How do you make life easier for builders?

How do you make life easier for builders?

How do you make life easier for the guys on site? Well, thinking about how you use bricks is one way…

Bricks have been used around the world for thousands of years, and were introduced to the UK by the Romans. Historically, they use a lot of energy in the manufacturing process due to the brick kilns burning large amounts of fossil fuels. While brick manufacturers are trying to address this by looking at alternative fuel sources for the kilns, they don’t appear to be going away anytime soon. We certainly use them on a lot of our projects.

So what has this got to do with making life easier for builders?

Well, to get the best from brickwork and the guys physically installing them on site it helps to design buildings to ‘brick dimensions’.

Brick dimensions help when setting things out as cut bricks are not used or if they are, they are minimised to half bricks. This means don’t set out walls to weird and wonderful dimensions that mean slivers of cut bricks need to be used. This is more fiddly and time consuming for the guys on site. I understand this can be frustrating, which is totally understandable.

Standard brick sizes

There are standardised brick sizes that have been used for several decades in the UK, these are sized to metric dimensions, in mm.

However, if altering or extending old buildings, probably built over 75 years ago, it’s likely the bricks will be sized to imperial dimensions, inches and fractions of an inch. This means an extension using metric bricks will not line up neatly with an old building, built with imperial bricks. Ideally, imperial bricks should be used when extending an old building, so new brickwork matches in well to the old brickwork. This isn’t essential for every project though as there may be designs and circumstances that mean different, non-matching bricks are used.

How designers and architects can help

If setting out bricks on a building design we try to use brick dimensions, up to the nearest half brick, sometimes metric and sometimes imperial. We believe this makes life quicker and easier for the guys on site with less headaches during the build process. This means a project can be completed quicker and helps build a good working relationship with contractors.

Metric brick dimension tables can be downloaded from the Brick Development Association website + there are loads of other really good brick resources on there. Check it out here.