Block Wall Construction Building The Nantahala Retreat 3

Hey and welcome back to episode 3 of building the Nana Hale of Retreat. If you didn't guess already we're laying some block today we're gonna show you how we built this entire basement. I made my delivery of water and a mixer so now I can actually go back to work in town where I'm working. I hope these guys can you know not screw up everything while I'm gone for a little bit just a couple days probably but I don't know I'm a little worried. You forgot the rebar bender didn't you? You had one job bro how do you mess it up every time? Wow that's enough of seeing everything go wrong let's check out how a few things actually went right. Before we got any block in the way we decided to go ahead and grade down the inside of the structure flush with the top of the footings that way we get an even amount of gravel under our slab and we also dug down to find the ends of our sewer sleeve so that we don't have to do this by hand later when we don't have a machine. We're gonna be using four types of CMU that stands for concrete masonry unit on this project. This is the first type here it's called a single corner it's square on one end for laying corners and has ears on the other. The second type you'll be seeing is this kerf block and it has a slot all the way through the middle of the block making it easy to hit the block and break it evenly into two pieces. Third type of CMU here is this open bottom knockout block and you can see they're open bottom like grout can just flow right through and we will use these on all of the bond beam rows we'll set them like this and there will be steel that runs through and then concrete will actually flow through these things and form a bond beam on each of those courses. Our last block here is called a header block and it's a cut block they'll lay like this and this is for around the front of the house the slab will actually pour across flush with the top of this height and it will pour down in through these cores locking everything together and that will be the front edge of our structure. The next step here is to break out our laser level again and check the height of our footing. We did shoot the grade pegs in the concrete with the laser but it's a really good idea to check it again to make sure it actually came out level. In this case we were actually right on and so we just simply had to mark up 8 inch increments of our speed lead poles and that'll be where we hook our string lines. In the case that the footings were up or down a little bit we would adjust for that so that our block work came out perfectly level even if our footing was not and that's actually pretty common. So is here and he is you know jack-of-all-trades including fixing pants. Exactly right here. Zip tape another use. You want the honors? What? First block? First block here we go. Cornerstone I guess you'd say. The cornerstone. Here it goes. The wall we're constructing here will be 9 foot 4 inches tall off the footings which is 14 courses if you do the math and I want to say you could build a wall like this a lot of different ways you could do concrete forms you could do ICF which is insulated concrete forms but what we're basically doing here is using block to make a form for the concrete in the same manner that will be permanent and this is actually cheaper to do and we can do it ourselves. The cores of this block wall will be filled solid with concrete after we finish and there's also reinforcing steel every two feet vertically and horizontally making a very strong and actually a pretty economical way to build a basement wall. Dude I'm beat. What? I don't know if I can do this anymore. What time is it? This isn't even hard work bro. It's not? You want to see some hard work? What? Follow me. Yo where are you going? Oh my gosh. Okay I'm never gonna complain again. Tony you are the man dude. Wow. Look he dug under. Look at this. I gotta show this. How many days you been working on it Tony? Four days. Four days per line and he's got to do one more. I ain't never complaining about work again dude after seeing that. Walk down there. That's crazy. Tony's a man. For part-time masons like me the consistency of our mortar mix makes the biggest difference in the amount of struggle I will endure in getting the block laid. It has to be just right. If it's too wet I can't get it to stand up to the line, too dry and I can't get it down. The outside of our wall will be stuccoed but we did go ahead and tool the inside joints and clean everything up so that it looked a little nicer on the parts you're gonna see. And I really did forget the rebar bender on the first day but we needed to bend some rebar to put it in to reinforce our wall as we went. So I improvised and we got it done. It worked okay. I think that will work. This is the best way I found to get these things to kind of sit down level is give a little pat like this. Set her in there and just see how that just sets down. It levels out. I don't know why that works so good. The pat. Just a little, all you gotta do. You should patent that. Oh patent the pat. There we go. Now I did my dance. If you've never had the joy of laying block yourself I'll go ahead and tell you the worst part is doing the first few courses that are down low to the ground. It will literally kill your lower back and I'll quote a real blockmason that I know that told me to be a blockmason you have to have a strong back and a weak mind. It's not so much here that it hurts it's like right there. Laying block. Is your itis flaring up? It's flaring. It's huge. Oh look at that itis. Oh gosh. That's old man itis I think it's called. How old are you? 40 this year. What? What are we doing? I need to go to the chiropractor. I meant what are we doing for your 40? Nothing. For those of y'all that don't know Arlo is an excellent mason. He was laying block before I was even born like in the 70s. It's great to have him