I am pleased to finally announce some concrete progress: the first arrival of the blocks!
The first delivery was nearly 100 pallets of blocks. 65 pallets were 8″ stretchers polished on one face, the standard building block of the main studio. 20+ other pallets represented a variety of other 8″ blocks: EC 1 Face 1 End, EC 1 Face 2 End, EC 2 Face 1 End, Half 1 Face, Half EC 1 Face 1 End, OBBB 1 Face, etc. Normally there are 75 8″ blocks to the pallet, but in some instances (like the EC 2 Face 1 End) there couldn’t have been more than a dozen.
Here is a wide view showing the whole array:
One of the challenges of building with concrete architectural blocks is dealing with damage: 
. There are 8 corners to a block, but at most only 4 are visible. There are 12 edges to the block, but again at most 4 are really visible. And there are 6 faces to a block, and only rarely are there 2 faces visible; mostly only a single face is visible, and there are many times that no faces are visible (such as behind a soffit). All of this adds up to a formula that says if X% of the corners are damaged, Y% of the edges, and Z% of the faces, then what percentage of the blocks are only good for fully hidden locations, what are best for partially visible or distant locations, and how many blocks will be at or near eye level and thus need to be visually perfect. Well, those are questions for subsequent postings, but here’s a look at the majority of the studio construction blocks pre-grading:
P.S. The 4″ block on top of the 8″ block is being used to judge whether the color delivered was the color of the sample selected. It was a perfect match!