Laying Brick

When we last saw our backyard brick table/bench it had a foundation and one bag of mortar holding up 4 courses of bricks. I was skeptical about putting more bricks up before letting this first set dry completely. So now it's time to finish it off.

I got another stack of 4 courses laid up before letting it dry again. After taking some measurements I thought I would need 2 more courses after that, so there are 20 bricks leftover in the last picture.

My eldest

And the youngest inside of there

My kids have a great sense of humor. I let the next set of 4 courses dry overnight, then got the last 2 courses on top of that. So that's 10 courses of 10 bricks each, or 100 bricks and 2.5 bags of mortar mix. Since there is a concrete foundation at the bottom of this thing, I wanted to get a picture of the kids in there for reference about how deep the cavity is. When they saw it was going to be hermetically entombed, they insisted on putting a skull in there. This way, when someone else buys this house and knocks this thing down they will be in for a surprise! HA!

I wanted to pour the cap in place, so I cut some plywood to fit inside of the cavity supported by a couple of scrap 4x4 pieces. Then had some 1x4 furring strips cut up to the exact size to fit around the outside of the bricks and held those up with more scrap. I used duct tape to seal up the cracks, the poured the remaining 90 lbs of mortar mix to make the cap.

smooth and wet

after removing the outer hold & all the duct tape

Kelley sitting on the new bench. Her feet barely touch the ground!

Strong enough to hold up a fat carpenter

There it is! Kelley's feet barely touch the ground when she's sitting on it. If I had left off those last 2 courses it would have been the right height for a bench. If I had gone 2 more courses higher, it would have used an entire 3rd bag of mortar and made a decent table height. So it's not a bench, it's not a table, but chances are people will sit on it and likely put out a veggie platter there. And I'll throw a towel over it and use it as a stand to paint furniture or something.

As my first masonry project, this turned out pretty good. The brickwork is fantastic, that's the important part. I wish I had made the cap not quite so wide and a bit thicker. Overall I am very pleased. My back, not quite as pleased. But this was pretty cool.