Masonry and Plastering

Mike Lawrence

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781847973511
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Commercio tecnico e manifatturiero

The house and garden offer many opportunities for the do-it-yourselfer to take on bricklaying, plastering and other masonry work which enhances the value of house and garden and keeps professionals' bills to a minimum. Many of the more basic jobs can be easily mastered by the competent DIY enthusiast and enables anyone to harness their own creative skills. This fully illustrated book shows you how to master the techniques of masonry and plastering, and then apply them to a range of practical jobs or special projects.

OUTDOOR JOBS

The great outdoors is definitely the place for the majority of your first building projects. Not only does it give you huge scope for improvement; it is the perfect environment for mastering the various skills you need to become a good bricklayer – or even a master mason – without having to worry unduly about the mess you are making. The garden is a very forgiving place, and you can retire to a warm tidy house at the end of a hard day’s work without having to do all that tedious clearing-up and putting-away that always takes so long with indoor jobs!

The outdoor projects in this chapter are also extremely good value for money, for the simple reason that the materials you will be using are by and large relatively inexpensive. It is the labour content that pushes up the price; you can comfortably save yourself fifty per cent of a contractor’s quote by doing the work yourself.

What You can Tackle

Armed with a few bricks and paving slabs and a bucket of mortar, the only limit to what you can achieve is your own imagination. You may want nothing more than a paved path down to the greenhouse or a dwarf wall round the patio, but if you are prepared to be a bit more adventurous you can create spacious patios, sweeping driveways, serpentine walls, ornamental arches, flights of steps to link different areas of the garden, even a garden pond. Here is a brief look at some of these ideas in more detail.

Patios, Paths and Drives The simplest jobs to tackle involve creating hard-surfaced areas on which to sit out, walk up and down or park your car. In some cases you can do this without even having to mix a bucket of mortar; all you need to do to create a simple patio or garden path is to bed paving slabs on a bed of sand, although this particular method is not recommended for a surface on which you intend to drive a car. But if you are prepared to be a bit more adventurous and hard-working you can lay interlocking paving blocks, crazy-paving or concrete in all sorts of shapes and sizes to create surfaces that complement your garden layout.

Fig 56 Outdoor projects offer tremendous scope for individuality and can save you a lot of money into the bargain. All you need are some basic skills and the patience to plan and work methodically.

Walls and Steps The next stage is to begin to work in three dimensions, by building walls to enclose different areas of the garden, allowing you to create terraced areas and raised planters or to hide eyesores like the dustbin or the compost heap. Walls also provide excellent boundaries and ideal windbreaks, and can with a little ingenuity be designed to match the style of your house. Steps marry the skills of bricklayer and paver, and can allow you to make the most of even the most awkward sloping sites.

The materials you can use come in a wide variety of colours and textures, allowng you to build in formal brickwork or rustic stone as you wish.

Other Features You can add other masonry features such as garden arches, raised planters, even a garden pond, once you have mastered the basic skills of paving and bricklaying. There are also jobs such as casting concrete bases and supports that are not in themselves glamorous – or indeed even highly visible once completed – but which are a vital part of other projects such as erecting garden outbuildings, setting fence posts in concrete or even providing an in-ground socket so you can put up your rotary clothes line.

Planning Projects

Even the simplest outdoor projects need a little planning if the work is to proceed smoothly. For small-scale jobs such as building a straight section of wall or laying a path, you need little more than some measurements to enable you to estimate quantities, and a few pegs to mark out the site ready for excavation, laying foundations and so on. For larger-scale projects, however, there is no substitute for drawing up some proper detailed scale plans. Not only will this help you make major decisions about siting the various components of your scheme; it will also enable you to plan the various stages by which work will proceed, so avoiding silly mistakes like having to cart loads of walling blocks to the bottom of the garden across your newly-turfed lawn.

Where to Start

If you are good at visualizing things and have a clear idea of what you want in your garden, you can get the squared paper and pen...