Finishing the blocks

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.

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!

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

Garage Progress, Oct. 8/22

There has been quite a bit of progress on the garage since I last posted. This will get you close to where we currently are, with the exception of today's work.

Since the lintel over the large door was finished, we needed to finish the lintels over the windows. These are much easier and take a lot less time mainly because they are only one block high. Dad did a great job setting up the boards for the windows to make sure they were straight.

I have been asked to detail a little more on how to make a lintel. Once you have the board set up and level, you need to cut the centers out of some blocks and then lay these blocks across the lintel with mortar only in the vertical joints (not between the wood).

This is a good shot of what the blocks look like before we add the concrete and rebar. There is going to be four pieces of rebar put in the blocks, which gives it tensile strength.

Once filled, the lintel is very strong and can hold the weight of the blocks.

Now. Many people who have seen the large lintel (Caroline's grandfather, uncle, and father) have commented that they don't think it is going to work. I am proud to say that we took the support out from under it (carefully) and it held! Engineering works again! You can also see Kim Dietz, a coworker of mine,  who has helped out a LOT in the past weeks.

Overall progress has been very good. Here is a sample of the ones I like to illustrate our progress, and I have also linked to the album with all of the pictures from the past two weekends. Most importantly, we finished the 19th row on the street side, which means WE ARE FINISHED WITH THAT WALL!! We won't be laying a single additional brick on that wall. I am very happy to say this.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/117598496317711140914/albums/5666522117843166881

Doggy Daycare

In addition to cleaning / moving in last week, I dog sat for my mom's 3 dogs and Tommy's one dog. I had Neo, Stella, Belle and Brandy living with me for the week! We did pretty well overall. Christine helped me walk them in the afternoons (can you imagine me walking four dogs, three of whom are labs???), I got used to waking up early to take them out and feed them, and they were very cuddly and cute most of the time. While they were here we worked on down, stay, come, and wait. By the end of the week they were getting pretty stir-crazy so we let them run around in the yard a few hours each day. That got squashed a couple of hours before they traveled back home to Mom and Tommy when a cop came by to inform us the neighbors had made several noise complaints. With such high energy dogs, you can imagine they barked quite a bit whenever a stranger walked by to give them some love... 

Me, Stella and Brandy

Brandy really liked this chair

Neo gave the camp chair a try...

...and sort of fell out of it.

Neo and Brandy napping

Neo, Brandy and Stella napping. Belle did more trash and people-food eating than napping, so there aren't any cute pictures of her.