Finally... done with the board form pattern! I knocked out a lot of tedious work done this weekend... for the form ties, I cut 180 feet of half-inch allthread  into 90 two-foot pieces with a Sawzall, then welded a nut onto the end of each one. Then I ripped about 75-100 more little sticks for the board-form texture areas.

Saturday was the prep-cook equivalent of the building world. "Slicing" allthread for form ties and "dicing" lumber for form patterns...

Set up to give my little arc welder a workout.

This was a lot of good welding practice. My welds improved remarkably in the course of running 90 beads around the rod-to-nut joints, and I was able to start an arc pretty reliably without sticking by the end of this. I also like that this looks like a bouquet.

Here's the completed pattern on the big retaining wall. The blank area at the lower left is where the landing and first run of stairs to the loft will be attached to the wall. I think this is going to look great, and I'm glad to be putting in this much effort now. That said... I'm very glad to be done with this part!

With all of the boards in place, I could get started on bending and tying the rest of the rebar. I'm starting to feel like this is going to be a very stout garage.

Another section of wall reinforcing done. I got about 2/3 of the low walls done before I had used up all of the available daylight. I'm thinking the rest of the rebar work should go pretty quickly; these small walls have a lot of cuts and bends and measuring, where the retaining wall will have a lot of straight full bars with only one cut per run of horizontal rebar. I'm enjoying the rebar work; working with hand-powered tools, and sometimes just hands... it's very satisfying to be able to feel the steel bending and yielding. I've heard from people who put a lot of effort into developing grip strength that bending steel (usually nails, various bars, horseshoes, frying pans, etc.) develops a kind of strength that you can't get any other way, and I'm actually starting to see some truth in that with this rebar work.