wesley181•11d agoMost Upvoted

The week we laid 12,000 bricks for a curved wall in Phoenix

Last July, we had a job for a big curved garden wall at a house in Phoenix. The plans called for a tight radius and the architect wanted a specific brick pattern that slowed us down at first. By Wednesday, the crew had the rhythm down and we were laying almost 2,000 bricks a day in that 110-degree heat. The foreman kept a cooler full of ice water and Gatorade right at the line, which made a huge difference. We finished the main run on Friday afternoon and the curve looked perfect, no bulges. What's the most brick you've ever laid in a week on a complex job like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

susan64911d ago

Remember a job where we tried to start at dawn like that, but I tripped over a pallet of bricks in the half-light and sent about fifty of them into the foundation trench. Spent the first real hour of work just fishing bricks out of the mud. We still hit our numbers, but my nickname was "Trenchfoot" for a solid month after that.

julia_anderson11d ago

We did a curved entry wall in Tucson last summer that was about 8,000 bricks. The real game changer for us was starting at 4:30am and being done by 1pm to beat the worst heat. We also rigged up a shade tarp over the whole work area, which made sitting on the mortar boards way more bearable.

willowh2011d ago

Wow, @julia_anderson, that's smart. We had to do something similar on a patio job, and we ended up soaking the bricks in water overnight before laying them. It stopped the dry clay from sucking all the moisture out of the mortar too fast in that heat. A big misting fan under the tarp was a lifesaver, too.