Well we reached the end of day 3 of making the foundation bricks. Well we successfully laid up another 167 bricks today. So that will bring our total foundation bricks made to date up to 429. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that my boys just don’t get laying the bricks in straight lines.
You can see the row of bricks on the right side. That was the first row they laid. This was after I had already talked to them about where to lay the bricks down and in what direction. There is a time to be creative but, when you’re trying to get the most efficient use of space is not the time to be creative. For those of you who have teenagers you know what I’m talking about.
So after laying the first row and having yet another discussion they corrected hings and began laying the second row on the right. Not too bad of news but, this is were it starts.
The second part of the bad news is that I ran out of lime. I had 2 50 LBS bags of lime slacked and ready to use for this and I ran out. As it turns out since I was adding lime by volume rather that weight I needed more than I thought. So I have to get some more lime and slack it for at least 24 hours before I use it. That shouldn’t be to hard since I ran into another issue as well.
The third part of the bad news is my other issue. For those of you that have read my blog from the beginning know that when I got the cement mixer the barrel of the mixer failed very shortly after I started using it. I had to take it all apart and weld the barrel back together to fix the failure. Well after all of batches of adobe/cob that I have mixed it seems that a weld or two has started to crack. So I think tomorrow I’ll get the lime and put it in the can to slack it and then work on the cement mixer over the weekend. That way the lime has time to slack and I can use the down time to tear apart the cement mixer, check everything and make any repairs needed. This way I’ll have my cement mixer back in top shape and ready for the next 1000 plus bricks that I need to make.
I’m planning on making making concrete counter tops as well plus an adobe floor so I’ll need that cement mixer running. I’ll post more about what happened to the cement mixer so that anyone else using one will know what to watch out for.