the beige and red and pink brick road

So, the first thing I did when I got started Saturday morning was clean all the cat poop out of the nice, loose sand after I figured out what all the flies were so interested in..

And in doing that, I disturbed this guy.. I have no idea what it is, but I'd be interested in finding if anyone knows. Especially if it's a termite queen, or something else that should be squished on sight.

After the nature hour, I picked up all the bricks I'd fit last weekend, and stacked them in order along the edge.

The first row only needed some adjustments to get it back even with the step line, but the 2nd row was a total mess.. so I got started.

One of the things I learned from doing the driveway, was that because the bricks are all different sizes and shapes and thicknesses, it was a waste of time to try to get the bed completely level and perfect before starting, like you would if you were laying brand new uniform pavers.

The bed was relatively smooth and level, and I just poured a bit of sand as I went, and had plenty more on hand to level each brick to the right spot.

Because the sidewalk is higher than where the bottom of the first stair is, I wanted to bow the walkway up in the center so water doesn't pool up right at the house-end of the bricks. Not sure I did that so well right at the stair side, but it's so important that wherever the inspector measures it's exactly the right height that I'm not sure I could've done much at that end anyway. Towards the middle and the sidewalk it bumps up a little in the middle, though you can't really tell by looking at it. We'll see what happens when it starts raining.. we shouldn't have to wait to long for that!

And here we are. All that's left to do is fill the joints in with sand to lock everything in place. (I'm still sort of amazed at how well that works!)

And voila, we're off to see the wizard!

And Dan spent the weekend on his favorite pastime, putting up the radiant heat fins. Aren't they pretty?!

and.. still working

Another weekend in which I was hoping to finish the walkway.. I realized that fitting the bricks to the shape was going to take so long that I didn't have a chance of getting the whole thing set in one weekend. And, as predicted, the first 2 rows are totally out of whack and I'll have to pull them up and reset them. In an effort to do as little duplicate work as possible, I decided to fit the whole path this weekend, then next weekend I can come back and set them.

It actually is already much more pleasant to walk on then the dirt.. which is basically sand, so if I really wanted to I could probably just sweep more in the joints and call it done, but I'd really like to have a flat, nice path for a little while

And Dan was back in the garage plowing through the staple-up. I took more pictures of him throughout the day, but they all look about the same..

This isn't the funnest project we've ever worked on, but the nights are already getting colder and the heat from this system is going to feel sooooo nice.

finally back to work

Now that we can stop digging up the dirt in front of the house, I can finally put in a proper walkway so it's not a muddy mess every time it rains. So bright and early yesterday morning I set out to prepare the ground for some bricks.

You can't see all the nails and wire and other crap so well as the giant slab of concrete extending out from the bottom stair.. Let's just say yesterday turned into a long day with the digging stick, a chisel and, ultimately, the angle grinder with a masonry cutoff bit on it that turned the shelf of concrete into a fine powder.

Finally, around 4 in the afternoon I finally was able to lay out the border of the walkway. I know the curve will make it a little harder (and more time consuming), but that's how I've pictured it all along and I really can't imagine it any other way.

I tried to lay out the curve with a hose, like all the books say.. but we don't seem to have any hoses without tons of kinks and it was more trouble than it was worth. The rope worked better, but there was no way I was going to be able to match the curve on the 2nd side. I finally dug some armored wire out of a trash bag of construction debris (I can only fit one in the trash can every week, so we have a little bit of a backlog of trash) and it was just flexible enough for me to shape, and just rigid enough to hold that shape when I moved it to the other side.

Next, I dug a narrow trench along the inside of the curve for the edging bricks. These bricks are laid on end so they're embedded deeper into the ground and hold everything in.

I needed to get the bricks at the edge of the stairs at exactly the right height because that permit hasn't been closed yet and the inspectors are really tough on the allowable variance in rise. Of course the sidewalk is about 3/8" higher than that point, so the walkway can't be sloped away from the house, or even level. But I got a nice gradual slope from between the sidewalk and the stair, and I'll crown the bricks in the center of the pathway so water doesn't pool up.

