All In All, You're Just Another...

If you've been following our progress at all, you know that Kathy and I love to move bricks back and forth. It's what we do. There's nothing like spending a sunny Sunday afternoon picking up a pair of bricks and moving them 20 feet, before going back for another pair, over and over. We can while away many a happy hour transporting bricks, and often have.

After a few years(!) of this we decided we'd had enough of rearranging piles of bricks and decided to finally build (technically, rebuild) a brick patio out of them. Here it is.

We didn't do it the professional way, of course, but instead worked on it piecemeal as we found time. Once we were certain that all the major plumbing underneath the backyard was solid and reliable, we could start to smooth out the soil and get it level. We eyeballed the dimensions we wanted and made a rough count of the bricks (no problem there). Then we started at one corner, leveling the soil, planting a few bricks, checking with a level, and moving on.

After a few weeks of this we had ourselves a brick patio. The bricks are all dry-set; there's nothing holding them in place except gravity. So we mixed up small batches of concrete and cemented just the outside row of bricks to create a kind of hard ring around the patio that holds everything together.

We're on a bit of a hill, so the backyard slopes a little. That meant we had to design-in some steps, or else slope all the walkways. We chose to put a step into the front (downhill side) of the patio, and we'll probably put a few more steps along the pathways, when we get around to it.

When all the bricks were done and the outside edge was cemented in, we poured polymeric sand into all the gaps. That's special sand mixed with water-activated epoxy. Once you work it into all the cracks, you lightly mist it with water and the sand sets up hard. That should prevent weeds from growing up between all the bricks, and it helps hold the bricks in place. It's not as tough as concrete, but it's more than enough to keep the bricks from shifting around. It's great stuff, but you only have a few minutes to get the water just right. Too little water and it's just dry sand. Too much water and you'll wash away the epoxy and get... dry sand. We went through six 40-lb. buckets of the stuff, so there's exactly 240 pounds of sand in the patio now. And a whole lot of bricks.

Details, Details...

Not every project requires five trips to the hardware store. Most, but not all...

A few weeks ago we finally got around to finishing off a little trim detail we'd been meaning to get to since, oh, about 2011. This post is near the second-floor landing and has some nice scroll work on it, especially near the top. The lower portion, however, is decorated with painted plaster, which was pretty common back in ye olden tymes. The downside is that plaster collects nicks and dings and isn't as durable as wood. The bottom few inches, in particular, had gotten pretty beat up by decades of vacuum cleaners.

So we trimmed out the very bottom, as you can see here. The trim is built up from various pieces of redwood stacked one atop the other, and then all stained and finished as one piece. It matches both the floor and the post pretty well, so it looks like it's always been there. (I considered banging it up a bit to give it a distressed look like everything else, but figured that will happen all on its own. No point in hurrying things.)