Over the past two weekends we finished all of the block work on the garage! It has been a great feeling to see the slope of the roof appear in the finished wall. Cutting the blocks with Caroline's Grandfather's concrete saw proved to be pretty easy, and it all actually worked pretty well.
Before the slope, we had to put in the top level lintel. This is a lintel that extends all the way around the garage at the base of the slope (so you can form a continuous box lintel). This adds a lot of stiffness to the wall and prevents the blocks from separating along the wall (imagine your hand being the wall and opening your fingers - that is what we don't want). I don't have a picture of this in progress, but here are the blocks we used to make it.
We then got to laying the tall side and cutting blocks. We also had to fill every other block at this point to make sure it was strong enough and connected to the lintel. Robin helped fill concrete for the day.
With the slopes finished (thanks to help from Matt Harwood, a friend from work), we started drilling and attaching the hangers for the roof rafters. These required using a concrete drill, which we had borrowed from Caroline's Grandfather (he has everything). However, I ended up buying a "beefier" one from Home Depot because the chuck wouldn't tighten enough and our bit kept slipping. Hanging the rafters was really cool because it was our first step to closing the garage in.
We got about 2/3 of the hangers placed, 6 (of 21) rafters up, and one sheet of plywood screwed down. Good progress for one day and we hope to finish it next weekend!
See all of the pictures here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/117598496317711140914/albums/5669448011325873297
Before the slope, we had to put in the top level lintel. This is a lintel that extends all the way around the garage at the base of the slope (so you can form a continuous box lintel). This adds a lot of stiffness to the wall and prevents the blocks from separating along the wall (imagine your hand being the wall and opening your fingers - that is what we don't want). I don't have a picture of this in progress, but here are the blocks we used to make it.
We then got to laying the tall side and cutting blocks. We also had to fill every other block at this point to make sure it was strong enough and connected to the lintel. Robin helped fill concrete for the day.
The back slope was finished on the 23rd, and we finished the front slope just yesterday (the 29th). It finally makes the garage look tall!
We got about 2/3 of the hangers placed, 6 (of 21) rafters up, and one sheet of plywood screwed down. Good progress for one day and we hope to finish it next weekend!
See all of the pictures here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/117598496317711140914/albums/5669448011325873297
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