In the area behind the house we have a fairly large cinderblock storage building. It’s built reasonably well, but there is one critical feature missing in this building that prevents it from being called a garage…and from being particularly useful: a large door. Time to fix that.

As you can see from the pictures, whoever built the building put two standard people-sized doors in it (one in the front and one in the side.) This is obviously a pretty dumb design: there is no way to get a car or trailer inside, and storing anything larger than a person in there is right out. This was the building we previously used to house goats in, but it now has a different destiny. I want to be able to store some of the siding I want to replace this summer in the building, so out comes the saw.

I decided to cut a hole in the back wall large enough to get a trailer through: about 9 feet wide and 8 1/2 feet tall. I’ll have to build custom doors for this, but that’s a project for another day.

I bought a 7″ diamond saw blade for my circular saw and took some measurements. I marked the outline of the hole using a level and straightedge on both the inside and the outside of the wall (the blocks were about 7 1/2″ thick, so my saw wouldn’t reach all the way through in one cut.) After putting on a mask to keep out the dust, safety glasses to keep chips out of my eyes, and hearing protection to block the sound of my neighbors complaining about all the noise, I got to work cutting.

My circular saw wasn’t meant for such a heavy load on the motor, but I figured if I went slowly and took frequent breaks to let the saw cool down it would be alright. I followed the cut lines as closely as I could, and the amount of dust and noise generated was truly unbelievable. Here are the lines cut on the outside of the building:

The stairstep cracks along the right side of the building were caused by some settling and will have to be repaired sometime in the future. For now, though, it’s stable enough.

I then repeated the cuts on the inside of the wall. I didn’t take any pictures because the cutting created a huge cloud of dust in the building that took about 30 minutes to clear, but you get the idea.

So here’s where my optimism was yet again proven wrong: I thought that if I made the cuts and knocked out a line of blocks with a sledgehammer all the way up and down the cuts the wall would essentially fall down with little resistance. I knocked down a column of blocks on one side of the wall, and then the other:

For reasons not clear at that moment a row of blocks about 6 feet up was made of solid concrete and I had a hard time getting them out, so I ignored them. I thought one row of blocks couldn’t possibly make a difference, but the wall didn’t even think about falling down.

So, thought I, I would just knock out a little more block…still no movement:

And a little more sledgehammer action, but still no movement:

This was getting a little silly, and I felt the row of blocks just hanging there was probably a bit dangerous, so I broke out the demolition hammer to break the solid concrete blocks into pieces. After removing them, I realized why they were solid and so resistant to gravity:

Yeah, those are steel cables embedded in the blocks. I’m not sure if this is standard construction or just how this builder decided to do it, but it created a time-consuming problem for me. I became resigned to knocking all of the blocks out one at a time, so for the next hour I did just that. Here’s a view from the inside with only a few blocks holding up the upper blocks: 

And finally all the blocks are out. It took almost 5 hours to do a job I originally thought would only take about 2, which is pretty typical for me:

And look, yet another large pile of concrete and cinderblock rubble that I have to figure out something to do with…

I covered the hole with random pieces of plywood I had around just to keep any rain out until I can get the doors installed:

I still need to cut the steel cables and smooth the cut block with a grinder, after which I’ll build a wood frame, header and the doors. That will be a separate project, so for now I’m going to call this project finished. This can’t be called a garage quite yet, but it’s a step closer.