A closeup of Jesse, me and the mixer. Note the cool brickers cap. Mary Tetrault knitted one for me and one for Becky. Both useful and stylish.  Thanks. The mixer was also given to me. I am guessing it is from the 1970's. It took 16 batches for the foundation.

It is cheaper and more fun to mix your own concrete. It is also a lot of work. Becky and I went to Hafner's Supply.for the sand and gravel. It is free if you load your own. Then we premeasured everything into close to 100 buckets. It took about three hours to mix and pour about one yard of concrete.

Now that the footer is poured, it is time to form up plywood form for the foundation. It is a 9' wide concrete wall of concrete on top of which we will build the brick wall.

We are pouring the footer. Into the mixer go three buckets of gravel, two of sand, and one of Portland cement. It is all spun together and then water is added. It too about 15 batches to fill up to the required 8" inches of concrete.

Ready to Pour

So we have torn down the fence. Then we dug a trench. It is 30" deep, below the frost line here in Kentucky.  The wall is 8''wide,  so the trench is 16", twice as wide. There is reinforcement steel at the bottom to hold the concrete together. Now we are ready to pour a base (footer 8' thick). By the way it was a lot of work to dig a 17' trench by hand. We carried the dirt away in buckets.

How to build a Brick Wall

I am back with the Kentucky brick Man blog. Here I  will show how I build a section of the wall. Jesse is about to remove the old wood fence