Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Creation of the bond beam is progressing well

Setting the side walls of the bond beam is going well... I have completely laid the east wall side walls and half of the long north wall. Hopefully, tomorrow I'll finish the north wall and the west wall. Then the fun part starts as I have to level both the inside and outside side walls so I have something level to pour the wet concrete mixture to. I am constantly (day & night) trying to come up with the easiest way to accomplish this because being level is SO important to the roof going on properly. This is a picture of what I have laid so far... both pictures clearly show that I still need to do some rasping work to make it level. Happily, the blocks that the side walls were "sliced" from is VERY soft AAC so rasping is relatively easy. My plan is to finish laying tomorrow and spend Thursday and Friday leveling in anticipation of pouring on Saturday (I bought the bags of concrete last week). Then we'll set the top plate and be driving nails.
This second picture shows the unevenness (and bow) of the side walls which I will correct in the leveling/rasping process. The glue you see is excess material that I had to dump or use to begin filling the cavity. The stuff is very strong so I chose to begin filling.

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