This week I decided to cover another side of the exterior floor cube, this time with some bricks laid in a herringbone pattern. I love the look of brick and love to look at brick patterns. So this just seemed like a natural to do at some point.
This time I am not using my normal go-to of egg carton to create my bricks. I wanted something that was a bit thinner for this project and that I could work with in a larger sheet as opposed to the smaller pieces that the egg cartons provide. I decided to use some of the poster board I always have on hand. If you don’t have any of this feel free to use something like a lightweight cardboard (like a cereal box)
I am going to create my bricks to look like “used brick” so I need to have a base of a brick color. For this I needed a brick color paint which I didn’t have so I just played around with some red, brown and orange paint mixing in a little of each until I had a color I liked. I then cut a chunk of the poster board bigger than what I needed. That way I knew I would have plenty of bricks so I would be able to pick and choose for each area. I also will have some bricks left to use for a future project.
I then painted the dull side of the poster board with the brick color and let this dry. I wasn’t really careful about getting a super even coat of paint since I am going to create “used bricks” from this and therefore I want variation in color.
Once the brick color was dry I brushed some stripes of black, light gray and a thin white so that I could have some different colors of brick all from the same sheet. Let this paint dry.
Next I drew some cutting lines on the back of the poster board that were ½” apart. Then when this was done I cut the poster board into ¼” strips going the long direction. This way I had my ½” cutting lines to guide me in cutting my bricks without having to measure each and every one. (I think I ended up with somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 bricks)
Now for the fun part we are going to lay our bricks. I decided to start in a corner to make things easier. I glued down the firs two bricks in the corner and let the glue dry long enough that I was sure that the bricks wouldn’t shift on me when I pushed the rest of the bricks against them.
I next added just a couple of bricks to continue the pattern along with the first of the half bricks that were needed to fill in along the edge. To do this just glue a full size bricks (or some of the ones that were miss-cut too short) in those spots and trim to size after the glue dried. These I also let dry for a while before going on with the pattern.
From here on it is just a matter of the continuing to add the bricks following the same pattern. I like to work out from the diagonal center line of my pattern but do whatever works best for you.
I will admit my pattern got off in a couple of places and if I was doing this on anything other than the cube I would have been a lot more upset about it. For the cube I am going to let it slide.
However, because of the mistakes I made I have a few hints for you to help you get yours a lot closer to perfect. First and most importantly DO NOT TRY TO RUSH THIS PROCESS!! I ended up being short on time this week for doing this and had to rush through more than I would have liked. This caused me to make some mistakes. So allow lots of time. Also I found things worked much better when I worked in short bursts of time. Lay bricks for a few minutes and then walk away and do something else. Next time you walk by add a few more bricks. The parts of the floor where I was able to do this went much better than the ones where I tried to sit and do a big chunk of the floor all at once.
In the end I am very happy with the end result I got and I think I might want to use this pattern for a floor in a future project.
As always I do want to sincerely thank all of you for watching my videos and reading my blog posts. It means so much to me that you are supporting me in this way. If I could ask you all to do just a bit more by subscribing to the channel and liking the videos and leaving comments. Those help more than you can imagine. Also if you could pass the links on to your friends I would appreciate it so much.
buen trabajo!
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