[Cob] Cob--colors and FLOOR PARTY

[Amanda Peck]

Thanks for reminding me about the colors.  Bioshield has a fine collection.  
All I have to do is order them.

If you really care about your earthen floor, you don't walk on it with shoes 
on.  It's softer than a lot of conventional flooring (not necessarily carpet 
padding, though), how soft, how waterproof, depends on exactly how you've 
done it.  So you need a transition, an inside place where people can remove 
shoes (if you really care) or at least where everyone's first step will be, 
so that there isn't a depression in the floor right there.  After the first 
step, presumably the subsequent ones will not always form a pattern.

Ceramic tiles can look nice, put into a pattern there, easy to come by, 
fairly easy to install.

We'll find out about rubber mats.

Everything wears--steel steps with that "no-slip" pattern wears after twenty 
years of hundreds of  people tramping up and down from the shop floor to the 
break room three times a day.  Where I once worked, the pattern was 
completely worn off, there were slight depressions on two of the three sets 
of stairs.

I once lived in a house with fairly new, and apparently good quality 
carpeting in which the pile, and the padding underneath had mashed down into 
nothingness in the standard route from the living room into the kitchen.

.............
Jane responds to me (snipped, especially of my stuff!):
"different colored mix into the voids."

I don't know if it's available in the US, but in Scandinavia you can buy a 
lot of different colours for lime and linseed oil paintings, some of them 
quite dark. They have been used traditionally for clay and brick houses and 
have been neglected for some decades when plastic paintings were applied 
everywhere, but they are coming back into fashion. Mostly it's some kind of 
metallic compound. If nothing else you ought to be able to get different 
colours of ochre (shades of yellow, red and brown) which will mix into both 
clay, lime and oil.

"I'm told it's a pretty good idea to put reinforcement around
the main door"
Why is it a good idea with those reinforcements, and where exactly to you 
put them?

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