One-eyed Fingerless Joe agrees … and would give a thumbs up but he lost that one too.

The blocks don’t need to be straight so long as the load is centered and even. The mortar makes it more like a continuous piece than if you had just stacked them with no mortar. Sort of like stacking irregular stones.

To be clear, it isn’t the right way, but it can be fine.

I have seen so many shit jobs like this and had to fix them. The trades joke that masons are the biggest alcoholics and we joke that this type of work is a Monday morning, after lunch, or Friday special; because this sort of nonsense with masonry work is so common.

Those 16x4x8 blocks can hold around 2,000 psi. So an overhang like that isn’t a big deal. The wood shoring holds like half or a quarter of that.

I feel like this is absolutely not fine. I know the facade would help protect the interior, but if any shear force is applied to the core, that thing is less stable than a fifty-move jenga tower.

If the facade were to rot, let’s say, and someone were to lean against it, they might end up having the whole thing collapse on them.

I don’t work in construction, but I don’t think there’s any way that meets modern building codes. If a contractor left something like that for me, I’d be getting it inspected for sure.