Rebuilding An Edwardian Garden Wall

About half a year ago we dared to give you a tour of our dandelion farm garden (You can read more about it here). Since showing you around, we haven’t really done much to the garden – and let’s be honest, it’s just been too cold to work outside.

One of the things on our ridiculously long to do list for this year is to at least try to sort some of the issues in the garden – starting with the dilapidated garden wall (you can read more about our project plans for the rest of the year here).

Now, with spring officially underway and the sun shining, we decided that we couldn’t ignore the wall much longer have started taking it to pieces.

There are loads of chipped and broken bricks that need replacing and, as the original Edwardian bricks are practically impossible to source, we’ve decided to take down the wall and then to rebuild it about half as high as before. This should hopefully allow us to salvage enough usable bricks to build the new wall.

The wall around our front garden is already lower than the wall around the garden at the back of the house, so rebuilding the wall to match the height at the front should hopefully give everything a more coherent feel. We started by loosening the bricks one by one with a hammer and chisel.

Some of the bricks were really loose and easy to remove, others were covered in so much mortar that we needed to chisel away at them for ages before they budged. Because we are reusing the bricks, the next step is to make sure that they are completely clean and ready for our builder to lay.

This involves chiselling away any remaining bits of mortar that are stuck to it and then just giving them a quick scrub with a wire brush.

In preparation for rebuilding the wall, we just stacked the finished bricks into a few small towers.

We’re have a bit of a confession to make…

…we’re not actually planning on rebuilding the wall ourselves.

We’re just doing as much prep work as we can, because it’s surprisingly expensive to have a wall taken down and re-built.

It took us about 4 hours to take down the first 1/3^rd of the wall. As long as the weather is okay (you know we’re wusses when it comes to working in bad conditions) we hope to finish taking down the rest of the wall this week.

Are there projects you just don’t feel confident in tackling yourself? Have you ever been surprised about the cost of seemingly simple jobs? Do you have any tips for cleaning bricks?

Comments

[email protected] says: 08/04/2013 at 08:54
Talk about a labor of love and patience!
I’ve noticed that two things are very expensive in renovation:
a) very small work (I had to add a socket somewhere and it was nearly as expensive as when I redid the whole electricity system of the house);
b) anything that requires traditional skills, like brick work or wood work.
- Christine says: 08/04/2013 at 10:46
  Now that we’ve managed to remove the first layer of bricks, things are progressing a bit faster. (On a break at the moment as my wrist is already aching from swinging the heavy hammer) I actually think that a builder wouldn’t be able to clean the bricks quicker than we are and I assume that it’s just the time issue in our case that would drive up the cost.
  The cost of some things are still shocking! It’s a good job that we enjoy doing as much as possible ourselves!
  Cx
MarieRoxanne says: 09/04/2013 at 20:10
Cleaning bricks. Power-washing them all!

Another Brick In The Wall

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