Finally building some walls. Dad had some mason guy who owed him big time (because he took a loan in fodder for the pigs he was raising, but didn't keep proper paperwork; then someone else got sloppy or got sticky fingers, and tried to blame the mason; the guy would have to pay what he actually honestly returned already, if not some fine too, but dad kept his copy of the paperwork and proved him innocent - happened with Bajče as well in those years). This guy said he'll work one day for free, and if we liked his work then we'll negotiate.
The moba the first day was me, dad, she, Arpi and one of her uncles from Germany, Stef, who happened to be visiting. We did raise a lot of wall that day, so we agreed to hire the guy.
He was perpetually drunk, and not too precise - he'd use a level to judge the verticality of the next row based against the one row of siporeks blocks below it, instead of putting up a thick slat on each corner and having a straight line from the start, so the walls were off by 5cm in some places. And he used thick layers of mortar, completely unnecessary with siporeks blocks. When he was jumping over the window holes on fresh wall, it would visibly wobble. The technique I developed later was just 3mm of 3:1 sand:cement mortar instead of his 20mm of classic mortar. But in the end he built it solid, it's still holding, but later the guys plastering that flat have mentioned his mother a lot.
One funny episode. This being summer, it was rather hot, but at least while we work we move and the sweat evaporates. It's the lunch that's a problem, but luckily we already had the basement, with hacked soil staircase of kinds, even some contraption of a door. So we all ate what we brought, and at some point he ran out of hot peppers. He asked whether we had any, however weak they may be. Dad offered him one of his from the vineyard, allowing for the possibility that they may not, indeed, be up to strength. Then he bit it, chewed, swallowed and stopped. Cold sweat. Red face. Pale face. More sweat. Grunt. Sigh. Hiccup. Olive drab face. "Ouch... this was a good one."
He asked to be paid by check to his wife's name, and we gave him some cash. Knowing that he'd drink the cash, so that the majority of money would reach home.
In the end, I had to find him to do one urgent fix. Two days after it was finished, I went to take off the planks from the corners, and I noticed that the west corner of the house was about 4cm inwards. The wall was OK, it's just that one of the planks holding the concrete while it was poured in was moved and nobody noticed. So I drove all the way to the other end of town, where I knew he was building something, found him somehow. He just finished pouring a floorboard, or started marking the next row of blocks on a fresh one - everything still clean and the board perfectly flat and horizontal. He was moving around with a vagres. I took him aside, so the guys who hired him don't hear, explained the fuckup, and then drove him to our place, and we quickly mixed a few buckets of fine grain concrete and poured it. It's holding to day. That corner, being inside the garage, was never plastered below the garage roof, so the traces of this job are still visible.
That vagres comes from distorted german Waagerechts, which is a mason's level - a long hose, either transparent or with transparent ends, filled with water so that the water level at some fixed starting point is exactly transferred to all other places. Precise and cheap. When something's „in vagres“, it means it sticks to one horizontal line.
This summer, while I drafted (in central projection, vantage point about eight meters above) the future looks of the walls, I also endeavoured to calculate their total volume, to see how many blocks will we need... and it turned out that I fucked up the calculation when I ordered them. We had too many, by about a third. Well, won't go to waste, 25cm thick siporeks is good insulator, 30cm is even better, so if we lay the blocks that way, we'll have thicker walls and we'll save as much in the future decades on heating, okay let's do it so. And the windows we bought were vacuumed, Jelovica brand, it's gonna be all ship shape, strike a match and you've warmed it up.
And the extra blocks weren't discarded, nor sold - who'd buy them this big anyway, the only popular format was 20x25x60 - we later thought to add a garage and, eventually, many years later, the remainder was used to build partition walls upstairs. For that we almost had enough, had to buy them only for the last seven square meters of the wall. Some fifteen blocks found their way into the neighborhood, people would take one or two at a time, when they needed to support something or improvise a stool.
20-VIII-2019 - 31-X-2025