The Old Vicarage B&B, Little Ouse

Another essential DIY weekend job, is recycling bricks. In an old property, the best bricks are the ones from the house. They will be the same age as the property, have the same colouration and depending on the area they are removed from the same wear.

The good news is, if they were originally laid using a lime mortar, you will probably be able to separate them, clean them off with a stone bolster/chisel. Even soft reds (Victorian bricks)! you might be left with some lime staining, but you can soon clean that with a good rub. Even old bricks that have been pointed with a modern concrete mix can sometime have a use. You only need one or two good faces on a brick; the faces that you see when laid. If when you remove it there are chips on one face you have a good face on one side, put it in a pile of like-minded ones. A good builder will be able to use them.

What ever you do, don’t let the builder loose with an angle grinder and lump hammer. All you’ll end up with is a pile of rubble and a badly finished exterior edge. And secondly, it is far easier to work in lime mortar than it is in a modern cement based mortar mix. You’ll probably hear many modern builders saying it is against health and safety, its difficult and all manner of things against it. it is not, you just have to know how to use it like anything else.

The picture is an example, of making a doorway where a small window once was (all in lime mortar) the bricks taken out carefully, cleaned and reseated to give the appearance that the brick edge was always there. when it is finished, you will be hard judged to tell if the doorway was not original.