![]() Then, I used the trowel to apply a small amount of mortar to the side of the bricks (apparently called “buttering the brick”).Īnd then pressed it into place, scraping away any excess mortar that seeped out. To lay them, I applied a layer of mortar with the trowel. It was a little tricky to get the bricks in neatly because I wasn’t starting with a flat surface, but that didn’t really matter since this would be covered with cement anyway. I could tell it was a good consistency when it looked wet and clumpy, and when a glob of it would easily stick on the trowel at a 90 degree angle. I did this in relatively small batches so I could be sure I was getting the right consistency and that it wouldn’t be too hard to mix. It turns out that I didn’t need to be nervous, because this project was super easy! ![]() I also read a lot of tutorials and watched a lot of YouTube videos (this one was the most helpful for working with mortar and laying bricks). I pumped myself up by telling everyone that I work with that I was going to learn masonry over the weekend, in hope that they would consider me to be daring and interesting. (If I had to buy the bricks, it only would have added about $7 to the total cost.) I also picked up some mortar mix, cement sand, and a trowel for a total cost of about $16. I gathered a bunch of random bricks that we had laying around in our yard. My plan was to brick it in and then cover the bricks with a thin coat of concrete so that it would mostly blend into the wall once everything was painted. ![]() Instead, I decided to split the difference and fill it in a way that would be more accessible for a beginner DIY-er like myself, but also solidly still a wall and not a random piece of plywood. After hearing that, I seriously considered just gluing a piece of plywood over it and calling it a day. The guys at Home Depot had a lot of fun lamenting the fact that the hole existed to begin with, and then suggested that I build a mold on one side of the wall and fill it in with a pour of concrete. However, I emailed the extraordinary contractor who did our renovation before we moved in, and he wasn’t worried about the structural issues and said I could go ahead and patch it up.īut patch HOW? I considered a lot of options. I had no idea how to fix a big hole in a cement wall, and was afraid that this might be a structural issue for the house, especially since there were some cracks visible in some of the cement blocks once I cleared away all the old insulation. I was very worried about this step of the garage project. Through willful ignorance, we hadn’t even known quite how big it was all the way through, because the previous owner had it stuffed with exposed fiberglass insulation and covered with a bookshelf on the other side. It is pretty bad for energy efficiency to have big holes from the inside to the outside. Or, rather, one very large thing: a huge hole in the cement wall that separates our garage from our basement. When a posted a little while ago about sealing and patching holes in my garage, I conveniently left one small thing out of the narrative.
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