Here's where I was hoping to be at the end of the Saturday, but this picture was taken late afternoon on Sunday.

I think the curves are pretty even..

I needed the height of the edges to know how much more I had to level the dirt in between. It wasn't much more, but there were some high spots.

And this is as far as I got with the actual brick. By next weekend those 2 rows will be so messed up I'll have to reset them anyway.. oh well..

And what's Dan been up to while I was laboring over the bricks? In the garage taking his turn at stapling up the thin fins. It's pretty slow going.. no wonder everyone wanted so much money to install this sort of system.

You can see we took some time and marked out all the rooms to make it really obvious where everything should be - here Dan's putting up the heat in the front room. He covered a lot of ground (or.. floor) but there's still more to go.

Of course, it was all we could do to wait until Sunday afternoon for what we wanted to get started on days ago.. look at the calendar folks, it's October! That's right, it's time for Halloween! I can't believe another year has gone by and we still don't have our stuff back from storage, but somehow we've collected a bit more spooky stuff with which to decorate.

Here's Henrietta helping me hang up some decorations,

And here's how it looks after an hour or so of work (and also illustrates why we had to stop after an hour or so.. it's getting dark much earlier these days). Lots more to do, but it's already satisfyingly spooky.

it holds the car

The pattern gets a little wonky at the end there, but it's done!!

Instead of renting a vibrating plate compactor to settle the sand we just jumped up and down a lot and stomped on all the bricks.


Then I drove the car over it a couple times to really settle everything in. I'm sure I'll need to resweep it with sand one or two more times, but hey - it totally held up the car, and that's pretty much all I can ask for.

<-- You can see the new bricks on the bottom right here, because they're still wet from washing. That last little corner took awhile to try to get it to hold to the pattern.

Speaking of pattern.. Dan doesn't think I should mention it, because if it had worked it should be obvious.. but since we had so many different colors I wanted to make a plaid driveway! does it look plaid at all??


And then I parked the car on it, and you pretty much can't see it at all.. since we almost never drive this is about the most you'll ever be able to see! sigh..

















Meanwhile, Dan was inside framing in the new bathroom!!

More on that exciting development tomorrow!

midweek brick update

I managed to get home with a little bit of daylight left, and was determined to finish the driveway. Wouldn't you know it, I RAN OUT OF BRICKS!!! A whole chimney and a foundation, and I didn't have enough bricks for a measly little driveway!!?


I filled the sand in on what was there though, and it's amazing how finished it looks!


You basically just sweep sand over it to fill in the gaps, and it acts as mortar and holds everything in place. Plus, it instantly looks like it's been here 100 years!






So close, and yet so far away..


One of the neighbors said she has a pile of bricks in her backyard that I could have if I dug them out.. so it looks like this Saturday is another powerwashing day..

She's a brick.. layer

It's finally brick time!!

I started off Saturday by sorting all the bricks into stacks by color and size - there are a ton of different shapes and colors. Most of the people who know what they're doing told us we'd be much better off buying pavers, because a driveway made of varying size bricks was likely not to last long. Aside from being stubborn, I just can't conceive of the waste of having a chimney-full of bricks at home, and buying brand-new ones for a driveway. But I did decide to lay them in sand instead of mortar. In general, you want the mortar to be softer than the bricks so that if anything breaks (because of settling, uneven loads, or just bad installation) it's the mortar and not the bricks. Since we have old, soft bricks, and I've never laid bricks before, I decided using sand instead of mortar was the way to go.

The concrete was poured low enough to have an inch of mortar and a standard size brick, which would be flush with the sidewalk. After I swept out the driveway, we snapped a chalk line an inch up, which would be the surface of the sand.

The woman at the store told me a 100lb bag of sand would cover an area of 100 square feet, at 1" deep. With a 135 square foot driveway, plus filling in the spaces, I figured 3 bags would be way more than enough.