back for the day and get a ton of block laid on this foundation. This is the trowel Arlo was using all day and this is the one I was using and I'm I'm tired. Now look. And I'm tired. Now look at that. Maybe one day I'll be a man I don't know. This is considered a block trowel. I think that's considered a brick trowel. Oh well I'm not a block guy then. I think it is. The next morning Jason and Ray did me a solid by moving all this block and setting up the scaffolding while I ran some errands. I also remembered the rebar bender but forgot to put on my boots. We are on row number 10 coming up course number 10 excuse me and I'm gonna show you guys how I lay one single block. If you can lay one block you can lay a thousand right? So let's lay one block. I've got my mudboard here and I like to scoot and do a little shake like that to get the mud to stick. See that? Trowel down. Point down. Run the wall. Do that again. Flop. Run the wall. And since this mud is a little soft. Thank You Jason. Yeah baby. I'm gonna run all the crossbars too. Just give me a little more stand up to my line and that looks good. Let's mud the block. You can go for double mud. I'm gonna try it. So I got enough here to do. Make sure it sticks. These do have a handle on them on one side. It's this wider part that you can grab. So I'm gonna set the block and what I'm doing is actually sighting down this block and down the rest of the wall while also keeping the eye on this line because this is my height. So I'm gonna kind of get over it. Bump it in. I'm gonna sight to make sure I set it pretty level to start with and I'm gonna flick right here. See this? I'm gonna flick that to make sure my line is clear. Which it is because that's my reference. I'm gonna give this thing a couple pats. That'll kind of settle it down evenly. Torpedo that I have not dropped down the course yet and you can see it's already sitting pretty level side to side and so I'm just gonna give it a little tap. This thing needs to go down through the line and that's it. I'm gonna take the excess here and save it and I'm gonna slide the board down and go again and then go again three hundred more times. Just a little tip bub. Yeah. Use the tip of the trowel. It works better. So if you put the tip on the wall first and then slide down, it works better. Alright tip it down. Straight down. Now you know why I'd rather be a roofer than a botanist. Alright tip it down. There you go. That's way better. Let's demonstrate the old Ray. What was your old move? Yeah see that's garbage. That's gold. That's gold. Alright everybody you got this. Don't do what I did. You know I mean garbage in like the most respectful nicest kind of way. Garbage like clean nice not smelly garbage. Like recycling? Yeah that was recycling. It still sucked but it was good sucked. Hey come on. I think we just went a little too far. Time to swarp it Ray. Swarp it. I'm good at this. At least I can do something right today. Hey do you want me to show you how to do that? You've never even done this before bro. Straight or down Jones? Not so much more an angle. More wrist action. What's the exact origin of swarp? I think it's Irish for wipe the inside of the blocks clean so the grout goes down in there easy. Perfect. Now I know. Swarp. Wait till you start painting bro. Garbage. Garbage. The wall we're constructing here will surpass what is described in the codebook that is needed to hold back seven feet of unbalanced fill. I don't mind to go above and beyond by adding this steel and filling all of the cores with concrete. In the codebook you really only have to fill about every fourth or fifth core with a vertical piece of steel. We're lapping our steel by a minimum of two feet and we're also stacking it vertically as you can see so that the grout can flow around these overlap sections easily. We decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and clean off these footings around the front and lay the block here before it rained the first time and turn this all into a mud hole. We didn't set up our speed poles on these front corners because it's only one course a block so what we do is hook string lines and pull from opposing corners to give ourselves a 90 degree reference then we lay up a corner. Once we have a corner laid on each end then we can hook string blocks and a string line and run between that to fill in the rest. And here's what we looked like at the end of day number two. Hey John you Remember everything we taught you yesterday bub? Alright we're gonna go over it again okay. Remind you like what part is garbage and then how to tip down and swarp it. I think all this is garbage. We're almost done and I still got it so. Oh you haven't dropped it yet. Not yet. Three more rows. At least not on camera. I really like this one too so I hope it doesn't go down the hole. That's the one I gave you. Did you? Yeah. Because you had mine. Gave or stole. Well I like it. I hope I get to keep it. I gave it to him because he stole my good one. This brings us to the final course of block the 14th course and this one needs to be the best one because it's what our wood framing is gonna sit on. In fact none of the other ones really matter it's just this one that really has to be level. Laying up this block took us a total of about 16 working hours. A lot of that with just one man laying block and if we would have hired this out to another crew it would have cost somewhere in the realm of three or four thousand dollars in labor so that was our savings. What other mountains do you know that are around here? Let's see that one right there is Chihuahua Bald. 5,062 feet. Are you reading this off your phone? No I was born and raised here. The Appalachian Trail goes over it. The what? You can hike over it. The what? Appalachian Trail. Spell it. A-P-P-A-L-A-C-H-I-A-N. Trail. Dude look that up bro because you know you ain't right. I'm right. It's right there. Is he? Boom. Wow. Pretty impressive.