Happy New Year to everyone.
Well I'm embarrassed to say 3 months have passed since the last update, and so little progress in that time.
To bring you up to date, I left the foundations around a week to harden up and then did my best to clean off the slime that had formed on top. It was quite thick in places. I then strung out my lines again and tranfered the corners down to the foundation. It became obvious I hadn't been too accurate with my digging of the trenches as one of the walls sits along the edge of the foundation and not 75mm from the edge as I had planned. I'm pretty sure the error has come about because the digger wasn't sitting level as I dug, so although I broke the surface bang on the line, the further I dug down the more I moved away from the line.
Anyway, I used Mike's method of cheap frogged LBC bricks for the first coarse so I could i chip the frog down if my levels weren't spot on. In reality, I think only two bricks need thinning down and the rest were laid conventionally, albeit a few with quite a thick mortar bed beneath them. Once I was happy with the levels of the first courses (inner and outer walls) I moved onto bringing up the levels with dense concrete blocks.
- (222.4 KiB)
- (228.96 KiB)
Once I reached the point where I needed to move to facing bricks, I back filled between the blocks with a lean mix of concrete and angled the surface to direct any moisture in the cavity down and out towards the outside wall. This was strangely quite satisfying as it gave a very neat and tidy appearance to the wall - well for a short period anyway.
- back fill
- (443.17 KiB)
I was then ready to move onto the facing brick, so I started building a corner.
- corner
- (381.47 KiB)
The above picture though doesn't tell the full story, that must have been the 6th or 7th time that corner was built. It really tested my patience and I admit the air was blue at times. Initially I was finding the mortar was firming up literally the instant I put the brick down, there was no way I could tap the brick in position, it was like working with exhaust gum. I was working with a combination of things I'd never used before, all because I wanted to use a light coloured mortar. I was using silver sand, instead of my usual building sand, snowcrete instead of the normal Portland cement and Lime which I'd never used before.
My first mistake was not to use plasticiser, I thought the lime aided the workability of the mortar so left out my usual liquid admix. A quick e-mail to Mike and he pointed out my error, so I knocked up a new mix, this time with plasticiser and before laying the brick I dunked them in a bucket of water. This seemed to help so a built up a corner 3 or 4 courses and went to bed feeling slightly better. The following morning though the lightest of touches and the brick came free, it was also clean of mortar so they had been no "suction" to the brick. Back to the drawing board then. I suspected the silver sand, despite the fact that it's marketed as a light mortar alternative so I mixed a batch using my regular dark red building sand, but although the mortar felt better in the hand/trowel, it felt "fatter", ultimately it didn't result in a stronger bond.
Feeling pretty dejected by now, I spent an evening researching on the internet and came across an article highlighting the issues with clay bricks and their water absorbency. It stated it was necessary to soak the bricks in a tub for a long period (overnight) and actually gave examples of brick layers doing to this onsite (which I found hard to believe). So with nothing to lose, I tried it, and with a little refinement it worked!!
The first courses of bricks were still too wait when laid, which caused the mortar to run and stain the bricks so I Ieft them long after removing them from the tank (kiddies paddling pool) so the surfaces were dry and that solved that problem. So my technique now is the night before I load the tank with bricks, 1st thing in the morning I take them all out and place on a wooden pallet while I go and mix mortar and get my tools ready etc and about an hour or so later I'm ready to lay bricks. It's a bit of a faff but it's working for me, I'm not a quick brick layer so I'm working with small batches of bricks each time anyway.
So this is where I am at now, the short wall is up to DPC level, the long wall just needs finishing up to the same level, unfortunately recent weather here at the weekends as either been too cold to lay brick or torrential rain of biblical nature, so more frustration.
- damp proof course
- (435.68 KiB)
- other wall
- (522.44 KiB)
The wall adjacent to the neighbours will be block work, but I'm going to have to be a little creative with the bolster chisel and the angle grinder to get round the step in the wall.
- tricky
- (384.75 KiB)
- tricky 2
- (344.86 KiB)
I did say earlier on in the thread that I wanted to have the roof on by Xmas, well...................... I just didn't state which Xmas
The forecast for this weekend is for slightly milder weather so I'm hoping I get all walls up to DPC by the end of the weekend.
Jon
PS Sorry for the first two sideways photos, I tried everything to get them the right way but gave up in the end.