How It's Going, First Week in October

Here we go again!  Carl's been on vacation since Tuesday afternoon, so we've been working on the Stone Thingie non-stop.  Well, we do stop to eat and sleep.  We're not THAT dedicated.  The week is going much too fast, but we sure can't complain about the weather, which has been wonderful.  We've had temps in the upper 70's during the day with nonstop sunshine.  Just perfect for mortaring.  Should we mix some up?

 

There's Carl demonstrating the process of mixing mortar.  His recipe:  Five shovels of sand and two shovels of mortar and add water to taste.  Well, ok, not taste, that wouldn't be a good idea.  Add water until you have the desired consistency to hold a bunch of unruly stones together. Remember I said you can't mortar in rainy weather?  You can't.  Even fluctuations in the humidity levels can make the mortar too wet or too dry. 

After the old mortar mixer has done it's job and everything looks well-stirred, it's time to dump it out on your handy piece of plywood.  We don't own a hawk, which is a traditional tool of bricklayers or plasterers.  We mix up too much mortar to hold onto comfortably in every batch.

If you're really strong (or feeling especially ambitious, like Joel, when he's around to help) you can carry the plywood mortar board over to the stone house, but if you're two middle-aged people, you resort to using the wheelbarrow to make life easier.

The mortar looks fairly dry, doesn't it?  It is, but works wonderfully to hold the stones together.  We found our recipe is really strong when we tried to remove a few stones that weren't in the right place.  Certainly took a whole lot of time and energy to whack those rocks out. 

We wheel the load of mortar over to the Stone House.  See the stones sitting on top the wall? 

They're the next course, waiting to happen.  The process of finding and cutting those stones to size took a good ten hours of work.  Nothing happens fast with this project, especially since the tallest stones are around four inches thick at the most.  We had twenty-four feet of cut stone to mortar last night, counting the inside and outside of the wall. 

Here's Carl's tool of choice, a big trowel. 

 First he has to wet all surfaces of the stones to be joined so the mortar adheres well.  I skipped a step---we use our big air compressor to blow any dust and debris off the stones and the wall before we start plopping mortar on the wall to set stones.

After wetting the surface of the stone above and below, Carl slices off a hunk of mortar and plops it on top of the previous course of stones and makes a nice, level layer.  Then he takes the loose rock and sets it carefully in place in the bed of wet mortar.

Carl moves on down the line of rocks, repeating the above steps over and over until he runs out of mortar.  If Joel is home, he is kept busy making batch after batch of new mortar for us while we work on setting the stones.  The construction goes so much faster when Joel's home.  When he isn't, Carl has to stop setting stones when he runs out of mortar and go make some more.  Progress is not as quick then!

My job (not illustrated) is to cram mortar in between the stones in the vertical joints between each one.  Then I go back and rake out the excess mortar after it has had a chance to set up a little.  Everyone has their own style of mortaring, and since we're not professionals, we have our own amateur style, which is to remove (or rake) out about a half inch of the mortar so as to have consistent joints between the stones. 

Once we have all the loose stones mortared in, Joel abandons his post at the mixer and comes to help with filling in the gaps in the middle of the wall with leftover rocks and more mortar and smooths the top out.  See the dark line under the stones?  That's the new mortar and my handiwork after the mortar has set a little.  I 'try' to keep the faces of the stones as clean as possible (though I fail often) and then blend and sort of sculpt the wet mortar into smooth faces.  

This is really a three person job and much less hectic and difficult with Joel's help.

Mortaring is my favorite part of the entire process of building the Stone Thingie.  You may recall my post about 'finding the right rocks? Without the right size and shape of rocks, the construction doesn't move very quickly.  The find-ering of the 'Perfect Rock' is definitely not on my Top Ten List of fun things to do.

  Carl (for some reason) doesn't have a problem with the way I rake and finish the mortar joints.  Tomorrow I'll take a picture of my assorted tools.  I just know you're waiting with bated breath to see them, ha.

There's the completed course on Thursday night.  All that's left to do is put a damp blanket over the wet mortar so it cures nice and slow.  Then we have to clean up all of our tools and the mortar mixer (can't have dried mortar stuck to everything)  and go in for the night.  See the slightly taller rock on the left side?  That's a 'shiner', a rock that's a little taller than the rest of the course and adds some interest to break up the monotony of stones all the same height.  We have several shiners all around the building. 

 Another day of vacation over and though it's not much, we have another three inches of wall height to our credit.

Just like Scarlett O'Hara said, "Tomorrow is another day."

Time for this Old Unit to hit the hay.  Oh, but wait, I promised I'd talk about the class reunion, didn't I?   We had an enjoyable time at the reunion, visiting with old friends and catching up on what's been going on with each other.  I certainly was one of the biggest chicks at the reunion, but well, I guess someone has to be, right?  (Bigger is better only applies to bank accounts, by the way, lol!)

The jacket I sewed was ok.  I had decided to put lace sleeves in it so it would be a little cooler in case I danced the night away, but we never left the banquet hall to go to the bar where the live band was playing.  The band was too loud to talk over (or am I just getting that old?) so we stayed in the other hall and just listened from afar.

There I am, as good as it's going to get, just before we left for the reunion last Saturday.   Like I said, we had an enjoyable time, but I think Jill's wedding would have been a whole lot more fun.  Leave it to us to be invited to two Fun Things in almost a year and have them both be on the same day.

Scarlett O. was right, Tomorrow is another day.  (And it's gonna be here faster than I thought.)