A few new photos to document the progress of our Interlocking Block Wall

With the birth of my son Jack things have slowed down almost to a stop over the past six weeks, enjoying our time with him in this first few weeks at home as definitely been the priority around here recently.

However with Thailand’s wet season fast approaching I am determined to get the house walls up at least to the point that we can suspend several tarps over the slab area a create a “dry” area that we can use to to fabricated the steel roof trusses. So with all that in mind we have enough interlocking bricks for 8 course of blocks around all the walls both internal and the exterior walls up to about mid waist height – the height of the second “ring beam”

Interlocking Block Walls 8 courses high awaiting concrete mortar fill.

Once the original ring beam is down the additional courses of interlocking blocks go together quite quickly ( and with minimal skills ) once the ring beam is set, they literally just stack onto each other like lego blocks and once you reach the desired height you fill the cavity with a concrete mortar mix.

We make the concrete mortar mix by hand Thai style and used a plastic funnel and a bucket and a lot of poking and prodding to “channel” the mortar in the block wall cavities.

This is one of the areas that if you decide to use this blocks that I would suggest that you “supervise” closely. It is possible to put a lot of concrete mortar or a little concrete mortar down those holes and once the mortar sets  is done its virtually impossible to tell how much when down there. We spent considerable effort ensuring the cavities where completely filled and it used a surprisingly large quality of mortar to do so.

As usual working with Wang provides me with real insight into how the job would normally get done if I wasn’t building the house myself.

It took us several bags of cement and a few days to complete the first level doing it “my way”

This is one of those areas that is so “variable” like the analogy I always go back to of a custom made suit – the real cost here on the walls is the interlocking blocks, a high quality cement mortar mix is comparably inexpensive and doing the job right is only a matter of an extra day or so of labour but I can see the opportunity for big time corner cutting here if giving the opportunity.

I will providing a more detailed “data sheet” on how to assemble the interlocking blocks when the walls are complete, if your interested you might like to book mark this page and come back when its finished.

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