Monday, October 28, 2013

Building with bricks

WELCOME TO OUR BLOG, IN ADDITION TO OUR OWN POSTS, WE WILL BE COLLECTING INFORMATION FROM ANY PUBLIC SOURCE, AND BY DOING SO, WE HOPE TO BE ABLE TO SUPPLY SOME USEFUL INFORMATION TO OUR READERS; WE ARE ALSO GOING TO HAVE SOME DO IT YOURSELF POSTS.
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Welcome to our blog, Menfranco general blog
and our post, Building with bricks
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On a sloping building site before you start building, this is how most foundation would look like.











You can start laying bricks in stretcher bond at the lowest corner and work your entire bond of the house from there










Sometimes stepped foundations can also be above ground, and if it happens that is is a face brick wall like the one shown in the photo, the bricklayer should be extra careful, when he starts the first course.







Building with bricks on a sloping site
As we have already said before, the most important thing in bricklaying is that the bricks must be laid at the right alignment, straight, plumb and level and when building a face brick wall the bricklayer should pay particular attention to these details, we will be coming back to discuss this issue soon, as for the time being we want to start building a brick base for houses, beginning from the first course of bricks that we lay on the foundations, therefore it would be better to concentrate on this single issue, as it is very important to start the brickwork right from the beginning.
Now, to lay bricks on a level site it is easy, as you can see from this picture beside here; also to lay bricks on a level foundation is also easy, you see you can build another corner as the one shown here at the other end, and by using a brickies line on line blocks you can stretch a tight line and lay bricks in a straight line easily. Of course here we have assumed that the foundations have been laid level, but on a stepped foundations it is not that easy, because even the concreters may not have been able to lay the foundations level, because the concrete moves until it sets, therefore the bricklayers need to check and recheck the levels when they start bricklaying on a sloping site. One of the easiest ways to do that is to mark  levels on the profiles all around the building site; then you can stretch a bricklayer tight line between these levels and measure from the line down to check your levels, ether with a type measure or a gauge rod.
I know now that you are saying, what is a gauge rod? Okay, a gauge rod is usually made from a long marked peace of timber that the bricklayer marks himself, once he knows what sort of bricks he is going to lay and how thick these bricks are and also what would be the best thickness of the joints for this sort of brickwork. I know that the gauge rod sounds like a strange devise for those that are not used to work for bricklayers, but really it is only a straightedge that has been marked with the space of each brick, so that you can quickly know how many course of bricks have to be laid in the space that you are measuring. Now in order to decide the spaces on the gauge the bricklayer Forman measures the thickness of four bricks that have been laid with an average and attractive joint, and from these measurements he makes his gauge rod for this particular job; here it follows that when the gauge rod is not handy we bricklayer talk about this space as the gauge that is supposed to be kept on this building site, which is four course of bricks. As you can see there are many jargon words in this trade, and there are also many other strange devises or tools that help the bricklayers do his job, which I would like to talk about some of them, as we go on building this house brick base, or other brickwork in general.       
 Anyhow, I believe that this bricklaying article is becoming too long and perhaps a bit difficult to understand and remember for DIY for the first time, as there are too many things to keep in mind all at the same time, and since there is a lot more that can be said about bricklaying, I think that it would be better to write another article about it; which we are going to call, Building a brick base, or Bricklaying on a sloping site.
Dear readers at this point of time I see the need to go back to the times when I started to work on the building sites, we need to do this because there are a lot of things that need to be explained and it can only be done if we take it step by step; in other words let me take you in the long journey of my life in the building trade; now, what I have in mind here is that if I tell you my life story in the building, then it would be easier to describe what happens on building sites and how many jobs are done, this would help to know how other things are done and many of those things are those things that one needs to know before one can start laying bricks.
So we may have to write a few articles about my building story, until we reach that stage where we have to lay bricks for this house base; once we reach that stage we will go back to build our house base and everything else. So building a brick base remains to be written later on. See you soon in our next article. Australian houses in Brisbane

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Menfranco general blog 
Building with bricks 
IS GOING TO BE CONTINUED; 
Next time with, Australian houses in Brisbane 
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