Sanding the brick

If you’re wondering why I haven’t been blogging much lately, it’s because every night after work, all I do is play in the sand in my backyard.

Remember how it took Sam, the brick guy, forever to lay my patio brick? He never did finish, really. He laid the brick, but didn’t sand it. In New Mexico, brick is traditionally placed tightly together without any grout or mortar, and then sand is pushed into the cracks, lodging the bricks tight. In this photo you can see how there are notches in this style of brick, to help them interlock.

I was so tired of Sam being randomly, occasionally, in my backyard, that when he declared himself done, and the brink wasn’t sanded, I just decided I’d sand the brick myself. How hard could it be to sweep a little sand over some brick?

I figured I had until first frost heave to get the brick sanded in tight. I did not anticipate flooding. Remember the storm we had a couple of weeks ago? My bricks weren’t sanded in yet. They didn’t float away, but they definitely loosened under all that water.

The empty cracks filled with slit from the muddy flood waters. Ta-da, all set, right? Sanded in, silted in, what’s the difference?

Unfortunately, fine silt won’t hold bricks tight. It needs to be fairly course sand to wedge between the bricks like miniature boulders. Then the finer sand fills in between. (If you’re thinking that this next photo doesn’t look like brick, it’s not. This is actually steps to the doggie door, made out of some sort of blocks). But it was a good shot of how the sand lodges in the cracks, holding the brick in place.

My first step was to hose the fine silt deposited during the flood out from between the bricks. The silt blasted right out easily with a garden hose (proving it was not stable enough to hold brick tight).

Next, I started sweeping sand around. It was easy to imagine that all it would take was a few sweeps across the patio and the sand would fall into the cracks and ta-da, done!

Uh no. It’s actually a slow process. Every evening I spend an hour or two sweeping the patio and contemplating the physics of sand, brick and friction. (Except for the evenings where we’re getting thunderstorms.) This is the pattern of rain on the scattered sand on the brick.

Sanding brick is actually fairly relaxing, as long as I don’t get impatient or overly goal-oriented. There’s a fine line between meditative and tedious. With each sweep, little bits of sand disappear down the cracks. A few grains at a time. Sometimes the sand gets clogged and it looks like the crack is full, only to settle a few minutes later, and the crack reappears.

A small crack doesn’t matter.

But after spending many hours of filling cracks, if I happen to see one my brain goes, “Oh no! A crack! Fill it! Fill it!” I can no longer ignore them. “Must fill in all the cracks!”

Sometimes there is a lot of empty space under one small hole. Here’s a section I thought was done, but when I put a patio chair down the brick shifted slightly, opening back up cracks along two edges.

The edges are tricky. The gap between the patio and the house I’ll fill with sand. But the cracks in the brick along the planter won’t hold sand, it just flows out into the planter.

Right now the brick is a dusty pink, but once it’s all done and washed up, it will be red again.

It’s very dusty. The dogs are here this weekend, and we’re keeping the doggie door closed or else there would be a layer of sand in our townhome as well as in the backyard!