I am have just finished your book Earth Sheltered houses in preperation to start on our own earth bermed/ cordwood house this coming summer. You talked in your book about using
concrete blocks for the wall that will be bermed and using a surface bond rather than mortar between the blocks. To me this sounded like a great idea and simplier to do. However, upon having a brief conversation with someone who tried to set up the blocks for a surface bond I am now hesitant to try it. She said the issues she ran into was the blocks were rarely exactly the same size so heights would be uneven and over several courses was really a problem, if any of the blocks had even a little burr on them then they wouldnt set flat, the burr had to be found and removed. It ended up with way more handling of the blocks then if one just used mortar as buffer zone to absorb the slight differences in sizes of blocks. Did you run into either of these problems and how did you resolve them? Thanks for your input.