The southern wall is the longest earthen wall in our house, so my friend Rachel and I were happy to lay its last brick in September 2012. My brother Van and our cousin Jerry came as quickly as they could, to begin work on the bond beam.
They set up frame boards and ran re-bar along the top of the walls. Our bricks were so sandy and dry that drilling holes for the metal stakes was an exercise in frustration. Van drilled the hole, the sand filled it back up. Finally we hit upon a solution: just add water! Drill, pour water in sandy hole, drill again, wet sand doesn’t fall back in. Yay!
It wasn’t until December that we finished pouring the bond beam for the great majority of the earthen walls. My sister-in-law Kathy joined us on a cold and miserable day to pour the north and west library walls and the bond beam for the infamous arch of a previous post.
The next day, in order to finish the southern wall, we worked in the rain until after dark. Jerry mixed concrete, I carried buckets of concrete and lifted them up to Van, and Van poured and smoothed the concrete.
We had around 40 bags of concrete for the southern wall and we knew we would probably use most of them. We were cold, tired, and sore. I don’t know how Van and Jerry managed. This is the trick I played on myself. I didn’t look at the pile of concrete bags. I didn’t look at the pile of empty bags. If Jerry poured me a bucket of concrete, I carried it; if there were no more buckets, I would know that we were done.
It wasn’t quite that simple—but that strategy kept me going almost to the end, when Van said, “I think we’ll need about two more bags.” At that point, pure relief kept me going, and the anticipation of a long hot bath.