I am not a brickie. Not by any means. My first attempts at laying bricks – namely the pillars on which the sink rests are fine. By which I mean, they’re two pillars. Not that they’re fine. They’re more or less upright (but not exactly totally vertical, if I’m honest). I’ve done better since – I spent a lot of time on the pillar that supports the deck, and it’s pretty neat. It actually is vertical, and the joints looked nice when I’d finished. I was quite proud of that. You can’t see it, but I’m quite proud of it.
But it takes me a long time, and I can’t say as I enjoy it. However, there was a need for me to break out the mortar again. See, the sink has spent the last, err, four years, being not quite level. The problem is, it’s a Belfast style ceramic sink that weighs approximately 80 billion tons, and it’s resting on those two brick pillars that I built. But that didn’t take enough account of the fact the floor is vastly unlevel. I’d ignored this problem because it’s got enough of an internal slope that it drains just fine, but it’s bugged me forever that it’s not level with the worksurface. And I thought it looked bad, and therefore should be fixed before we sell the house.
So I’d bought a bag of ready-to-mix mortar (yay, lazyness!) and steeled myself for the task. I lugged my 2 ton car-jack up to the house, along with a big plank to stand it on, and a pile of scrap timber to stack on it to lift the sink up. I mixed the mortar, plunked my spirit level on the back of the sink, jacked the thing up, after some terror of it wobbling I got it settled at only 1mm out across it’s entire length (as opposed to about 5mm).
And then I remembered how much I hate dealing with mortar.
Look. I have quite a few strings to my bow. On a good day I can plaster, I can paint, I can plumb (many depths), I can do basic electronics, I can fix a morris minor. I’m not without skills. Today, for example, I stripped my laptop down to remove the dust bunnies which I’m hoping were the cause of its overheating. But being a brickie is not one of those strings. After a process which involved most of the mortar spending some time on the floor, and ending with me applying it with gloves on and discarding my trowel in disgust (and surprisingly little cursing) I finally ended up with it all ‘sorted’.
I now just need to wait for it to dry and then I can paint the whole thing white. Which might cover up the awfulness a little.
I also need to make the panels to go under the sink to cover up the plumbing and make it less crappy looking. I think. I may not do that. We may just remove all the stuff from under the sink, but I feel it’d look better if I did make something.
Given that things were going so ‘well’, and that I had a big pile of left over mortar (this was sort-of-planned); I decided to tackle the top few bricks on the falling-down wall in the garden. Realistically, the whole thing needs to come down, the mortar’s gone strange and is no longer holding the wall together very well and the bricks have been frost-eaten and are disintegrating.
On top of which, it looks like it was pretty appallingly built to start off with.
Never mind, though, because what I did was remove the completely falling-off-loose bricks, clean it up a little bit, then throw some mortar back in. And now it’s appallingly built and hopefully going to stick together a bit longer. Really it needs so much more. But hopefully it’ll do for the next people for a while.
