Category: Phase 3

It is nice to see the 3rd row all completed! It is looking neat and tidy,
especially with the black DPM plastic sheet covering and protecting the
mortar joints from any rain showers at the moment while the cement set and
cures.

The final 24½ blocks went in smoothly, taking us 4 hours to lay them in
place.

Front-Wall-3-Row-All-Done

We have decided that it would be much more practical to NOT have tall
reinforcing bars sticking up along the front wall and basically potentially
be in the way for the next 2 years. We will just lay flat two rows of the
narrow 140mm blocks to gain extra height (just laid dry without any mortar
etc) and then place the DPM plastic and hang it down the wall, in front to
provide a waterproof barrier against any dirt and rain water.

We grabbed the morning to start the 3rd row of the front wall, doing 25
blocks before the rain came in the afternoon. This is our last row of the
fat 215mm wide concrete blocks – at last!! Well at least, for this stage of
the swimming lane construction, as we got the pond and the final couple of
metres of the lane to build later on after we have built the house itself!!

On this row, we inserted a reinforcing steel bar horizontally to improve the
strength in the direction of “bowing” outwards under the pressure of the
water.

Front-Wall-3-Row-Half-Done

We protected our wet joints with a plastic sheeting, from the rain. Which
turned out not to be so heavy as forecasted after all!!

With our early start this morning, we managed to finish off the 2nd row of
the front wall before we had to stop for other tasks and commitments. A 9am
start saw us doing the final 16 blocks before 12:30pm, which also included
the delay of our mortar guide breaking apart under the strain of having done
over 400 blocks! It was a half an hour quick and nasty repair job to get
going again and finish off the final 6 blocks!!

Front-Wall-2nd-Row-Complete

Stephen improved the design in the afternoon, to make it stronger and also
more flexible as we will be switching over to the narrow 140mm blocks soon,
and there is another 570 blocks of those to do too!!!

So we just got another 50 blocks of the fat 215mm blocks to do and then we
look at doing one row of the narrow blocks for the 4th row.

We were interrupted with heavy rain showers in the morning, so we didn’t get
started on doing any work until after lunch at 2:30pm.

We managed to do 33 blocks of the 2nd row of the front wall of the swimming
lane. It was a long haul and we didn’t finish until 7:40pm – phew!

But we are glad that we did manage to do that many as this week is going to
be rather interrupted with other commitments and weather too.

It is quite noticeable that our skill at laying concrete blocks is improving
all the while and compared to our back wall, the front wall is coming out
very nicely indeed!! Only 16 blocks to go to complete this 2nd row and then
we can start on the final 3rd row of building the wall using the fat 215mm
wide concrete hollow blocks. Then we might do a 4th row using the narrower
140mm wide hollow blocks. This would bring the level of the wall up to just
above nominal ground level and we can then fill up in front of the swimming
lane, using the excess sand / soil mixture that will come out when we dig in
the energy modules. It is coming together slowly but surely!!

It was a lovely sunny day on this Sunday, to complete the 1st row of the
front wall of the swimming lane. We took four and half hours to do the
remaining 19 concrete hollow blocks. It went very well, laying the block
nice and evenly, even though we discovered that a fair number of the steel
reinforcing bars sticking up out of the foundation slab were “out of
position” and we had to bend some of them right over and chip a bit off the
bottom of the blocks to make them fit!!

Front-Wall-1st-Row-finished

But now we have a nice level line to work upon tomorrow and it should go
faster with the 2nd row.

Something to note, we discovered that we had rain overnight and there was
some standing water in our swimming lane! This means that we are going to
get our swimming lane sooner than we expected, if we get a real heavy
thunderstorm blast of rain! At least, the ants will enjoy the swimming
exercises!!

We spent half a day on doing the 1st row of concrete blocks for the front
wall of the swimming lane. We managed to do 17 blocks today which took us
about 4 hours to do. It was a case of spending quality time on making sure
the blocks were level and at the correct height, so that the subsequence
rows would come out neat without too much fuss.

Next-17-Blocks-on-1st-Front-Row

We had done 12 blocks previously a couple of days ago, plus the 2 that was
done a month ago, means we now have done 31 blocks in total so there is
another 19 blocks to go to complete the 1st row.

We are doing just 3 rows to build the front wall, and we will stop at that
point. We don’t want to do any more than that for now, as we might need the
extra clearance around the house as we build it, and avoid any future
situations where a 3 foot high wall above the nominal ground level would get
in our way, if we went ahead and built all 7 rows of the front wall!!

Today, we shovelled loads of soil and rubble back over to behind the new
Back Wall of the swimming lane. Much of this dirt was the same material that
had collapsed and washed down away from that higher grounds during the
thunderstorm we had back in January.

Blocks-Stacked-at-End-of-Lane

Filled-behind-wall-at-Workshops

It is all rather neat now and once it is settled down a bit, we can put back
the old fence too.

We also put together a solid blockage using excess concrete blocks and the
extra length of the DPM plastic sheet to seal off the open end of the
swimming lane to stop any further rain water and mud from sliding down into
the lane. Or at least we hope so!!