Brick Laying

August 6th - 9th 2019

In the evening before leaving for my summer holiday visiting my Dad, I found a few minutes to insert a few more bricks into the panels of the first conservatory kit.  It was pretty easy and fun actually.  As I was doing it, I realized that the bricks were obviously higher than the panel insert and they didn’t quite fill up on the square.  So I had to come up with a kind of stencil to square off the brick sections without me having to actually fill in the areas between the bricks and the wooden side posts.  So I used my jewelry jig to make a squared-off bit of wood where I would be able to mortar in the bricks and square them off all in one go.  At least I hoped.

Well it didn’t work out that great.  But, I did three of the brick panels (having made a little mortar and didn’t want to make too much in case my experiments went awry) but it was a little more complicated than I thought.

Mixing the mortar.

The first panel was an outright mess.  Basically, the mixture said to make like to a toothpaste-like thickness but I noticed that when I spread it on the bricks, it immediately became too dense to spread - hmm.  So I used my little stencil and packed in some mortar and went on to the second panel.  This I made a little less dense and poured a little water over the top of the panel to make the mortar seep in more than spread in.  And the third panel I came up with the idea that maybe since the bricks are real, they are sucking in water from the mortar as soon as the mixture hits them.  So, I dampened the bricks then spread the mortar over them.

Panel #1

After each one, I tried to fix in the spaces between the bricks and the wood work without much success.  Then I passed a wet sponge over each panel and cleaned up the sides a bit with toothpicks and water.  Out of the three, I like the second version best.

Panel #2 - more liquidy and poured easily

Finished panel #1

Finished panel #2

Finished panel #3 - wetted bricks beforehand.

But I had to wait a few hours to see the final result - whether or not the mortar actually set or not.  Which when I cam back a few hours later, seems it did.  The bricks are set and still I like the second one.  The slight bas relief makes it looks fairly realistic.  I’ll end up adding lots of grass and moss on the bricks at the bottom so I’m not too concerned about the edges.  But not bad for a first time go at brick laying :-)

And since I will be leaving visiting family for a few weeks, I shall leave you with the summer liqueur of choice for Italy - Limoncello.  Enjoy.