Reclaiming Bricks Part I

Happy Victoria Day.

It’s the Monday of the holiday weekend and it’s John and my 21st anniversary weekend! We delayed going to the cottage so we could go to our anniversary place Scaramouch for dinner on Saturday night. It was lovely!

We left for the cottage around 8:30am on Sunday and arrived around 11:30ish. The cottage was a lot of work…cleaning, cleaning and more cleaning. But we finished in about 5 hours and had enough strength for wine and dinner. We left around 10am on Monday and arrived home around 2:30pm.

We forgot to view the window samples on Saturday, so we swung by the house on Melrose and had a good look. We are going to approve. We arrived home to start removing the 1st set of reclaimed bricks from the inside the new addition so we could start chipping away the mortar. Fortunately, it is absolute gorgeous outside and we made light work of it.

As we suspected, the mortar is relatively easy to chip away, mostly sand, but I’d rather not jinx it. We got about 174 (precisely estimated by JT, of course) and it took about an hour and a half (including moving them from the new addition to outside).

There is still quite a predicament about the beams…how the house will be supported as the beam is inserted…quite a production and I hope to have several photos documenting this phase. There have now been two structural engineers to review the situation…should be interesting.