When we broke ground on the chicken coop we realized that the foundation for the back of the garage wasn’t fully formed, it didn’t reach down to the wall as it should. So in order to build the coop behind the garage we needed to make sure the back of the foundation wouldn’t crumble and fall apart. So we found it necessary to build a cinder block wall as a support wall behind the garage foundation.
So 18 cinder blocks, 10 pavers and two 60 pound bags of mortar later we constructed a wall and determined that neither of us would ever be skilled in the masonry field.
The hardest part, in my opinion, of the whole project was the transportation of the materials from Home Depot to our cars and unloading the materials. Cinder blocks aren’t the heaviest thing’s I’ve carried but 18 of them get a bit tiresome. The part we struggled with the most was the mixing and consistency of the mortar. No amount of Youtube videos, articles or photos can really properly describe what the consistency of mortar really is suppose to be. Because neither of us have ever used mortar before we weren’t sure how it was suppose to act. In the videos it looks as if the mortar is just smoothed on the side of the blocks like butter and then slapped into formation…boom wall done.
Ha.
We poured the mortar into our rickety old wheelbarrow, the dust making us cry and our lungs scream, added the water little by little and mixed it with the only tools we have, a trowel and later a shovel. Not. A. Fun. Process. It was muddy and not smooth or like butter at all. I’m not sure what was going on but it was more than likely user error. We added more water and little by little and it helped but whatever we could we couldn’t get it to stick to the sides of the blocks.
While Jim tried to mortar the side of the blocks and place them, I followed along behind and filled in the cracks, smoothing the mortar and adding more to make sure they were at least a tiny bit sealed together. It was slow going but finally most were stuck together. Beside the ungraceful globbing on of the less then desirably mixed mortar, the only hiccup we ran across was a couple of little outcropping of the rough surface of the foundation. Jim smoothed out what he could but some impeded on our wall making it a little less even than we hoped.
But hey, it’s a wall! The first wall we have ever built, and I couldn’t be any happier with it.
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