Everyone thought we were mad for saving these old bricks – now they're the making of our garden
Three years after painstakingly cleaning every reclaimed brick by hand, we're finally putting them to work
Committed home renovators David and Andrew Harrison-Colley (better known on Instagram as The Home Boys) are part of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing their thoughts on making a home together and living through the tricky parts. See the rest of their articles here.
There’s a stack of bricks at the bottom of our garden that has been waiting, very patiently, for the best part of three years. We walk past it most days. For a long time it was just there – a slightly accusatory pile, the physical embodiment of a job we kept promising to get to and never quite did.
This summer, finally, the bricks are getting their moment. And it turns out that slightly mad decision we made three years ago – the one everyone raised an eyebrow at - was one of the best we’ve made.
The maddest thing we ever did (and the best)
When we took down the old carpenter’s workshop to make way for the extension, we had thousands of perfectly good traditional Suffolk bricks on our hands. The easiest thing – the thing a normal person with a skip and a deadline would do – was to get rid of them.
Instead, we sat in the garden over numerous weeks and cleaned every single one by hand.
Bolster chisel in one hand, brick in the other, chipping away decades of old mortar until we had neat, reusable stacks. It was slow, dusty, knuckle-scraping work, and there were definitely moments we questioned our life choices (a recurring theme around here).
But reclaimed brick has something you simply can’t buy new. It’s weathered, varied in tone, soft at the edges – every one slightly different. New bricks look new. These look like they belong. And crucially, they cost us nothing but time, which suited a renovation that has eaten money in every other direction.
Finishing what we started
First on the list was the retaining wall we started – and abandoned – three years ago. We’d built the structural base from breeze blocks, always intending to face it in our reclaimed bricks, and then life (and the inside of the house) got in the way. It sat there half-finished and quietly judging us ever since.
Facing it has been deeply satisfying. The breeze-block bones of the new retaining wall we also started 3 years ago have disappeared behind a skin of old brick, and a wall that read as “building site” now reads as “always been here.” Same structure, completely different feeling. It’s remarkable what a brick facing does.
The only job left is the top. We’re after some coping stones to cap the wall - partly the finishing flourish, partly to stop water sitting on the brick over winter – and, true to form, we’re holding out for the right reclaimed ones rather than settling for something too crisp and new.
If past form is anything to go by, that hunt could take a while, but we’d rather wait than get it nearly right.
Edging the lawn (the mow-over trick)
The job we’re most pleased with, though, is the simplest: edging the lawn in brick.
Our lawn has always been a slightly apologetic shape – mown, but never really defined. So we’ve been running a flush brick edge around it, set level with the grass so the mower can ride straight over the top. No more strimming a fiddly edge by hand, no more lawn creeping into the borders. A small detail that completely changes how intentional the whole garden feels.
The method is more forgiving than it looks. We dig out a shallow trench, lay a sub-base of compacted hardcore, then a bedding layer cement. The bricks go on top, laid flat, tapped down with a rubber mallet and checked constantly with a spirit level.
We run a length of timber along each side as a guide rail to keep everything dead straight – easily the cheapest and most useful tool in the whole job. As we go, we deliberately shuffle the tones so no single stretch ends up too matchy matchy. With reclaimed brick, that variation is the whole point, but it looks best mixed rather than clustered.
The steps (and the patio we couldn’t wait for)
From there we built a set of brick-and-sleeper steps to tie the levels together – timber sleeper risers with reclaimed brick treads, picking up the same materials so the whole garden speaks one language.
They’re the kind of job that looks like nothing on a sketch and makes an enormous difference in person: suddenly the change in level feels designed rather than accidental, and the bricks carry the eye from the wall down to the lawn.
And here’s where we’ve slightly betrayed our own “one project at a time” rule. The west-facing spot we’ve been saving for a patio was too tempting in this weather, and one of us (no names, but it wasn’t the cautious one) decided we may as well start. So we have.
The same reclaimed bricks are now going down as a patio too – which we’ll cover properly in the next piece, once it actually looks like something rather than a trench, a string line and a lot of optimism.
If you’re working with reclaimed brick
- Clean as you go. Chipping mortar off in batches is far less soul-destroying than facing the whole pile at once. A bolster chisel and a club hammer is all you really need.
- Save – or order – more than you think. Reclaimed brick varies and you’ll lose some to breakages. Far better a surplus than running short mid-row with nothing to match.
- Bed on a sand and cement mix, not soil. A proper sub-base and a sharp sand/cement layer is the difference between an edge that stays put and one that sinks the first wet winter.
- Use a timber guide rail. A straight length of timber down each side keeps your lines honest far better than your eye will.
- Mix the tones deliberately. Shuffle light and dark, pink and grey, as you lay. Clustering happens by accident; blending takes a few extra seconds.
The long game
There’s a particular satisfaction in this stage that the inside of the house rarely gave us. Indoor jobs were slow and incremental – a whole weekend on one corner of a room. Out here, a trench becomes a wall, a scrappy lawn edge becomes a crisp line, and you can stand back at the end of the day and actually see it.
But the best bit is quieter than that. It’s standing in the garden, looking at bricks that came out of a building we knocked down three years ago, now laid into walls and edges and (soon) a patio – and realising the slightly mad version of us who refused to throw them away knew exactly what they were doing.
They look like they’ve always been here. In a way, they have.
