House construction diary. Part 2. The best way to mark corners and masonry corner blocks

In mid-May 2020 delivered the first car with material for building walls of the house - autoclaved aerated concrete from a Novosibirsk company "Sibit":

Why exactly aerated concrete - he wrote in one of the first articles on the channel. External walls: D500, B2.5, 400 mm thick, internal load-bearing - 300 mm. The machine includes 16 pallets of 0.75 m3.

All products are in stock in St. Krasnoyarsk - at the company "Stroybyt". They have two large building bases (warehouse-store) with various building materials:

The whole area is filled with an assortment of bricks, blocks, aerated concrete, etc. Constant flow of clients. And more conveniently, one of their two warehouses is geographically located in my direction at the exit from the city (to the west). For several years I have been purchasing building materials from this company, so I decided to purchase aerated concrete here.

So, the first batch of aerated concrete at the site. I did not put pallets on the foundation. That's what it is for. The most important and crucial stage in the construction of the walls of a house is to correctly set the blocks of the first row - pallets on the foundation will interfere.

When marking, several criteria in geometry must be observed: corner blocks must stand in strict places on the foundation so that the design lengths of the walls are observed. And keep right angles at home. There should be no trapezoid.

To do this, after installing the corner blocks (without mortar), we measure all the distances and check the length of the diagonals. The lengths of the diagonals must be equal.

Duplicating the correct position of the blocks, an additional control of the rectangularity of the perimeter is a stretched rope in the corners. The vertical edges of the blocks should not deviate from the tensioned rope. This is with regards to the geometry of the walls of the house and this is the easiest to markup.

Next, you need to find out where is the highest angle on the foundation and where is the lowest. The first row will need to be started from the highest corner. Moreover, the height of the masonry joint in the lowest corner should not be more than 4 cm.

For this marking, I used a hydro level, and in the evening, at dusk, I checked it with a laser level before placing the blocks. I have a simple one, there is no pulse mode and there is no point in purchasing a photodetector for daytime use.

On the corner blocks on the machine, I cut off the edges with grooves. It is not known when I will deal with the facade of the house, but these grooves and recesses for grip spoil the view.

I kneaded the solution (proportion 1 to 3 - cement and sand plus a plasticizer), laid out a "bed" of the solution in the uppermost corner:

Do you think everything worked out the first time? No, very often it was necessary to remove blocks, put or remove mortar.

On both sides of the corner blocks (which are still without mortar) - I laid the blocks on the mortar. And so every corner. Be sure to control the height of the blocks with a hydro level. All eight blocks need to be in the horizon. Well, the horizontal position of the blocks themselves is checked with a float level and corrected with a rubber mallet.

After laying 8 blocks, put the corner blocks themselves on the mortar. The vertical seams were filled with glue-foam.

This process of setting and laying 12 blocks took me almost the whole day. I'm happy with the result. Three corners came out to "0", and the fourth one is 2 mm higher, which is not critical. I checked it in the evening with a laser level.

I saw this method of setting corner blocks in this video:

Everything is explained very competently and easily. For those who start to build from aerated concrete, I recommend this channel - you will find a lot of useful things for yourself.

Previous part: House construction diary. Part 1. Shut-off waterproofing

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Photos of the author (c)

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