Purple In Providence: Joshua's Eagle Scout Project

Installing the Bricks - August 11th

This was our longest workday. First we had to go down to Brigham City and pick up our brick order. There was only two errors (not bad out of 70 bricks) that will be re-done and be ready for pick up some time next week.

Before we could lay the bricks, we had to lay a 1 inch layer of sand on top of the compacted roadbase. Doing this was a lot harder than we thought. It literally took hours to complete.

Finally, we were ready to begin laying out the bricks. The installation went very nicely. Lay a brick... tap tap tap. Lay another brick... tap tap tap.

We started at the sidewalk and worked toward the building. Then we moved towards the front walk. We were a human brick laying chain. One person would call out the sequence, others would fetch the required bricks, and another would lay the brick in place. Brick by brick... we got the job done.

As we installed a few rows, we would secure them in place with edgers. It was all falling into place nicely.

Once we laid in the last brick, we were amazed to see that the end result was about a 1/4 inch gap. Wow. So we filled it will a little sand and will probably use some sort of concrete sealer to finish it off.

Since we are still waiting on two more bricks (that need to be re-done) we can't do the final brick installation: sand between the joints and a compacting the bricks. So, to protect our project we laid out blue tarps and hoped that would protect the bricks from the elements and/or nosy neighbors.