[Cob] Question from a list newbie

[Amanda Peck]

I don't know about things called "manufactured homes," but I have a couple 
of friends with "trailers" that qualify as old and crummy, which I wouldn't 
think about  putting any more weight on their floors than necessary, 
especially over the existing holes.  Also talked to a woman a year or so ago 
who I think got some money from the trailer company when she fell through 
the floor of her year-old trailer.  It's a ways down to the ground.  Even if 
it's in good condition, it's still a lot of weight, and a lot of slow-drying 
water that could mess up plywood (bad enough) or particle board (the worst 
case, and depending on year the most likely) or OSB floor below.

What I did with my tamped gravel equivalent of a subfloor was to put about 
an inch and a quarter of pretty well packed down--mallet or slapped around a 
lot with a big masonry trowel--clay sand woodship, quite a bit drier than 
most concrete.  We'll see.  The samples looked good.  We tried for a trowel 
finish on the mixture, and most of the wood chips disappeared quite nicely.  
We'll see, we'll see.  Pictures one of these days.

What you may have time to do is make samples.  A bag of sand, a bucket of 
clay from a road cut or ditch, wood chips from your friendly local 
woodworker.  Mix by hand or foot, spread out in or on something--board, 
large bowl, let dry slowly.  If it cracks, less clay/more sand, if it 
crumbles easily, more clay, less sand.  No clays out of a ditch are going to 
be pure clay, sand varies in its ability to support the clay, so your first 
trial may be horrible.  Maybe even as bad as spreading pure lime--no 
sand--on what is now the toad house.  Boy, did that look silly.  One of my 
samples, with a couple of coats of boiled linseed oil (buy it that way, 
boiled dries faster, but the process of heating it is a "don't try this at 
home children"  it can explode if you go too far or too fast or something.) 
set out in the rain and weather for months, still looks pretty good.
..............

Bonnie asks (snipped):

I would like to replace my crummy old manufactured home with a cob cottage,
but it's going to be a couple-3 years before I can do that.  My problem is
that I REALLY need to replace the flooring in my house now.

I'm wondering whether I can put an earthen floor into an existing house.  I
was thinking that I could rip up the crummy old carpet and put
down...maybe...1 or 1 1/2 inches of tamped cob, with 1/4 or 1/2 inches of
poured adobe over that.

Will I ruin the subfloor if I do that?  Will that much thermal mass be
enough to help keep my house cooler on hot summer days?  Am I completely off
my rocker?

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