks.  Also, the floor of a building tends not to lose as much heat as the rest, so better to spend the cash saved on loft insulation or something.  The gravel was sandwiched between two layers of geotextile membrane to keep it separate from the other layers.  It does roll about a bit - tamping was of no use because the size of the gravel is pretty similar so it doesn't lock together like a graded sub-base normally does.  I guess this is the same for the LECA, so thought it would be ok.  After all, with a ton of lime slab on top, where's it going to go?  Also, there's only two knackered people and a sofa to support...

Actually level! Well, near as dammit..

Next was the limecrete slab.  I stumbled across pumice aggregate, which is used for septic tanks over here.  It's called "pouzollane", which sounded a lot like pozzolan.  Turns out the Romans made stuff with it.  Worked for them, might work for me.  Now, they made things differently to how we do it now.  Basically, they beat lime putty, pozzolan and aggregate together - no mixing as such.  This is also how lime works were done up to the Victorian era - rammed, beaten, etc.  I can't do that, and only have a wee cement mixer.  I need a forced action mixer, but they're very expensive and hard to find here... Also, the pumice was of a different size to the LECA used so I had to work out the mix myself.  Turns out to be what everyone uses anyway - 3 aggregate, 2 sand, 1 binder...

Mixing is hard work: the wee cement mixer only takes 3 bucketloads.  Any more and all you get are maltesers and not concrete.  Also, the pumice sucks water out of the mix, and the sand and lime bind to it, and you get maltesers, not concrete.  Also, the St Astier datasheet on making limecrete says only add one litre of water to 50kgs of lime!  Not enough to even get it damp in my mixer, so after experimenting, I ended up having to use 4 litres per 10kgs of lime!  Not very strong, but the pumice sucked most of that water out and I ended up with a dry-ish mix that just about held together when squeezed.

I then spread a layer of pumice-crete on the floor between already levelled shuttering, and tamp it down with a big bit o' wood.  In 5cm layers.  To level, I alternately scrape a bit with a bit o' wood across the shuttering, and tamp with another bit o' wood, then add a bit more to make it level again, and tamp again.  When it's looking like level, I then go over it again, tamping down hard to compact it until it looks like a Rice Krispie cake.  Then cover and keep damp for 72 hours.  Hard bloody work.  Better work or I'm off to live in a tent.

Job done!

Got to keep off it as long as possible to make sure it's ok - the mix was way too wet to be honest, but it's 10cm deep (twice what St Astier recommend) and it's a living room, not a bloody car-park.  Got a quarter-ton wood stove coming at some point so I'll have to make a wee railway track across it to spread the load!

August

"They had loads of it here when we first came over, but haven't seen any for a while." said a friend, talking about terracotta floor tiles.  Can get them here but they're fifty euros a metre squared, so that would be 4 grand to do the ground floor.  Also, they look crap!  See below at our sample after I had sealed it.  I guess you have to walk on them for 100 years to get them looking good.  Or buy expensive ones.  Or, as we have, buy ceramic looky-likey for seventeen euros a metre squared and make do.  Also, to keep them looking good and not covered with ground-in muck and cat sick, you wash and oil them every week.  Sod that.

France don't do what everyone else does.  We have decided that concrete is bad as it produces it's own weight in CO2 emmissions.  Lime absorbs CO2.  It's also permeable (ish) so good for damp places like our house.  Which might have a spring under it, meaning I need to investigate and maybe dig a drain in the house.  Everyone who has pioneered limecrete floors recently uses LECA, graded and mis-shapen to provide structural stability.  France has balls of even size, which would be like making a floor out of marbles: prone to movement.  I found the next best thing - pumice.  Should (fingers crossed) have some insulation properties, and it's pozzolanic, meaning it makes the lime stronger.  Worked for Rome...

Also been wiring the house.  Very, very slow work as we can't sink the conduit into the walls: they're only 5cm thick and very brittle so the conduit would almost cut them in half.  I wonder why no-one has thought of this.  So, surface-mounted it is, in wee placcy boxes.  Brittle, expensive, and every shop has not quite what we need, or it's another make of wee box which is 2mm smaller/bigger than the rest on the walls.  Bloody nightmare.  I don't know why it's so cheap and nasty over here - British stuff is so much more solid and half the price!  The other half of the problem is routing it correctly.  For the plugs in the bedroom, it leaves the fusebox, goes up into the roof void, along a frame I had to make to mount the cables properly, through the wall into the living room, up into the bathroom, into a junction box, along and up the a plug in the bathroom, down and through the doorframe, up and around the door, along to the plug on the far side of the room, back to the plug nearest the bathroom door, up and round it again, across to the bedroom door, round the door frame (I replaced the door frame trim with the conduit to try and hide it a bit), along the top of the skirting board and up to the last plug.  Twenty million miles of wee placcy strip for 6 sockets, all mitred by hand, all staggered as per regs, all sank into the plug sockets a wee bit to make it neat.  Good job I'm smacked off my head on Ritalin or I'd be in a madhouse by now.

Yawn.

zzzzzzz.....

Also started plastering.  First coat harled on, next lime-hemp coat splodged on, then battens set up and down the walls as guides, then second lime-hemp coat on, then finishing coat of fine stuff (lime putty, fine sand) on.  Fine stuff is maturing in our old bath for 3 months so it's nice to work with and not shite.

Floor's coming up for the tiling.  We were going to tile on top of the old ones, but that would mean having to use tile adhesive, which is cement, sand and glue to make up for the cement being crap.  Better off using lime and not breathing in glue all day when laying it.

K is working her magic on the radiators.  Rub down, clean with linseed oil soap, prime with linseed oil primer (linseed oil and rust, basically), paint with linseed oil paint (linseed oil and probably graphite powder).  Good fun (K says I talk a lot of bollocks some days), no headaches, natural so no problems with disposal killing fish and that, lasts a long time.

Looking very nice indeed.

Not much going on then... better do some work in the garden as well...