There are many ways that a building incurs a hole. However, there are generally a limited number of ways to properly fill the holes. Anyone involved with home and building repair has surely encountered the problem of locating a brick or a manufactured stone that no longer exists; it's difficult enough to find two runs of brick from the same facility that match exactly. Also, during this past decade, the industry has changed brick sizes slightly, but just enough that the new brick won't course with the old.
Textures and colors of masonry go in and out of vogue like the fabrics of the fashion world. But the memory of an incident can't heal until the hole is gone. So what are the choices? Sure, you could put the wrong brick in the hole; stain it to match if you can find the right size and texture; downgrade from all brick to some siding or complementary stone; or re-brick the entire building. Re-bricking often necessitates landscaping, maybe modifying a window and door, and relocating for a while. So perhaps we should re-evaluate: what if you can match the brick, its size, color, texture, shape, and even weathering and dirt — if needed? Now you need 350 bricks instead of 4,000.
How does one match a brick? There are textures like tree bark, brushes, worms, sand, slurries, fossils, vertical scratches (varying in lines per inch), rick-rack waves, brain coral, or even paw prints. As for size, the choices run the gamut from Roman to Norman, Engineer, Utility, Modular, Standard, Ontario, Queen, King, Modular Queen, and Western King (yes, they really are bigger in Texas), among others. Then there are decorative "shapes," such as bull-nosed or egg-and-dart, water table, pier caps or coping; however, there is generally no standard for any of those.
Weird things happen at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, an average temperature for firing a brick. Changes in barometric pressure, humidity, and differences in temperature and oxygen within the kiln give bricks their characteristic range of colors. Just as you change colors (red or blue, pink and green) when exposed to more or less heat or oxygen, so are bricks colored red, orange, purple, greenish or tinged with yellow by the varying heat and oxidation. Even the way they are stacked in the kiln will give a "clear burn," halos, or color marks where one brick touched another. Huge tunnel kilns are open at both ends and fire continuously. They do not turn on and off, but the carloads of bricks travel through them.
It is difficult to repeat conditions exactly and get the exact same brick every time. It cannot be stopped to alter conditions and make a small quantity of discontinued brick even though a homeowner may really need them. A typical run of one kind through a tunnel ranges between 20,000 and 100,000 bricks. A shuttle kiln or periodic kiln heats and cools with the brick inside. It fires small enough quantities to better control the atmosphere in there and duplicate what needs to be matched. A periodic kiln may fire 300 to 3,000 pieces at one time, while ceramic hobby kilns will hold 5 to 50 bricks.
Purposely Flawed
A house may have been built out of bricks that were misfired accidentally. Sometimes the job is to get it wrong. Bricks made from clay that has a lot of carbon will swell up like loaves of bread if fired too quickly. It may also show up as a black heart in the brick. A clinker is a brick that has been fired too hot, and may thus be glassy or misshapen. I love to question people whose father and grandfather worked at a brick yard. I showed off a particularly ugly brick. "We try not to do that," he exclaimed, and then explained how it happened. As bricks fire or vitrify, they gradually begin to melt. You want to stop it before they stick together, or fuse into one big blob that must be unloaded with a sledgehammer.
The best result starts the day you have the yard cleaned up and cover the hole. Can any of the original bricks be saved to mix in with replicas? Cleaning the mortar off is tedious, and often it simply won't come off. However, it is worth checking. Peck it with a claw hammer to see if the mortar will separate easily from its brick. Since there can be so much range in one brick wall, the bricks that are selected as examples for matching should be representative not only of the different colors in the wall, but the variation in textures. Are some of the bricks rougher while some are a little more shiny or smooth?
Dirt — especially red clay — tends to "wick" up a wall for a foot or two from the ground, right through the pores in the brick and mortar, so these bricks are not the color you want to match. If the whole wall is going to be cleaned, then be certain that the examples are cleaned the same way, so that the replicas will still match after the wall is cleaned. Decades of dirt can make a noticeable difference. Photographs of a 5-foot by 5-foot area are sufficient to determine the percentages of each basic color. Is there just a smattering of a dark-colored brick in the wall? If you only need a half-dozen of that color, then can that many be salvaged to mix in with the predominant colors? Closer photos of a 2-foot square also show characteristic traits (such as middles or halos of a different shade around the edges of each brick), as well as whether one brick typically has more than one color on it.
The four major kinds of bricks are: extruded (usually have holes), dry pressed (most uniform), sanded wood mold (most irregular), and "water-struck" (rare). Concrete bricks, pavers, and cultured stone may also of course be discontinued, or may look different than their forerunners.
Even when you have obtained a superb match, there can still be a problem. It's not a match until the new mortar matches the old pretty well, too. Most mortar manufacturers offer help with that, plus a huge palette of pre-blended shades, and many masons have quite an eye for it, too. Even so, on occasion, a corrective stain can take care of that finishing touch after the fact. Sometimes, after the mortar is hard, scratching across the interface between the old and new with a piece of the old mortar (which you happened to save for the purpose, or just found in the shrubs) does wonders to blend out the slight color variation. A sharp line stands out much more than a gradual one.
I am sure you have encountered small settling cracks in a masonry wall. You may even have some of your own. If they don't change or get bigger, then they are more than likely not a problem, unless moisture seeps into the wall. Once it is determined not to be structural, what can be done cosmetically about a crack, even radial ones from an impact, that may travel along the mortar and only crack a couple of bricks? The mortar can be tuck-pointed, but here is a little specialty niche if you know someone with a lot of patience and an artistic bent.
The cracks can actually be taped off (both edges) and filled with caulk of the appropriate color, changing colors as you cross from brick to mortar to another color brick. This is a purely aesthetic take-off on crack injection. Scrape it off flush with a tool so that the tape won't pull the caulk. It is important to note that caulk comes in virtually every color and that fire wall caulking is red or orange. While it is still wet, dab on some dust to kill the shine and match the color: brick dust, play sand, brown sand, colored dry mortar mix. Remove the tape immediately. Marble, granite, or counter top fabricators have lots of colors of dust. Caulk allows some expansion and contraction with heat and cold, so it won't hair-line crack back again. For a more rigid application polymer modified cement or epoxy can be dressed the same way.
Beauty may only be fascia deep, but a satisfied client lasts a lifetime.
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