A brick patio can be laid over an existing concrete slab or in a sand bed. On concrete, bricks are set in ½ inch of wet mortar with ⅜- to ½-inch-wide mortar joints. You can create attractive, unique ...

Dear Tim: I have a lovely brick patio that has mortar between the brick. After pressure-washing it this past weekend, I noticed several locations where the mortar has disintegrated. Most of the mortar ...

When I first picked up a trowel, I didn't have a clue how to use it. The people who were supposed to be teaching me how to lay bricks were too busy with their own work, so for a few months, I ...

Over recent decades everything to do with construction has been improved to enable the builder to increase the speed of construction, that is, everything except bricklaying. Conventional masonry ...

Seven or eight years ago, Stephen Shelton started worrying about the future. It wasn’t just his own Pittsburgh-based construction company, but his entire industry. Shelton had spent decades working in ...

INDIANAPOLIS – Do you know what “repointing” bricks means? By definition, it consists of “removing a portion of the deteriorated mortar and redoing the joints with new mortar.” Doing that basically ...

Intricate brickwork on a Tudor-style home facing in the Holly Hills neighborhood of St. Louis. What would surprise us to learn about your job? The one thing that people don’t realize is that brick and ...

There’s something soothing about brick patios and sidewalks, which is something I learned while installing a patio for my dear, departed mother-in-law. It was 50 years ago, before I was married, when ...

So, last winter we ended up ripping up all of the plants in our landscaping because our dog had destroyed most of it already. Since then we've just had large piles of dirt for "landscaping." Well, we ...

If you want to use pavers to build a patio, you'll probably hear the advice that laying pavers over dirt is a mistake. It's true — you should level the ground and add sand and gravel over the dirt ...