Block Wall Construction | Building The Nantahala Retreat #3

[Music] no z hey and welcome back to episode three of building the nana hale retreat if you didn't guess already we're laying some block today we're going to show you how we built this entire basement [Music] i made my delivery of water and a mixer so now i can actually go back to work in town where i'm working i hope these guys can you know not screw up everything while i'm gone for a little bit just a couple days probably but i don't know i'm a little worried you forgot the rebar bender didn't you yeah dude you did one job bro how do you mess it up every time wow that's enough of seeing everything go wrong let's check out how a few things actually went right before we got any block in the way we decided to go ahead and grade down the inside of the structure flush with the top of the footings that way we get an even amount of gravel under our slab and we also dug down to find the ends of our sewer sleeve so that we don't have to do this by hand later when we don't have a machine we're going to be using four types of cmu that stands for concrete masonry unit on this project this is the first type here it's called a single corner it's square on one end for laying corners and has ears on the other the second type you'll be seeing is this kerf block and it has a slot all the way through the middle of the block making it easy to hit the block and break it evenly into two pieces third type of cmu here is this open bottom knockout block and you can see their open bottom like grout can just flow right through and we will use these on all of the bond beam rows we'll set them like this and there will be steel that runs through and then concrete will actually flow through these things and form a bond beam on each of those courses our last block here is called a header block and it's a cut block that lay like this and this is for around the front of the house the slab will actually pour across flush with the top of this height and it will pour down into these cores locking everything together and that will be the front edge of our structure so cmu is that like it's not like a computer that's a cpu oh a little different it's a little processing yeah the next step here is to break out our laser level again and check the height of our footing we did shoot the grade pegs in the concrete with the laser but it's a really good idea to check it again to make sure it actually came out level in this case we are actually right on and so we just simply had to mark up eight inch increments of our speed lead poles and that'll be where we hook our string lines in the case that the footings were up or down a little bit we would adjust for that so that our block work came out perfectly level even if our footing was not and that's actually pretty common [Music] arlo is here and he is you know jack of all trades including fixing pants exactly right here zip tape another use you want the honors what i'm doing the first block first block here we go stone i guess you'd say the cornerstone here it goes the wall we're constructing here will be nine foot four inches tall off the footings which is 14 courses if you do the math and i want to say you could build a wall like this a lot of different ways you could do concrete forms you could do icf which is insulated concrete forms but what we're basically doing here is using block to make a form for the concrete in the same manner that would be permanent and this is actually cheaper to do and we can do it ourselves the cores of this block wall will be filled solid with concrete after we finish and there's also reinforcing steel every two feet vertically and horizontally making a very strong and actually a pretty economical way to build a basement wall dude i'm beat what i don't know if i can do this anymore what time is it even hard work bro it's not you want to see some hard work what call me yo where are you going oh my gosh okay i'm never going to complain again tony you're the man dude [Music] wow look he dug under look at this i gotta show this how many days you've been working on it tony for four days i never complained about work again dude after seeing that walk down there that's crazy tony's a man for part-time masons like me the consistency of our mortar mix makes the biggest difference in the amount of struggle i will endure in getting the block laid it has to be just right if it's too wet i can't get it to stand up to the line too dry and i can't get it down the outside of our wall will be stuccoed but we did go ahead and tool the inside joints and clean everything up so that it looked a little nicer on the parts you're gonna see [Applause] and i really did forget the rebar bender on the first day but we needed to bend some rebar to put it in to reinforce our wall as we went so i improvised and we got it done it worked okay i think that if that is i think that will work this is the best way i've found to get these things to kind of sit down level is give a little pat like this put the center in there then just see how that just sets down it levels out i don't know why that works so good the pat just a little that's all you got to do you should patent that oh patent the pat there we go now here we go now i did my dad if you've never had the joy of laying block yourself i'll go ahead and tell you the worst part is doing the first few courses that are down low to the ground it will literally kill your lower back and i'll quote a real block mason that i know that told me to be a block mason you have to have a strong back and a weak mind girl you all right it's not so much here that it hurts it's like right there land blocks you're right it's flaring up it's flaring it's huge oh look at that itis oh gosh that's old old man i did something it's called all right let's hold him uh 40 this year what what are we doing i need to go to the chiropractor i'm in what are we doing nothing for those of y'all that don't know arlo is an excellent mason he was laying blocked before i was even born like in the 70s it's great to have him back for the day and get a ton of block laid on this foundation this is the trial arlo was using all day and this is the one i was using and i'm i'm tired