The Legacy of the Wall

Quite a while back, when I was working as a carpenter for a small contractor near Boone, NC, my hometown, we worked on a foundation for a log cabin.

It was mid-December, about 25 degrees Fahrenheit and driving snow. This contractor, generally of foul mood, was singing, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!” at the top of his lungs. It was indeed, and the temperature certainly felt like it. Not a good day to be laying cinderblocks.

A mason who had retired from Florida to the mountains was directing the work and setting the blocks for the corners of the foundation, leaving the contractor and the other carpenter to lay the blocks between the corners. As carpenters, not masons, we were under the mason’s direction; I was relegated to mixing the mortar, while a laborer delivered it to those who were laying the blocks. I had been directed to add antifreeze to the mix to keep it from freezing as it set.

Now imagine a properly-laid foundation wall: the first course on the footing, a neat rectangle with its top exactly horizontal. The second course on top of the first, its top exactly horizontal. And so on up to the top course.

Now imagine this one: three of the four walls properly laid, with their tops exactly horizontal.

The other wall was a different story.

This wall started at the left on the first course, but ended at the right on the second course! The guys laying the block were not using a level, so they had (apparently) no indication that the course wasn’t horizontal. I can only guess that the footing had been poured out of level; it was poured before I started working on this crew. In any case, they were three or four courses up when this was discovered, and as this was not a tall wall, it was almost complete.

So they pulled the blocks out and corrected it.

No, not really. They left the blocks as they were. Their solution was to use a masonry saw to cut the blocks for the top course so that they tapered from full block height on the left to zero on the right. They had left openings for the foundation vents, which normally would have been installed later in the project. Since these openings would have been a dead giveaway to the error of the wall, they installed the vents in the openings, tilting them to get them as close to horizontal as possible. To hide the rest of the evidence, a batch of stucco was mixed up and applied over the blocks of that wall only.

This was typical of this contractor: all of his work was done in a slapdash manner. Errors were hidden, not corrected.

I’ve seen this many times since. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Or maybe, if it ain’t broke enough, don’t fix it.

The carpenter or mason or laborer only has to look at the poor work for a few hours or days, but the homeowner has to look at it forever. I couldn’t and still can’t work that way. I didn’t work for that contractor for much longer.

Let’s do it right the first time—that should be the foundation of any work. And maybe that foundation will last a long time.