Brick floors

[Lippyp]

My garage is about 100 years old and started life as a cowshed! The floor is currently a mixture of concrete (bad concrete!) and the original blue engineering brick floor. The whole lot needs to come out this summer and be replaced as it needs to be dropped down by about four inches to make it easier to get a car in as it currently ramps up just inside the doors. I also have a problem with damp, particularly at one end. This end will be the workshop end and currently its half brick half crappy concrete and its so damp it gets puddles forming where water is coming up through the bricks. The site does have a slope and this is the lower end.

What I'd like to do is dig up whats there, if you imagine the thing as a three bay garage two bays will be to actually put a car in and the third will be a workshop where all the cabinets and work benches will be.

As people on here have commented the brick floor adds a lot of character BUT it just is't dry or level. The bricks are just on a layer of sand over soil as you can see from this picture taken when I dug a few up to get the electricity cable in.

The middle bay is currently all relatively modern concrete but it may well be on top of the original bricks so I might be able to salvage them if they are still there.

My plan so far is this, rip the whole lot up, put down a the requisite rubble subbase, sand, damp-proof membrane and then a new concrete floor with or without rebar as required.

The third workshop bay is currently seperated by a brick wall which will remain but it will have a door cut in to the rest.

This is the workshop end

What I'd like to do is re-use the original bricks in the third bay after cleaning them up properly but over a concrete floor. Is this possible? Can you lay bricks onto a concrete floor? I guess this would mean that section of concrete will need to be the thickness of the bricks plus mortar bed deeper than the rest so they match up when laid. I think reusing the bricks in this way would put a lot of the character back in that will be lost when the floor comes up but keeping the car bays concrte will give me a nice smooth floor to work on, run jacks etc.

Also bearing in mind the damp problems should I be looking at some sort of drainage under the subfloor? Please bear in mind that we have just had the wettest year since records began in the UK so it has been and is exceptionally wet.

Any advice welcomed. I need to get this right, at the same time the whole roof is going to come off to be replaced and reslated as its currently a leaky mess and the timbers are somewhat wormy too.

 

[Angelfire]

We have brick floors in many of the homes here, over concrete. Lay them on a 1" bed of fine sand.

As for the dampness, I'd probably be looking at how I could remove the water from under the slab vs relying on a membrane. I'd still use the membrane but would be looking at French drains etc to try to keep things dry to start with. Of course I live in the desert so take these comments with a grain of salt!

 

[mdbeck1]

I'm not an expert but have been around concrete some. You will want a layer of sand on top of the membrane and the guys I worked with (who did this for a living) used square meshed wire (we called it remesh) or rebar in the concrete. This added to the strength of the concrete. They always told me that if you didn't use sand under the concrete that it would crack very easily.

I've seen several brick drives but have never put one in. What I have seen they put a fairly thick layer of clay down and then laid the brick (I suppose that concrete would make a good base). Later they came back with a mix of sand/mortar (dry) and spread it on top then used a vibration machine (compacter) (picture a really wide foot on a pogo stick and add an engine or air power) to vibrate the bricks and work the mixture in between the bricks. Later you water down the bricks and mortar/sand to get it to harden.


...and the guys on this board really like to watch the construction techniques from "over the pond". Please take pictures and post them.

 

[AndyA]

If you have water problems now, I'd be worried what will happen when you drop the floor another four inches.
Do you have any pictures of the ramp setup. Can you extend the ramp to make lessen the slope and make entry/exit easier. Maybe pour a concrete ramp to make a better setup. Maybe top it with brick to make it more attractive.

 

[Lippyp]

OK

The ramp isn't a ramp as such, at the workshop end the man door has a step up into it, the two garage doors outside are flush with the ground but as you go inside theres a sharp rise up by about four inches. The garage doors have been added in at some point as originally this was a shippon (cowshed)so it would probably have had another two man doors with a step up. The plan is to take it all down to about ground level to elminate the step, as it is the garage doors aren't tall enough so my roofer suggested constructing a dormer over the opening to raise the eave height by a couple of feet, then I can actually get my pickup and blazer in, dropping the floor will also help with this. I will put some kind of drain across in front of the doors so water can't run in.

I do appreciate the issue with the water ingress, to be fair we have had unprecedented rainfall this last year and everything is waterlogged, the grass around my home is like a sponge, you step on it and water squeezes up around your foot, lots of fields are flooded and the locals say they have never seen it like this in their lifetime so hopefully normally it shouldn't be this bad. I think we ended the year about 3mm off the wettest year since records began in the UK in 1901. We have springs appearing in all sorts of odd places, I've had to temporarily dig a trench aloong the back of another outbuilding because water was creeping between the block wall and slab and running across the floor inside. This will also get replaced with a proper french drain and the lower course of blockwork and the join with the slab is going to get a few coats of bituminious paint to seal and waterproof it.

There does appear to be a drain coming out from under the floor at the wet end of the garage into a drain gulley, this is underneath the opening for the drain groove that is built into the brick floor to take the cow urine out! This lower drain may well have collapsed so replacing it with some proper french drains is a possibility once I get the floor up and see whats happening underneath.

I'll try and get out and take some pictures later, heres one of the front outside.

The leanto joining the garage on the left to the barn on the right has been demolished as we don't own the barn, it was sold seperately for conversion into a house when we bought the farmhouse. That is the wet end.