Stem Wall

Soon after the concrete was poured, our blocks arrived.

The first blocks to be laid! You can see the forms are still on the concrete. Kristi and I stripped them over two days. The first day we got all the easy ones. The second day we worked on the tough ones with sledge hammers, stakes as levers, and jackhammers for the really tight ones.

The first course is coming together here. My job was to bring all the block off the pallets to the interior. We hired professional block layers to set the block.

This is the finished height of the stem wall. It looks taller now than it will after we backfill. Our floor will sit at this level. You can see vents in the wall here, this is for a passive cooling system. I'll get into the details of this in a future post.

This is taken from the inside. The white lines on the wall are to mark the location of the rebar, the dots are where we need to drill for installing hardware to hang the floor. The wood columns are forms that we will pour concrete in for interior footings, they still need more reenforcement.