I'm about to build a dwarf wall at the front of the house to enable us to remove a slope down to the front path, probably about 3 bricks high and about 10m long. SWMBO wants the bricks to match the house, so that means Heather bricks.
Is it possible to get wall caps to match Heather bricks, or do I need to use concrete caps? Any other suggestions?
(Also, how thick should the foundations be for such a small wall - 75mm?)
Dave
Capping a dwarf wall would mean consulting with Snow White
If you want the capping to match, then you will have to do a brick on edge capping. But heathers are not much good as cappings as the frost gets them after a few years.
In fact, heathers in such as exposed use like you propose will not last long as the damp and frost/freezing starts to spall them
An alternative can be to use a better frost rated brick, or engineering bricks - red or blue. At three courses high, you wont see much of it anyway.
dg
When I helped my dad build a wall in his garden we wanted to use heather bricks but when we tried to order them from the builders merchant he wouldn't sell them to use once we said what they were for.
They are really not frost proof - he recommended something else which looks pretty damn close (a couple of years of weathering we can't tell the difference).
Unfortunately, I can't remember what they were but a decent builders merchant should be able to tell you.
We used bricks on end. Worked well.
Darren
Slate?
I'm just having some caps made in 30mm riven Welsh slate for a row of brick pillars at the side of my drive. The bricks are hand made and quite a range of colour hues - mainly reds to yellows and some blue/grey tints.
For a continuous run of 10m of 3 course wall, 30mm would be too hefty, not to mention rather expensive.
However, one could buy floor tiles in 12 or 20mm thickness and cut them quite easily on a tile cutter, followed by honing the edges. That would be in proportion for a 3 course wall.
From your dimensions, it would take about a square metre of slate and cost about £40-45.
Thanks for the warning about frost I hadn't thought of that.
D
Thanks for the warning about frost I hadn't thought of that. It's only a single leaf wall so I think bricks on edge would look strange.
D
That's an interesting idea Andy but I'm not sure that slate would fit-in.
D
Half bricks on end? We scored them with an angle grinder (cheap diamond wheel well worth getting hold of) and split them with a bolster on sand. As we got better we found we could skip the grinder stage :)
Looked better than I thought it would tbh
Darren
I laid a 5-6 brick retaining wall on about that foundation.
I used double brick construction - well brick and concrete block below ground on the upside - tied together with steel 'bow ties'. The one place I didn't use ties has cracked slightly. Draw the obvious conclusion...
The bricks were laid cross bonded..you know, two paralellel bricks along then one across. Below ground the inner leaf was as I said concrete blocks and bow ties were used to tie the leaves together instead of the cross bonded bricks..
I capped it with transverse bricks. These should be OK as the brick quality is good, and they do not absorb water that much and frosts seem to be rarer these days.
I recommend that, and leave a couple of dozen bricks laid up under a tarpaulin in case they need replacing in 15 years time. Don't skimp on brick quality for such a small job.
Another wall down the road has cappings on. They needed replacing after many years. The new ones don;t match, and the old ones didn't protect..so why bother?
Hear him! Hear him!
Its the only issue to worry about apart from expansion/contraction. Use steel ties on every sodding brick.
Oh..single leaf. My you are optimistic.
A nice effect is to stand them on end, canted over 45 degrees
Or cut em in half and use them end on. The idea is to finish with the brick 'show faces' outwards, thats all.
Yes, I wondered if it may be too much for a large piece of wall
In that case, have a look at York Handmade Brick
If you go to the Downloads page, there is a downloadable brochure (second item) including landscaping. In there, you will find a whole variety of copings and cappings.
The bricks themselves are relatively expensive compared with machine made ones (about £500/1000) but by my reckoning, you'd only need about
150 or so.
mmm, they look very good; makes me wonder if I should be bolder - back to the drawing board!
D
Are you near the south coast? They have a local sales office.
I was able to get quite a number of samples to test out ideas.
One thing to be aware about is that because the bricks are handmade, there is some degree of variation in dimensions - only a couple of mm generally but enough that they won't make an absolutely precise pattern with small and regular mortar joints. This is not a factory look product at all. So in the same way that one goes for a wide grout line between tumbled stone tiles, one way to use these bricks is to go for wider than normal mortar joints. Another way is to select bricks longer and shorter so that on average over several bricks in a line the dimensions of the bond stay roughly in line. It's pretty easy to do actually. There is, as a result, a somewhat old world effect.
To put that in perspective, I had the drive and the walls done professionally. The guy who did it does concrete block work as well as brick wall building. He reckoned that using hand made bricks took him about a third longer for each operation.
Another option along the same lines is Chelmer Valley Brick.
Thanks for all the info Andy but I've failed to sell the rustic look to management; it's been decreed that the wall needs to match the house so Heather look-alikes it is. I've filed away the info above for future use though.
D
One trick that may be worth thinking of, is to coat the top of the wall
- or indeed the whole wall - in one of those weathershield type products that soak into the brick and seal it. That has been shown to substantially reduce frost damage.
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