“Wall” is for finally starting to put up the end wall.  “E” is for the East end. It is also for energy efficient, eco-friendly and the E in GREEN.

We are using a dry stack wall building system called Faswall.  It is made by a local company (Philomath) Shelterworks, out of ground wood pallets and cement.  In the picture you can see the inserts of insulation.  Once we have stacked these, we will fill the voids with concrete.  We end up with a super strong, insulated wall.

This is really nice material to work with as you can use common woodworking tools to cut it.

A small electric chainsaw works great

for making notches in the Faswall and shaping the block to fit our curves.

There will be a couple of plugs in the wall so we had to run conduit to the receptacles.   I had to find our old rebar cutter which was buried under a  pile of lumber.  I didn’t think we would have to deal with any more rebar but there is some in the wall.

We could only build the wall so high until the electrical inspector comes to check out the conduit. Then we can start filling up the wall with concrete.  Also, we are going to be making the concrete ourselves with an electric cement mixer.  It will be easier for us to fill up to the level of the windows. (reflected in the gaps you see in the first and last photo), before continuing to stack and fill the blocks.  We already have a pile of sand ready and our gravel will be delivered tomorrow.  We will also be putting ground polystyrene foam in the mix to make it “light weight”.