I planned to pour and screed about a third of the area, lay the bricks, then do the next area..

well.. it turns out a 100lb bag of sand covers an area of 10 square feet at 1" deep. That's quite a difference!!

Back in the truck, back to the hardware store, and back home to unload 20 50lb bags of sand .. by about 4pm I was finally ready to start laying bricks!


I went with a standard basket weave pattern, and it worked out that I only needed one cut brick every other row.

I leveled the rows from side to side, and tried to make sure that the slop toward the house was even.. Since the bricks were so different in shape and size, having an even bed of sand to lay them on didn't really save much time. I still had to pour extra sand on, or scrape some out of the way for each brick

By the time it was too dark to see on Saturday night I think I had 2 and a half rows done.


Sunday morning, I got out there early and progress was slow, but steady.

I was joking about it with neighbors, but I really did need to re-estimate how long it would take because so many people stopped by to chat! It was a sunny, nice weekend and everyone was out, and everyone is so friendly here.. let's just say by about 4 o'clock on Sunday I was seriously regretting my little motivational plan of parking my motorcycle in the garage to be sure I'd be done with the driveway by Monday morning..






I brought some lights out and worked as long as I could, but it got to the point that I could barely move. My knees were actually bleeding and there was no way I was going to get done anyway. So I threw a piece of thick plywood down, took a long hot shower, and sat down to write a post.

Just powerwashing in the rain..

Power tools are fun!

Last weekend the unseasonably sunny days brought everyone out, so there was some chatting with the neighbors that cut into the brick cleaning progress.. but a crappy, rainy day and a loud power washer makes for speedy uninterrupted cleaning!

Most of the time was taken up getting bricks from the stack in the backyard up to the front and laid out in the street. (Who needs a gym?! I did a million squats today with weights!) There was some scraping of stubborn mortar, but the dirt pretty much came flying off. I cleaned one side, scraped the ones that needed it, flipped them, and cleaned the other side.

And apparently, I made quite a sight out in my rain slicker in the street. It actually stopped raining Sunday afternoon, which is just as well since I really need to clean my outfit before it rains again and have to wear it to work!

In 3 days last weekend I cleaned 143 bricks. This weekend, I cleaned 409.

I'd be a little more bitter about that wasted time, but it was nice to chat with all the neighbors, and I wouldn't've been able to lay the driveway yet anyway. Because there's still more concrete to pour in the back, there will be a concrete truck and crew traipsing through that would have been ill-advised on a partially completed driveway.


Here's the current state of the pool/patio/sunken living room.. the rain washed all the loose pigment off the surface, so you can begin to see the cool color and texture. The drainage is in place, and short lengths of rebar are sticking out of the retaining walls, ready to be tied to reinforcements for the slab.

Plan is for the slab to be poured this week..

Turns out, 3 days aren't enough...

We had such grand plans for our 3-day weekend! We went and picked up the toilet for the downstairs bathroom, checked in on the doors we've been trying to order for more than a month, and bought a bunch of siding to patch the area over the garage door, which was Dan's task for the weekend. I had my stack of bricks to clean, which hopefully would be put down in the driveway. I don't want to give away the ending, but the toilet is still in the box, the doors still haven't been ordered, the siding is stacked in the garage, and there aren't anywhere near enough bricks for the driveway.

Dan started prying off the odd bits on the end where a whole run would go back in, and there were a few boards that were rotted. Well, as you might expect, that was just the beginning, and it now looks like this spring will involve replacing a whole lotta wood on the porch, starting with this post right here.






With another storm approaching it seemed like a bad idea to spend the last sunny day tearing everything apart, so Dan primed all the freshly exposed wood and patched the hole with a piece of plywood. (you can see the stack of pretty siding in the garage in this shot.. sigh..)
Then he primed the plywood too.








From the street it doesn't look half bad!


The house already looks way better than when we bought it, and by this summer should look pretty good from the outside.












And what was I doing all this time??

sitting around eating bon-bons??

If by that you mean scraping and scrubbing piles of bricks with no end in sight, then yes! bon-bons.

Looks like next weekend the brick cleaning continues..