First Course Complete!

Wow, it's amazing what can get done when everything aligns. I was off for the day. I had nothing else on my schedule. And the weather...the weather cooperated! We had a high of 58 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. It made for an enjoyable day outside. And as you'll see in my photos, I had good company (and yes, I had to change out our well pressure tank last weekend). My plan today was to get the entire first course of blocks finished. I really don't want to worry about drying the footing and scrapping away mud and dirt again. If I can get the first course complete, then I won't have to worry about it. Any water that gets under the tarp won't bother me much after that point, except for wet shoes. 

Since all the corner blocks were in place and set up nicely from the day before,  I used some mason line and pair of mason line blocks to stretch a line from corner to corner. The line was set at the top corner block of each end. This gave me a guide to set the remainder of the blocks. I could lay a block and tap it into position so it was just off the line, and then set the height so that the top of the block was level with the line. I still used a level to make sure the block was level in its width, but otherwise I moved pretty quickly. Quick being relative as I've only been doing this for a few hours now. 

The one frustrating thing, and I'm sure all masons have to deal with it, is the uneven footing. I just didn't think with that fancy laser level it would be quite the issue. As I go along the line I'll have to pile up a good bit of mortar, or really thin it out when the footing gets high. But I've now taken care of all the low spots. My first course blocks are either spot on where they need to be, or they are still high by about 1/2"-5/8" or so. As I mentioned in the previous post, there's only so much ground you can recover from being high. So while my wall won't be perfectly level as of yet (a fact that really bothers me), it will be soon.

I got the entire first course completed. Before daylight ran out, I was able to set a block in all four corners for the second course. Once these setup, I'll be able to use my mason line blocks and string to stretch between them to fill in. It's supposed to start raining tonight and then turn cold, so it looks like they'll have a week (at least) to setup before I can get back to it. And now I can concentrate on building up the corners to the full 6 course height, like a pyramid. 

So, that's 39 blocks today, 54 total, 243 to go! Being an engineer, I think I'll need to put these in a table and work up some graphs for a future post...