Building a concrete block house, a small vacation villa in Gulf Shores AL


Here on the left you can see the first lintel set in place over the opening for a French door. The photo on the right has the lintels in place and most of the porch column blocks. While most of our blocks came from DAC-ART of Birmingham, AL, our column blocks came from DAC-ART of Baton Rouge, LA.

building a small vacation villa using concrete blocks cement blocks

Dac Art Building System concrete building construction contractor

The south end of the house,facing the water, will be floor to near ceiling windows. The blocks between the tall windows will give us strength for hurricane season. (Which we needed in 2005--see link)

Looking back--I wish now that we had put electric outlets in those south corners and maybe even between the windows. On the S-W, between the French doors and south facing windows, we have no outlets and I have a tall bookcase in that corner now. You are not going to loose that much strength--if any really--so put outlets everywhere. You just never know what is gonna get invented and what you might want to be plugging in.

Scott Coutts, of Magnolia Springs, our concrete contractor has done a great job.

These dry stack architectural concrete blocks are big !

DAC ART buildings need a hammer drill for construction occasionally

Anyone building a DAC-ART house will need a 'can do' drill. Michael Bates, our electrical is drilling here for porch lights. At first ,we rented an electric 'hammer drill' from a local rental shop but it became instantly apparent that since few of our subs owned one of these drills and we were building a concrete house, we would need to go ahead and purchase a hammer drill and a set of masonry drill bits. Of course, we ended up buying lots of bits of certain sizes .These masonry drill bits can be used many times, but it is not like a good wood bit that you use for years. Hammering thru concrete is pretty hard on a drill bit (can be a little hard on a shoulder too). You have to consider that concrete has aggregate inside, and you are basically drilling, not just thru portland cement concrete, but solid rock at many times. Our drill is Bosch from Germany, and our local Home Depot carried the drills and accessories. Make sure that your electric temp service has a circuit breaker of sufficient amps to power your drill, and because the bits are often quite long, it really helps to have a second person as a 'spotter' to be sure that you are drilling perpendicular from ALL angles. When you are the one on a ladder, holding this stout drill up close, it is impossible to site the angle of the drill bit from all directions. I'll also add, that hitting a chunk of aggregate early on can sometimes cause your drill to want to jump and drill at odd angles, attempting to bypass the chunk of rock---concrete is not as hard as limestone aggregate, so hold tight.

We did drilling for both insertion of threaded rods that got epoxied into concrete blocks and for holes that got a lead sleeve inserted for a screw. Some holes were drilled for things like wiring too--as in the case of kitchen cabinet undercounter lights where just a piece of romax needed to be pulled thru.

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The cornice corners were put into place first. Here you can see a block used as a temporary counter-weight until the concrete backfill is poured into the cornice blocks. Rebar runs all thru the block openings as well as the concrete back-fill..


Cornice blocks are in place and special custom blocks will be made to fill the smaller cornice opening on this end.