Brickwork

It's been a month or so, but we finished the breezeway, which was previously a covered outside walkway/narrow porch between the kitchen door and the carport (turned garage) door. I'll post pics of the inside later, but in the meantime, this is a pic of the outside...where the two windows are is where the walkway used to be.

We discovered that the brick was Antique Chicago, which actually does mean antique Chicago. The bricks are from old buildings in Chicago that have been torn down and repurposed. It wasn't possible to match what was already on the house, not exactly, because obviously, the bricks used on the house 30 years ago were from a different building than the bricks we were able to buy now. An interesting thing I found out that the different colors on the bricks are caused by signs that had been painted on the old buildings. Like, if you get some with red or black or white, it may have been a Coca-Cola sign. Anyway, needless to say, our brick doesn't match, but it's very close and I don't mind. If you look closely, you can tell. The color difference would probably have been much more noticeable if I hadn't noticed and stopped the brick layer from using grey grout. The rest of the grout on the house is a dark tan. I felt bad because he was already starting on his third row of bricks. But who uses grey grout on a tan grout house? He was a good sport, though, and took it all down, remixed the grout to my satisfaction and did a fantastic job otherwise.

Oh, and we have a whole pallet left over. The place where I bought the brick estimated that I needed two pallets, but we only ended up using one. Then they wouldn' t take the other pallet back. Oh well, I'll just have to think of some fun project to do with the brick.