The masons got an amazing amount of work done last week, I have the photos to prove it!
First, do you remember my Week 5 photos showing all the gray block on the site? Well most of those pallets are now here:
Many of them went to the garage:
The blocks are covered in plastic because the forecast was for rain and the mortar was still a bit “green”. But the garage walls were not the only ones being built up this past week, as you can see from this view of the overall site:
One of the big questions we needed to answer was how best to perform the 3/8″ rake at the 120° corners. The masons laid up some different approaches for us to evaluate. The screed course (that will be at slab level when the slab is poured) is the middle pair of architectural blocks:
The top 2′ of this corner will be knocked down and replaced with the building’s true colors. All other blocks built up so far will be buried in concrete.
Here’s a cool feature of the tall walls starting to take shape: the shear wall. As you can see, some of the blocks have no cells—they are designed to let the cement fill the entire void betwen the two withes. That’s going to be one massive, strong structure!
Here we see the chalk line that the masons are following. We measured the work in detail this weekend, and the largest error we found was a 1/4″ deviation in one wall thickness that should have been at most 1/8″. But it was the only one, and most walls were within 1/16″ of spec—an amazing job considering that the blocks themselves are spec’d to have a 1/8″ tolerance (with 1/4″ considered possibly acceptable by industry standards, but not by ours). It is clear that our masons are craftsmen who are proud of their work.
In closing, here’s a panorama of the site (the large image is full resolution):
