Kitchen Makeover: How To Lay a Brick Wall

By far our favorite thing about the kitchen is the new brick wall.

It is incredible.


The wall has so much character now, and adds such a cool dimension to the kitchen. We ordered the brick veneer from Marvel Buliding & Masonry Supply. We chose the English Pub brick, and it is just perfect! The grout that we went with is called Winter Frost, which comes out a really pretty light grey. The brick was $.95 a piece, and we had 940 pieces, so with tax it came out to about $1,000.

The process they did was this:

1. Draw leveled lines across whole area, each line should be spaced equally with enough room for the brick and the gap between the brick. So if your bricks are 3″ tall and the spacing is 1/2″ then the lines need to be spaced 3.5″ apart.
2. Some people prefer to start at the middle of the wall, if we were doing this ourselves that is probably what we would have done, but since we hired professionals (and our floors were level leading up to the wall) they started at the bottom.
3. Apply mortar to wall for bricks to stick as well as to the back of the brick itself with your trowel. Start with the center brick and work your way to the ends (or you can start against the a corner wall if you have one), this will ensure a more cohesive look when finished.
4. As you approach the edges of wall cut the end pieces to fit, keep the excess from the ends you cut as you may be able to re-use them.
5. Let ‘set’ for a day {I don’t think this was necessary, I think it just worked out that way because they didn’t fully finish the first day}
6. Fill in the gaps with grout (preferable with a bag that basically looks like those things bakers use to apply frosting to cakes, they are like cones with a spout, these will be available at the store you purchase the brick/grout from). We chose to do a scraped look with our grout (meaning its not smoothed out), rather than a smooth finish. It makes it look a little more rustic and old.
7. Smile BIG because it looks so rad!!!!!

At first I really wanted to have J and I install it! I thought it wouldn’t be that tough, I mean- how hard can it be to lay brick!? Well, since we are on a serious time constriction since J is going back to night school to get his MBA, he said we needed to have it done and didnt want this project to linger. These guys were machines getting it up! So freaking fast! They were pretty cute too, every-time I whipped out my camera to get a shot, they would all stop-turn around and smile HUGE cheesy smiles, and then quickly say “ooo just kidding” and RUN out of the photo before I could get it! Haha, they did this every-time! Love them:)Without further ado, here are some ‘in progress’ shots.

Work station for cutting the brick. Honey wanted to help..and trust me, she tried: