Fireplace Brickwork
Photoshop
Pre-visualization
One of the first projects we wanted to do was renovating our fireplace. The plan was to remove the huge 18 foot tall wall mirrors above it, replacing it with a sold brick wall and hearth. We also wanted to get rid of the gold firebox door frames, making then black instead. We also wanted to remove the tacky black granite mantle.
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Here you can see what it looked like when we started, after we had removed the carpet, and had the mirrors removed (Unless you like trips the the ER, it's a good idea not to DIY mirror removal). You can hover over the image and see a previs I made in Photoshop, to visualize what it would look like once we were done.
I scraped off the mastix from the mirror and sealed the rips in the drywall where the glue tore off with Pro-999, then patched over this with 20-min quickset drywall mud.
The next step was to remove the fire box and granite mantle surround and hearth. The firebox was easy, but the granite mantle was a bear and weighed a ton. Crowbar time! Under the granite hearth we found more tiles which I also removed.
We took a trip to a place called the Brickyard to look at types of bricks. A pretty disorganized place. I ended up ordering several samples in an effort to find the type I like aesthetically.
I calculated that we would need around 500 bricks to cover everything. Part of that will be full brick for the hearth, and then for the mantle on the wall we will use thin brick veneer, which can be added over drywall, where full brick is too heavy and would thus be dangerous, potentially collapsing the wall.
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Once the bricks arrived the first step was to build the hearth. I began by sketching out the pattern of how I wanted to lay out the bricks, which you can see on the right here. I went with a "basket-weave" pattern on the top, with a "running-bond" pattern on the sides.
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Next I laid the bricks out "dry" to decide aesthetically where I wanted each brick to go, which involved lots of moving bricks around until it looked just right.
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Once I had that, it was time to mix up the mortar and do some brick laying. I began mixing it by hand, but later got a paddle attachment for my drill.
Once the hearth was done, the next step was to do the same for the wall. Like with the hearth, I began by laying out all the bricks to make sure the arrangement looked nice. I also hand cut the bricks at the ends of my classic "running-bond" pattern with a chisel.
Next we began gluing the bricks to the wall. This took a lot of measuring, and laser leveling to make sure everything looked straight. There's a saying in carpentry: "measure twice, cut once." Here the corollary is measure twice, glue once. That took some doing, but once we got that first row just right all the other bricks went pretty fast. We would set up the laser line, and then Julia and I did a tag-team effort of one of us putting the glue on the brick and handing it to the other on the ladder to place. It also helped to have one of us looking up close, and another looking at it from far away to make sure everything lined up perfectly.
We needed to wait 24 hours for the glue to dry before we could add the mortar between them. Once it was set, we set to work on the mortar. We ended up applying the mortar with both a hawk and pointing tool, and also with a grout bag which is kinda like applying cake frosting. The cake approach seemed to work best, the trick was getting the mortar mixed to just the right consistency.
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The idea is get the mortar in between the bricks, and then let it dry enough that it holds a thumb-print. At that point you go over it with a special u-shaped tool to smooth it out and make it look nice. The final step is to brush it all down. This whole process took the whole day, and we finally finished around 10pm, which is why it's dark outside in our final pic.
You may notice red tape on each side of the bricks on the image below on the right. That's there to mark where the wall studs are so we can later attach a wood mantel. But that's a project for another day, but for now we have an amazing 12-foot tall brick mantle. On the left you can see a close-up showing the details of the mortar work and the firebox which we spray painted back using special heat-resistant paint.
