Fwd: looking for ideas
Herb
-=-my son, 7, woke up this morning and announced he wants to build a shop. with real bricks. i said we would look into this. i offered to call local builders and see if we could go and watch them and maybe help a bit (health and safety allowing). this is not what he wants. i looked up building kits with the small, realistic bricks and mortar-=-
My best friend in high school's father was a brick layer. All the houses where I grew up were made of brick with a brick layer putting down each individual brick. It was fun to watch, but I'm sure much slower than the home building process now. I wish I had learned to lay bricks from my friend's father. I thought about looking online for instruction and trying it out. You might try learning to lay bricks with your son. If you are in the right part of the country, you might be able to find a retired brick layer to work with. My daughter and I have been laying bricks on the ground for borders, but we've never gone up. With each new project we get better. We haven't worked with cement and stacking, just gravel, then sand a layer of bricks and then fill with sand. Your son might feel like you are trying to meet his needs if you built a 3 layer high brick structure..It would only be 6 inches high, so hopefully wouldn't be a safety concern. I'm think of small rectangle or square maybe with a brick floor if you have the space. You could then use some poles with a tarp to make a tent structure over the top and for the walls. It might be a project both you and he could handle and if placed in the right space might work as something else in the future. If that seems like too big a project or you don't have the space, you could just get some of the 2x4x1 inch bricks and build a small model of what he might want to do in the future. I now want to go out and get some bricks and cement to try to teach myself that skill. I know my daughter would enjoy a brick project.
Meg
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My best friend in high school's father was a brick layer. All the houses where I grew up were made of brick with a brick layer putting down each individual brick. It was fun to watch, but I'm sure much slower than the home building process now. I wish I had learned to lay bricks from my friend's father. I thought about looking online for instruction and trying it out. You might try learning to lay bricks with your son. If you are in the right part of the country, you might be able to find a retired brick layer to work with. My daughter and I have been laying bricks on the ground for borders, but we've never gone up. With each new project we get better. We haven't worked with cement and stacking, just gravel, then sand a layer of bricks and then fill with sand. Your son might feel like you are trying to meet his needs if you built a 3 layer high brick structure..It would only be 6 inches high, so hopefully wouldn't be a safety concern. I'm think of small rectangle or square maybe with a brick floor if you have the space. You could then use some poles with a tarp to make a tent structure over the top and for the walls. It might be a project both you and he could handle and if placed in the right space might work as something else in the future. If that seems like too big a project or you don't have the space, you could just get some of the 2x4x1 inch bricks and build a small model of what he might want to do in the future. I now want to go out and get some bricks and cement to try to teach myself that skill. I know my daughter would enjoy a brick project.
Meg
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]