Corners

It all starts with laying the corner blocks first.

The first course gets mortar underneath the block. This ends up being about 3/4". The shopvac was to clean any debris off the stemwall before applying the mortar. 

We use the level on top of every block. The tripod has a laser to make sure that every block is set at the same height. We can adjust the blocks on the first course due to the mortar joint underneath. After the first course, the blocks get a thinset which is a much thinner joint. This is why it is critical to get the first course right, any small error here gets magnified as we get higher.

Here are a couple of finished corners. 

Flexcrete Delivery

Well, we got our first two trucks of Flexcrete. 

This truck had 16 pallets on it, plus thinset. We unloaded down on the flat area you can see in the photo.

Here is the forklift we got to drive. It was ok, but the tractors are a lot funner.

It took about 45 minutes to unload the truck, but a couple of hours to get everything up the long driveway.

That is what it looks like with 32 pallets. 48 blocks per pallet = 1536 blocks. Each block is 8"x12"x24" and weighs about 54 pounds. Still more to come.

Plywood Floor

We have been very busy lately, which has made it hard to keep up with the blogging. We now have a plywood floor! This was a pretty fun job as we got to see a lot of progress as we went. Here are some photos.

Here we are in the beginning. We cut the boards to fit with a skilsaw, then applied glue to every joist. Once it is in place we screwed it down with approximately 32 screws per sheet. I'm guessing we used about 38 pounds of screws for the entire floor.

Here we are making sure the floor will come out flat and level. I am using a planer to take down a high joist. A couple of joists were low, we solved this by gluing a shim down before the plywood. Using the level and a string running from end to end you can get a very accurate measurement of anything that is high or low.

Here is a shot of the finished plywood floor. It came out great. Unfortunately we have had a lot of rain to deal with since this photo. Our original plan was to stain and seal the plywood and use it as our regular floor for awhile. We were not able to get a stain on in time, we have a sealer on it now. We will see how it goes, but by the time we get the walls up and the roof on, our floor will have taken a lot of abuse. It is possible we will still be able to finish it to look nice, but we might have to get a real floor sooner than we expected.