mortar Archives - The Year of Mud

The foundation is now mostly complete with the addition of a third course on the west side of the building. The past few days have been spent trying to piece together that topmost course with the remaining urbanite, and stuffing additional nooks with a clay/sand mortar. The construction of the foundation has gotten funkier over time since we used all the nice flat pieces at the start, and all that was left for the third course was the irregular stuff.

The mortar mix is kinda tricky to work with because of its high sand content (about 3:1); it’s very gritty and difficult to jam into tight spaces. I’m glad now that there are only a handful of cracks remaining. But it sure does feel great not using any nasty new cement mix!

On Monday, I hope to get a delivery of sand to begin cobbing the walls. Look out!

The first course of the foundation is now pretty much complete.

Unfortunately, I had nowhere near enough urbanite that I thought I needed, and I made another trip to collect more over the weekend. This second time I played it safe and filled the trailer about twice as much as the first go-round, hopefully insuring that I would have more than plenty.

Yesterday, I ran into a little snag in the assembly of the foundation when I realized I needed a massive slab of urbanite for underneath the door frame. Either that or I could spend some time attempting to level a couple of smaller, very uneven pieces. Forget that, I thought.

I went into Rutledge with four others, thinking we could heft an appropriately massive, flat slab I spotted earlier that day. Apparently not. It was hugely heavy. Instead, Brandon, a (very proactive!) visitor got Zimmermans Excavating (which was just down the road) to bring their backhoe and lift the piece into the pickup truck. We drove back to DR and to my warren, backed up to the spot in the foundation where the piece needed to be, and tipped the slab off the truck bed onto the ground, and then wiggled and walked the piece into its final resting place and then leveled it. That single piece of urbanite was probably three to four times the size of any other piece we had collected.

Later that day, Jeff and I stomped the first batch of earthen mortar (clay sand mortar) at a ratio of three buckets of sand to one clay. This we used to fill in the gaps (think cement mortar) between urbanite, along with gravel and smaller chunks of concrete. Today, we pretty much completed the first course and began stacking pieces for the second, final course.

I suspect this second course will be much trickier…