Accomplishments and frustrations

This past visit included DD and her boyfriend. They practically live together, so he merits the tag SIL. They both helped with the woodstove hearth project. DD washed the slate tiles and SIL helped stack and fill the concrete blocks.

But first, the frustrations. A new beaver dam has appeared, so now we are into Beaver Wars, Part Deux. Not big dams, though, and he waited until Sunday night to rebuild.

The 'corrected' report from the soil engineer still wasn't right. I'm getting pissed.

Now on to more fun stuff: the hearth project. DS mentioned that she has seen masons on jobsites cutting blocks many times and would be happy to try her hand at making our half-blocks. Why didn't she say so earlier? Her cuts turned out excellent, as we already had the stone chisels used for such work. We bought them to take apart the old fireplace last summer. We went out and rounded up all the full and half-blocks we could find of the dimensions we were using for the wall. We were able to get enough in good to excellent condition to do a wall about 6' high. That will be plenty of thermal mass.

Since we ultimately decided to pour concrete into all the CMU (concrete masonry units aka cinder blocks) voids, and used rebar in the edge voids, we opted to not surface coat the wall. The last voids have a 5' rebar from the bottom block upwards and the next ones in have a 4' rebar from the top down. We're confident that the wall is not going anywhere, at least, not anytime in the next 50 years.

We used an OdJob for mixing, which was easier than hand mixing in a wheelbarrow, and margarine buckets for moving the concrete to the voids. The mixer, when full, was too heavy to lift into place. As it got emptier, we were able to hoist it into position and 'pour' the concrete into the voids more quickly. Then, as the wall got higher, we had to do everything bucket by bucket.

At first, we lay 4 rows of blocks, then filled all the voids. That was tiring, so after lunch, we opted for laying two rows then filling them. We didn't vibrate the air out, but we did use a 1/2" x 1/2" stick and tamped down each void every 4" of concrete or so. For a total of 9 rows, it took 7 66-lb bags of concrete. We earned every bit of the steak and shrimp dinner that followed.

Here we are transferring the last of the concrete from the OdJob to the wall:


Here's the view from the top showing the rebar in one of the voids:

And here's the (mostly) tiled wall and hearth:
We'll need a tilesaw to finish and we just missed the sale on the one we wanted to buy. But, enough is done to have the woodstove installed and not worry about the stove and/or pipe getting in the way or plastered with thinset. Once the drywall and wood are on the wall to the sides, we'll install one last full tile on each side of the wall section. Because we'remaking the wall wider than planned, we'll have less tiles for the bedroom side. This means we will have to use all the tiles, even the broken ones. We've decided that we'll break up any broken pieces and do some mosaic squares, and that we will also do an irregular pattern using all the off-cuts as well. Should be interesting.