More Wall-Building, June 2008
After the wall-building party, we hired a crew to come out and finish raising the walls. We started off paying them by the hour and damned if it didn't take them forever to lay each brick. We switched over to paying them by the brick and the walls went up faster. We placed the window and door bucks, and Scott helped us prepare the lintels (beams of wood that sit over each window and door). A concrete "bond beam" was poured over the top layer of bricks, as required by code.
The walls. Our concrete guy came out and poured a mini wall where all the interior walls would go, because he screwed up the depth of the slab relative to the stem wall.
The lintel wood was delivered. Aaron drove the Bobcat like a pro, which he just about is, by now.
Some guys working on the wall.
Joe Zamora, our plumber, with the first stream of water out of the hose.
Lintel wood.
Aaron, as the walls rise to almost head height!
Our south wall.
The west wall.
Looking towards the south from inside.
To protect the top course of bricks from the heavy summer rains, we kept plastic on the top of the wall in the afternoons.
A rainbow through an east window.
Aaron removing pallets of bricks that didn't get used.
Broken bricks. We had way less breakage than we thought we would, so we had lots and lots of bricks left over.
Aaron and I worked on the shed a little bit more, making a stem wall of CMUs.
Aaron cutting rebar.
Amy troweling concrete.
Just like with the house walls, the first course of blocks is cemented to the stem wall and is made very, very level. The rest of the walls have a thin mud slip and are placed quickly, leveling every third or fourth row. As you can see, they're not perfect, but they don't need to be.
Aaron after the day's labor.
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©2008 Amy Jordan; Email Me.