now look and i'm tired now look at that maybe one day i'll be a man i don't know this is considered a block trawl i think that's considered a brick trough oh well i could be wrong i'm not a black guy then i think it is all right the next morning jason and ray did me a solid by moving all this block and setting up the scaffolding while i ran some errands i also remembered the rebar bender but forgot to put on my boots we are on row number 10 coming up course number 10. excuse me and i'm going to show you guys how i lay one single block if you can lay one block you can lay a thousand right so so let's lay one block i've got my mud board here and i like to scoop and do a little shake like that to get the mud to stick see that trowel down point down run the wall do that again flap run the wall and since this mud is a little soft thank you jason yeah baby i'm gonna run all the crossbars too just give me a little more stand up to my line and uh that looks good it's mud the black you can go for a double mud i'm going to try it so i got enough here to do [Music] it sticks these do have a handle on them on one side it's this wider part that you can grab so i'm going to set the block and what i'm doing is actually siding down this block and down the rest of the wall while also keeping an eye on this line because this is my height so i'm going to kind of get over it bump it in i'm going to cite to make sure i set it pretty level to start with and i'm going to click right here see this i'm going to flick that to make sure my line is clear which it is because that's my reference i'm gonna give this thing a couple pats that'll kind of settle it down evenly torpedo that i have not dropped down the cores yet and you can see it's already sitting pretty level uh side to side and so i'm just going to give it a little tap this end needs to go down to the line and that's it i'm going to take the excess here and save it and i'm going to slide the board down and go again and then go again about 300 more times um just a little tip bub yeah um yeah use the tip of the trowel it works better so if you put the tip on the wall first and then slide down it works better yeah all right tip it down straight down now you know why i'd rather be a roofer than a product okay all right tip it down there you go that's way better way better let's demonstrate the old ray what was your old move uh just something like this yeah see that's garbage well that's gold that's gold all right everybody you got this don't do what i did you know i mean garbage in like the most respectful nicest kind of way garbage like clean nice not smelly garbage recycling yeah that was recycling okay it still sucked but it was good sucked hey come on i think we just went a little too far [Music] time to swap it ray swarp it i'm good at this at least i can do something right today hey do you uh you want me to show you how to do that you've never even done this before bro straighter down jones not so much one angle more wrist action what's the exact origin of schwartz i think it's um irish for wipe the inside of the blocks clean so the grout goes down in there easy perfect now i know swarm freaking garbage wait till you start painting bro then you'll see some real garbage garbage garbage the wall we're constructing here will surpass what is described in the code book that is needed to hold back seven feet of unbalanced fill i don't mind to go above and beyond by adding this steel and filling all of the cores with concrete in the code book you really only have to fill about every fourth or fifth core with a vertical piece of steel we're lapping our steel by a minimum of two feet and we're also stacking it vertically as you can see so the grout can flow around these overlap sections easily we decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and clean off these footings around the front and lay the block here before it rained the first time and turn this all into a mud hole we didn't set up our speed poles on these front corners because it's only one course of block so what we do is hook string lines and pull from opposing corners to give ourselves a 90 degree reference then we lay up a corner once we have a corner laid on each end then we can hook string blocks and a string line and run between that to fill in the rest [Music] and here's what we looked like at the end of day number two hey johnny you know what i'm doing n.o.c madison ski resort you remember everything we taught you yesterday bub uh no i've slept since then all right we're gonna go over it again okay remind you like what part is garbage and then how to tip down and swap it i think all this is garbage we're almost done and i still got it so oh you haven't dropped it yet not yet three more rows at least not on camera i really like this one too so i hope it doesn't go down the hole that's the one i made did you yeah because you had mine gave her stone well i like it i hope i get to keep it i gave it to him because he stole my good one this brings us to the final course of block the 14th course and this one needs to be the best one because it's what our wood framing is going to sit on in fact none of the other ones really matter it's just this one that really has to be level laying up this block took us a total of about 16 working hours a lot of that would just one man lay in block and if we would have hired this out to another crew it would have cost somewhere in the realm of three to four thousand dollars in labor so that was our savings [Music] what other mountains do you know that are around here ah let's see that one right there is chioa bald 5062 feet are you reading this off your phone no i i was born and raised here the appalachian trail goes over what you can hike over it the what appalachian trail spell it appalachian trail dude look that up bro because you know he ain't right i'm right right there busy boom wow pretty impressive [Music]

Channel: Perkins Builder Brothers

Views: 373,713

Rating: 4.9114971 out of 5

Keywords: Building, Construction, Block, Wall, How, To, Build, Lay, Retaining, Basement, Masonry, Learn, CMU, Tips, Carpentry, Woodworking, Framing, Foundation

Id: 8y28JIqezp8

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021