Day 48
These days just keep ticking by. I almost can’t believe it has been 48 days since I began this site. Well, the good news is that progress is being made. Not only in the recreation of the Big Barn but also the little house has been receiving an overdue makeover. The inside of the house is a mess but ready for laying the floor.
The damp has become an issue, leeching in from the outside, to the point of dissolving the concrete floor.
In the last week I have obtained Hydraulic Lime which will become the first layer of the floor. This material acts as a water barrier while still absorbing and evaporating water. Make sense ? Well, Lime actually does this. It acts like a wick for dampness, slowly evaporating moisture and repelling moisture from the exterior. So it is actually a breathable floor. It absorbs carbon dioxide from the environment which offsets the carbon emissions from manufacturing it. And in comparison to making concrete it takes 20% less energy to make lime. So there are a lot of pluses to using this material.
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- hydraulic lime
bigbarnproject Blog 
I never knew. I know the old timers always used lime on the inside and outside of the stone houses. It’s a natural bacterial killer. Milking parlours were whitewashed, kitchens, anything that needed to be fresh and clean.