Monday's Progress

Phil was ready to go Monday morning. He began drilling holes in the lowest level of 10" blocks, and inserting anchor bolts.

These will, somehow, be part of the structural wood floor. The anchor bolts are large pieces of metal with a curved end inside the concrete block.

Then it was time to grout the cells. I could not believe how sore my forearms were! Lifting buckets of sand and peastone was agony. I have no idea why: I would have thought four days off would have left me less sore, not more.

The process wasn't as bad as I had feared. Phil would mix up a batch and drive into our enclosure. He'd pour off grout into our two black tubs. We'd carry them over to the scaffolding. From there, I used a metal feed scoop to put the grout into each cell, while Phil used rebar to pound it carefully around each anchor bolt.

I had originally expected that one batch would be sufficient. But the corners took in grout and took it in, until we finished three batches. We debated whether to do a fourth batch, but didn't feel confident we had quite enough space to finish it.

And so Phil transitioned to laying block. He has reached a level of proficiency (and, for the moment, corners high enough) that it is simply fun. He ended up working a while after dark, but finished around 6pm or so. (We watch the days getting shorter. Two weeks ago it wouldn't get dark until after 5; now the sun sets before.)

Some of the blocks he had to cut in a unique way: we didn't receive 10" knock-out bond beams, so he had to cleverly cut the regular block in order to knock out parts of it. Two of the blocks broke, but I was actually impressed it wasn't more.

At the end of day, he had laid 33 blocks more: eight to finish the long side, plus two more rows finished on the short side.