After checking out the upcoming weather forecast, it looked like there were going to be two straight days, Thursday and Friday that were good for mixing up some concrete and laying block. The rest of my long weekend Saturday, Sunday and Monday, not so good. So I took a day off of work to get a jump start.
It had rained the day before, so after getting the kids to school I pumped off the water on the tarp. I was frustrated to see water had gotten beneath the tarp and coated half my footing trench with mud. I was thinking I might as well go to back to work, but fortunately the other half of the trench was clean. I have a nice blower fan unit that I grabbed from the barn and put in the trench to try to dry the water, while I spread it around with a broom to thin it out.
As the blower was doing it's thing, I decided to get started on the other side. By now it was already nearly 2 o'clock. Better late than never. I had quite a bit of a nervous adrenaline rush getting ready to break open the first 80 lb. bag of concrete. No turning back now. It had been 14 years since I last laid block on my previous house garage and I had just that nervous anticipation of the unknown.
Six quarts of water was perfect for the mix (as the instructions called for) and I thought I had it just right. Using a concrete pan and a ordinary garden hoe (the same from '99!), it wasn't even as hard to mix as I thought. My nerves quickly subsided as everything clicked and I felt like I had just done all this yesterday. I started in the corner where the footing was the lowest point of the whole perimeter. A good 1" low or so. I built a thick and full bed of mortar to lay the first block. And down it went. I used a story pole I had made to check my height against the string line above and carefully tapped it down into position. At the right height, level in both the length and width directions. No don't bump it!
I set four more blocks around the first corner block and then moved to the next corner. Although I had a chalk line snapped to guide me along, it's not the easiest to stay perfectly straight. So I wanted to set another corner block so that I could then use a string line pulled taut from corner to corner
to more easily guide the way, and set the height.
I set the first block of this corner (not really a corner, but an end) to be exactly 10 blocks away from where I started. This was because I didn't want to start right at the end against the existing house foundation, otherwise I'd have a small cut block in the middle somewhere. This way, I keep the cut block against the house, and underground.
By now I had the other side of the footing pretty dry. In between laying the previous block I had moved the fan around, spread the water around and swept the dried mud away with a stiff straw broom. The corner nearest the house is actually a high point of about 3/4" high. The opposite corner is about the desired height.
With the contractor using that rotating laser level to set the pins for the footing depth, I have no idea how this footing was so un-level. From 3/4" high to 1" low. The low points aren't so bad, they can be built up quickly. But there is only so much space to made up when you are high. Normal mortar joints should be 3/8" thick. And obviously you have to have some mortar between each layer to hold everything together. I have 6 courses to work with, and I think it will take most of them to remove these high points. I'd rather get it taken care of below grade where it won't be seen, but I don't think I'm going to have that option here.
Anyway, the remainder of the blocks went smoothly, although my back started to feel the effects of carrying 80 lb. bags of concrete, mixing them, and then working in the bottom of a hole all day. Hopefully I'll get conditioned to this. I have a long way to go...
If you want to keep track, that's 15 blocks today, 282 to go!
If you want to keep track, that's 15 blocks today, 282 to go!
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