Working with Natural Hydraulic Lime, you’ll want to have a big bottle of White Vinegar on hand. It has a lot of great uses, beyond making volcanoes with baking soda! I keep a gallon of white wine vinegar under my kitchen sink and in my tool trailer.
The first use and most immediate when working with lime, is to neutralize that lime when it gets somewhere you don’t want it. For example, if you get plaster on some woodwork, you can quickly wash it with vinegar to minimize the staining of the wood. This fix won’t be perfect, but it will make a big difference which may be that space between ruined and “not a big deal.”
Another use for the vinegar is in a similar fashion, but a more personal way. You can use the vinegar to neutralize the lime on your skin. If you get some in a cut, it will sting like crazy. Add some vinegar to the cut (yup, that’s going to hurt too) to stop the long term burn of the lime in the cut. A little pain in the short term for some long term relief. Here’s a link to some great natural cuts and scrapes salve. This works great to heal those dried out, scraped up hands. Natural Salve.
Yet another good use: Throw some vinegar into the soak cycle of your laundry when your clothes have lime on them. It is very hard to get the lime out for good, but a long soak in vinegar water (strong on the vinegar) will help. Soak the clothes for about an hour or two and then run them through a cycle. Once more, with laundry soap this time, and your clothes should be almost like new (at least like what they were before you started leaning the hawk on your chest).
Best practices when working with lime plaster: Wear good gloves. Wear glasses. Don’t lean the hawk against you. Clean out cuts and use band aids right away. Keep your tools and yourself clean!
About the Author
Andrew Morison is a specialist in straw bale and green construction. He has shown thousands of people how to build their own straw bale projects through his comprehensive series of instructional straw bale, concrete foundation, and plastering DVDs. You can check these out at http://www.LearnStrawBale.com.com.
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July 15th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
My son works for a concrete finisher and his clothes are always a mess. I told him about adding the vinegar to the rinse cycle and he tells me it worked great.
You have a great site. Thank you for sharing so freely Andrew.
July 15th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
That’s great! Thanks for the kind feedback too.