Blocked In
The lowly concrete block. 8 inches high, 16 inches long with two big holes in the middle. It's not sexy like a poured concrete wall, it's not technologically advanced like all the new engineered wood products we're using, it's just sturdy, plain, cheap and in plentiful supply.
The entire first floor of our building is made of concrete block, except for the very back portion which is formed by the poured wall that's also holding back the hill. Our architects, RVC, have used this same design in a number of buildings. The poured wall is necessary to hold back the big hill but also gets strength from the structure of the building being built against it. It's very elegant.
So the concrete block is the workhorse that holds up the walls of the upper floors. It also holds the brick veneer that will form our front facade. Hundreds of them are necessary to do the job, held together by mortar which is a simple mix of sand, water and cement, the ingredient that binds them together. In our case it takes about 175 of them to go all the way around once which is called a "course". It took four courses to get from the foundation to where we were above ground and another 16 courses to get to the height of the second floor. That's roughly 3500 blocks, each one placed by hand and meticulously mortared in by hand by a skilled brick/block layer.
Our block and brick contractor is Brick-It, owned by Don Hawk of Albany. They've been plying this trade for a very long time. If you see a brick job built anytime in the last 35 years there's a pretty good chance it was done by them.
They showed up on the first day with the goal of getting the building up above ground level. The building foundation sat about three feet below ground level and in only two days of block laying they got us above that level. Work then stopped so that Athens Excavating could backfill the foundation with stone so that the foundation will be forever buried below ground, safe from rain and other elements.
When they returned to work the next day all that remained to do was to lay the hundreds and hundreds of blocks to form our first floor. The block layers have the responsibility of getting the doors and windows in the right place, getting the blocks to the exact elevation of the second floor, ensuring that reinforcements are placed correctly and that every block is laid exactly as every other.
It's an unglamorous, repetitive job but I'm not lying when I tell you that I could have pulled up a lawn chair, cracked open a brew and watched them work all day long! There's a rhythm to what they do and a certain style and flare to their movements as they pick up mortar on a triangle-shaped trowel, flick their wrist just enough to mortar an edge and place the block in exactly the spot it needs to go. When they lay a course they don't go from one edge to the other, they typically have two people laying block toward one another and they meet in the middle. And when it's time to lay that last block in the middle it ALWAYS fits exactly, same gap around it as every other block. It's amazing.
Block-laying starts right on the poured "footer" or foundation, a concrete pad in the shape of the building's outline several feet below ground. Though it looks pretty sparse, this is the beginning of the building.
Building the blocks up to get above ground level.
Quickly, the building starts to grow!