So like the rest of the planet, I’m looking for a new hobby to occupy my time while stuck at home. My mind has been wandering to the idea of learning to do brick work and stone work. I would not be thinking of trying to build a building, but more along the lines of trying to do a mailbox, stone-lined fire pit, garden beds, and so forth.
Has anybody else done this? How much time and effort does it take to learn to do it well? Any good books, websites, or Youtube channels to recommend?
That sounds like a great idea. The final product will be as good as you want it to be. It’s not too hard to make stuff like that. The quality of the final product will be more about your attention to detail rather than needing to be particularly knowledgeable or have certain skills. For example, it will likely take some practice to get the feel of how much mortar to use to make all the lines uniform. If you’re the type who can get the feel pretty quickly, then it’ll be easier than if you have to measure the right amount of mortar to put on a brick.
Doing some edging around garden beds will likely be the easiest thing to do for a beginner. It won’t be very high and any imperfections won’t be that noticeable. Over time it’s normal for the ground to shift which can lift the bricks up, so look for some guides which explain how to prep the area to minimize that. Practice with building stuff in the backyard before doing something in front like a mailbox. You’d want the mailbox to be perfectly square and straight, and it’s unlikely you’d get that right if that was your first project. If you’re in the process of building something and it doesn’t look right, you can often take it apart if the mortar hasn’t had a chance to set. You can use a hammer to knock off any mortar which clings to the bricks and then start over.
Brick laying takes some practice. I made a pizza oven out of brick, but that was a specialized effort, I did it slowly and carefully and did a half decent job. An experienced mason could have done it in much less time and done it better. Stone is different, for the things you talk about you could just use dry laid stone, no mortar needed. Using cut stone and masonry blocks is much easier than using rough stone, it’s even easier than bricks when dry laid. Using rough stone to build simple wall type structures like a fire pit are easy enough to do with a little instruction and practice. As your project gets more complex it gets more difficult, clean corners are difficult to do, a narrow vertical structure probably needs mortar to keep it from falling over unless you are really good at fitting stones together.
My advice, find some used brick for sale cheap, get a bag of mortar, and try out something simple and see if you like doing it. A small plastic mixing tub from the big box store is pretty cheap, you’ll need a masons trowel but people have gotten by with less, and a small shovel is good enough for mixing. Don’t mix too much mortar at once, but mortar is made to give you some time to work so you won’t be in a huge rush.
Also, go for rustic historic style with your brickwork. You might even be a pro at that. A mason I know got fired from a historic reconstruction job because his brickwork was too neat.
I have a friend who used to do fabulous dry-stone work, and a relative who used to do very nice stonework with concrete. Both started by building walls, and developed experience. Part of the experience is seeing how the stones will fit together in 3 dimensions. Part of it is knowing how the earth will settle, and what you need to do to prevent your wall from cracking in an esthetically unpleasing way when that happens.
Um, and I suppose I have a traditional drystone New England stone wall along my back property line. It’s like every other traditional stone wall around here – it developed over time as I and the prior resident tossed stones there when we dug them out of the ground as we gardened. Those are easy-peasy.
I don’t know if this is still true, but when my father built two brick flower boxes on our front porch back in the 50’s, he didn’t wear gloves and got a lot of mortar on his hands, not bothering to wipe it off or wash it off until the end of the day. He told me later that large swathes of skin sort of sloughed off and it hurt like hell and took several days to heal.
Apparently Portland cement (an ingredient of mortar) when wet can be both caustic and toxic. So wear gloves when you’re working with mortar.
I Love Lucy has an episode where Lucy rebuilds a brick fireplace. Watch that for what not to do.
I’m in the middle of rebuilding one of our raised garden beds that fell apart over the winter. The bricks are left over from when we had the chimney taken down 3 years ago when we bought the house, and mortar mix is cheap. The trowel was around $10, so it’s not a gigantic investment. It won’t last forever, but we should get a few years of veggies out of it, anyway. Maybe by the time it collapses again, we will be in a position to hire a pro the next time and use new bricks rather than 100-year-old recycled bricks. I’ve never done anything like this in my life, but it’s in the backyard, so I don’t care that much as long as it’s functional.
Dad cast bricks from concrete and built nice low walls. I built a tall wall from store bricks and I sucked. Be careful.