ABSTRACT
Having paid a great deal of money for beautiful and expensive bricks, it is only good sense to make sure that they are properly looked after on the site. However good the brickie may be, the best face of the wall will be the one where he is standing and the landscape designer should ensure that the work is carried out from the side which will show most after the wall is completed. If both sides must be perfect, then ‘overhand’ working must be prohibited so that the brickie works equally from both sides of the wall; this is obviously more expensive as two sets of scaffolding will be needed for high walls and two lots of mortar and bricks must be carried to the workplace. In any case, the landscape designer should always check the following points: •
• The bricks ordered are the ones delivered. • The pallets are undamaged, since a dropped pallet may cause cracked
bricks which are not apparent until too late. • Loose bricks should be unloaded and stored on a clean hard surface and
not left where they can absorb site water or diesel fuel. • Bricks from all pallets should be mixed when laid so that any under-or
over-sized batches are blended equally into the wall. • Mechanical handling of bricks is the most satisfactory; for expensive
handmade facings the bricks should be shrink-wrapped on the pallet at the brickworks and remain untouched until they are used; they must never be tipped or thrown.
