[Cob] new earthen floor on old concrete floor

[Amanda Peck]

Hey, this time I'm almost the voice of experience!

a) did you try something like citrasolv to clean your concrete?  It'll 
probably reek you out of there, although a small amount is pleasant 
smelling.

b) I put down about an inch and a quarter (the size of our wood, so it 
wouldn't matter too much if it was upright or sidewise!) strips into crusher 
run/roadbase type gravel about a foot apart, then after the whole mess dried 
came back and put colored mix into the holes left by the wood.

(by the way, we could nail or screw our wood.  Ed, how did you fasten yours 
down?)

c) many people, when putting down earthen floors, use tile or something else 
sunk into the tile to reinforce the areas subject to a lot of wear, e.g., 
doorways, places where you stand in front of the sink.  I used those rubber 
mats with lots of holes in them--both the kind to ease your feet on hard 
floors and the "looks just like cast iron, with no rusting."  They don't 
have a lot of tensile strength.  Lay down a layer of floor mix, put the mat 
on top, fill it, then clean off the surface.  This is kind of pretty, seems 
to be working.

And we dried it slowly, with hay (straw would have left less mess) on top.

My mix was developed by the self-proclaimed "mud-pie queen of Oklahoma."  It 
didn't crack, went in beautifully, but is a bit soft.  Of course, since the 
walls doors, etc. haven't been completed the one place I put in linseed oil, 
some critter--no idea if it was a dog, possum, raccoon, coyote, guinea fowl, 
chipmunk, blacksnake, whatever, decided to chew it all up.  Ed's right, pure 
linseed oil is not toxic, otherwise we might have known from the corpse!

d) we had cracking where we didn't get it smashed down enough.  If, after it 
dried, it sounded hollow, it was going to break the first or second time 
somebody stepped on it.