Yahoo! the first wall of the building project is completed!
We started the day by using the mini-digger to lift the wall to the just above horizontal, this reduces the friction allowing the wall to be pulled by one person each side. The wall was soon moved next to its sole plate on the mass wall.
Before we lifted the wall upright we tied the ends to both the mass wall and the front of the garage to reduce the chance of the bottom of the wall sliding to far forwards or backwards. The mini digger the raised the wall with a careful combination of lifting the arm and driving forwards. When the wall was upright we left the arm holding the wall up while we fixed it in place. We then removed the ramps.
The wall was not quite lined up properly in either plane so we had to lever it into alignment with the front of the sole plate, then use a sledge hammer to shift the wall about 10mm to the left. A few concrete bolts were inserted to hold the bottom of the wall. We braced the wall with diagonal struts from the wall to timbers inserted into the earth tubes (our Dad suggested this). Finally all of the concrete bolts were inserted.
