Progress Photos

Brick wall laid by skilled bricklayers.

So what happens when non-professionals like us come together to do some bricklaying? Scroll on to see our masterpiece.

Front Elevation: The Pretty side

Side Elevation (Right): The hard work side

Side Elevation (Left): The Sunny side

Rear Elevation: The Shady side

Instead of a new build, we were to construct around an existing wooden log house with an outer leaf of brick wall on concrete footings + cavity filled with fibre glass insulation. The small extension on the right is build with hollow concrete blocks.

In the professional eyes, you probably already spotted the pointing issues – smearing, keeping perps in line etc.

The new bricks we had were only allowed on the front elevation. For the side and rear elevations, reclaim bricks were used instead. They were unattractive, in irregular sizes and poor/brittle conditions. The concrete blocks were nothing better and fairly uneven. Mortars were mixed on site without proper method of measurements; therefore mortar batching varies which leads to variations in mortar colours and patchy brickwork. But mind you, the 'manual' mixing of a tub of mortar in an 'unstably elevated sliced up' metal drum is no easy job but thank goodness for Xinyi who was assigned the task and became an expert. I suspect she might have a well toned biceps by the end of the job since our daily demand of mortars were fairly high. Anyhow, it looks like a good cleaning down of facework is necessary without good trowel technique and the use of sloppy mortars? Talking about pointing, there were no tools for this job – finger or plastic scrap is best we can get! Where there were gaps to be filled, one supervisor demonstrated that we could just smack the mortar into it - another contribution to smudging the bricks. Also, there were no patent profiles at the corners to support string lines so our line to guide the setting of the bricks to line and level are hung right at the edge of corners and weigh down by the bricks tied to the line – sometimes the line moves or it just fell off. Glad the quoins raised as control points for lining were done by our supervisors, otherwise brick levels would be a disaster. As for the wall ties, its nothing I've seen before (they used a nail-like rod) and were hammered into the wall joints at random locations where our supervisors think its required. Guess this is pretty much a brief summary on our working conditions and lets not go into health & safety just yet. Am really amazed to see and experience how everything comes together in such harsh environment. Our supervisors are very experienced folks, quite some perfectionists with high tolerance on us apprentices but eventually they became really ‘flexible’ on the level of our workmanship. Its either they gave up on us or we’ve became better! Really impressed by them for their abilities to rectify any problems we’ve encountered in the laying process. Though we couldn’t understand each other, our sign/body language works brilliantly. We knew exactly what they wanted even with a simple gesture or finger pointing. How cool is that!?

So what do you think?

Considering the lack of proper skills, tools & materials, this is pretty decent? At the end of the day, we did learn to appreciate the hard work of skilled bricklayers and will now see brick walls differently.

Anyway, just when we started to get the hang of it, we have come to the end of the build. We were almost there in completing the walls but sadly it is time for us to bid farewell. If only we have a couple more days…