Workshop 88

[captain14]

Good luck on salvaging the older homes for materials. I wish you great success in thisEndeavor. Have you figured how to transport all the brick home. I remember the photos of your car and materials .

 

[ZRX61]

21 floods??

 

[xtremek]

Thanks for bringing the update/question to your htread. Can't wait to watch this unfold.

 

[Mr. 360]

Thanks guys, and Boilermaker, all great points! I like the weakening tactic. If this was a flemish single wythe, i would use that mehod for sure. If its a double i might just leave it unless i can work out a deal with the demo crew to get my hands on as much as possible once levelled. I keep thinking of how killer a brick shop would be, which probably clouds my perception of reality a bit here. The house also has tons of other usable bits like windows, aerial wire, old growth lumber, etc.

 

[BoilermakerFan]

Double course brick isn't that much harder to take down. Especially just the outer course.

 

[wout]

In Belgium it's quite common to use reclaimed brick for building houses that need that kind of look. If you're lucky the building is build with poor quality cement like mostly in those days. So the cement gets of the bricks very easy. The're special machines to 'clean' old bricks but you can do it with an old heavy machete (like the butchers have) or with hammer and chisel. What you call 'flemish bond' we call 'cross' bond here in Flanders and was used in the old days. Now they still use it for 'old' look buildings but it's fake cause the wall is only 1 brick thick so they use 1/2 bricks where there should be the short side of a brick. Cause in the old days the walls were full 2 row thick brick walls, now it's 1 row, then insulation and then insidewall brick. If this all makes sense to you? We mostly have all brick walls for our houses and only a smaller part are build like you do in the states with wood and only the exterior wall in brick.

To take the building down, you'll probably can take the bricks of one by one when the roof is off even when it's a double row bricks. Very strange but the old cement doesn't hold it together that good when the bricks are out of 'connection'.

Good luck!

Wout

 

[Jim'bo]

Actually, cross-bond is different from Flemish bond.

Kruis/Cross:

Vlaams/Flemish:

There is great irony in all this since I've lived in Flanders practically most of my life, and I had never seen Flemish bond prior to finding this thread. Of course now I'm on a mission to find old buildings that used it (I did find recent houses that have the faked copy, never really noticed this before).

So far no luck.

Oh, and I did literally walk through open air museum Bokrijk on Google maps to check out all their brick buildings
(None have Flemish bond - it's all cross bond)

 

[wout]

Aha, thanks for the explanation