How To Make A Hard Dirt Floor

How engineers make plain old dirt as strong as concrete.

How to make a hard dirt floor.

Cover the dirt floor with a layer of 10 mil plastic sheeting to serve as a vapor barrier which will keep moisture from seeping through the dirt and onto your wood floor. Earthen or adobe floors are. It is usually constructed in modern times with a mixture of sand finely chopped straw and clay mixed to a thickened consistency and spread with a trowel on a sub surface such as concrete once dry it is then usually saturated with several treatments of a drying oil. Just a short video on a way to use junk tracks to make a floor in a dirt floored storage building.

A humble pile of sand can make a pretty good foundation so long as you treat it right. The end result is a very beautiful slightly textured very hard earth floor. It is best to finish one half of the floor before starting the other part. When sweeping the finished floor add a little water so that the mixture will not dust off but become harder.

Making dirt hard entails adding sand and lime in specific ratios. It s a pleasure to walk on works as a thermal sink in colder weather and is a beautiful addition to the roundhouse. When mention of an earthen floor is made one might imagine a dusty drab dirt floor. Instead they are very elegant durable inexpensive and ecologically sustainable solutions to a typical floor installation.

Earthen floors are far from this however. They are varied in construction but the idea and ingredients are essentially the same across the board. Lay the sheets in rows across the dirt floor. May 17 2016.

This method took 8 weeks from start to finish with high input costs due to all the brickies sand we used and the endless hours of labour mostly. Overlap the bottom of the walls with two inches of the sheet edges raised upward along the wall s surface. Mix the ashes and earth very thoroughly and slowly add just enough water to make a paste. At my old shop my forge area actually had a sweepable dirt floor wherein i mixed up clay heavy fill dirt and mason s lime different than aglime at about a quarter bag to a wheel barrow full of dirt dampened it well and compacted it with a regular hand tamper i then raked it to key in the next layer of fireclay masons lime and course.

Using a wheelbarrow to mix all the elements will make your dirt hardening project go easier. Part of the garage we did years ago and it has worked very.