Bad brickwork? What are your thoughts?

[CoW]

We had this extension built to a school building.

Imperial bricks were used.

What do you think of this? Cuts had to be used to ensure bond and 10mm perp joints. As you can see from the bottom course it worked out ok but the perps were upto 30mm in places!

Any feedback welcome, thanks!

 

[noseall]

View attachment 352251
We had this extension built to a school building.

Imperial bricks were used.

What do you think of this? Cuts had to be used to ensure bond and 10mm perp joints. As you can see from the bottom course it worked out ok but the perps were upto 30mm in places!

Any feedback welcome, thanks!

Baffled.

 

[Notch7]

View attachment 352251
We had this extension built to a school building.

Imperial bricks were used.

What do you think of this? Cuts had to be used to ensure bond and 10mm perp joints. As you can see from the bottom course it worked out ok but the perps were upto 30mm in places!

Any feedback welcome, thanks!

it looks like there were loads of 3/4 bricks used

maybe the packs of bricks were damaged so the brickie styled it out

 

[CoW]

@Notch7 We agreed to cuts due to the bond not working. In person its not noticeable but the camera makes it look worse

 

[Trazor]

I have rotated your image, so the right hand edge of the wall is vertical ( your camera must have been slightly tilted. )

The right hand edge is nicely inline with wall behind it, which has full bricks, and is of a much better construction.

Looking to the left the joints are poorly aligned ( Odd size 3/4 bricks possibly )

The bricks are horizontally laid halfway down, above the centre they rise up to the right
But as you come down to the row of vertical bricks, they drop down to the right.

Aesthetically poor, but perfectly functional.

You can check all of this, using any viewer/paint program, which allows you to crop and rotate an image.

 

[Notch7]

@Notch7 We agreed to cuts due to the bond not working. In person its not noticeable but the camera makes it look worse

with out seeing the whole panel its not possible to work out the best bond layout

It does seem odd though that the first course out of the ground appears to be unbroken bond (although it could have been in the section beyond the image)

the bed seems to vary in thickness quite bit too...I suppose the imperial bricks might be uneven in thickness.......

Its a nice colour traditional red brick and once the mortar weathers you wont notice it so much.....has the mortar got lime in it or is it just the sand being white? Around here all the quarries produce very yellow sand

As Trazor says, its perfectly functional and Ive seen lots of brickwork around my village with shockingly bad stretcher bond

 

[CoW]

@Notch7 It grade 2 listed so all bricks are lambs imperial and the mortar is nhl 3.5 (medium). Heres another picture for reference.

 

[noseall]

Any feedback wewelcome

Awful. Amateurish. And he's forgot to put the window in.

 

[^woody^]

With all those cuts it must surely have been Rachel Reeves on the trowel.

 

[Koolpc]

Are you sure a professional brickie did the work?

 

[stuart45]

@Notch7 We agreed to cuts due to the bond not working. In person its not noticeable but the camera makes it look worse

If you agreed to all the cuts there's not much you can argue with him about. Even if the bricks vary in length a bit, if you set it out properly you wouldn't need all those cuts. I can't believe you couldn't spot all those almost straight joints in person.

 

[stuart45]

Baffled.

I'm baffled a CoW would agree to those cuts.

 

[Deluks]

If it's a school building, paint a mural on it.

Or give it time and the kids will do that themselves.

 

[IJWS15]

Don't blame the bricks, we built an extension in the 90s with imperial thickness bricks and the length was very consistent as was the thickness. They were about 10mm or so shorter than the original bricks the house was built with.

 

[stuart45]

The most difficult bricks I've worked with for different sizes were reclaimed ones which had come off a few different jobs. You need to check the different sizes before you start, and then take your time setting out the first course. When building up the corners use the bigger ones as using the small ones makes it harder to get the bigger ones down to the line.
There was a fashion on new builds on the 80's for reclaimed bricks until they realised that the poorer quality inside bricks wouldn't make it through the winter.