Brick is my favourite character in the film Anchorman. Brick loves lamp. I love brick. Well I don’t know if I would go that far but I never knew there was so much to know about bricks! I drove an hour this week to a few brickyards to select recycled bricks for our feature wall, and what a learning experience!

When we were planning our recycled brick feature wall a number of sources indicated this would be a large expense. Seeing as we’re sticking very tightly to our budget we forlornly approached our builder expecting to end up with a rendered brick wall, but we were pleasantly surprised! Recycled bricks can be much cheaper than new bricks, and there is no difference in the labour cost. Let me explain further…

Bricks can be made one of two ways:

1. Extruded: mass produced by pressing through moulds
2. Dry Pressed: each mould is filled and pressed individually

Extruded is cheaper.

Bricks are classified into two types:

1. Common: where the colour does not matter, often used in foundations and for rendered walls. Also referred to as “off colour” or “reject”.
2. Face: where colour matters, and this ranges from browny red to yellowy blonde and the darker blue/black.

Face bricks are more expensive.

In addition there are new bricks and there are recycled bricks. Bricks that were laid pre 1940’s / 1950’s were laid with limestone rather than cement. It is the limestone that can be fairly easily chipped away without damaging the brick that means these really old bricks can be recycled. Old houses and buildings that are being demolished can sell these pre 1950’s bricks to a recycled brick yard who will clean them up and sort them into colour. When choosing recycled brick you either have to take whatever is in the brick yard at the time or be prepared to wait a while for more rarer colours or larger quantities. Recycled bricks can vary in price and they can be a lot cheaper than new bricks.

Then we get down to how much bricks cost. The Brickies I spoke to gave these guide prices:

• An extruded common new brick can cost $0.65/brick
• A dry pressed common new brick can cost $0.85/brick
• A recycled common brick can cost from $0.90/brick
• A recycled face brick can cost around $1.30 – $1.50/brick but up to $3/brick for rarer colours
• A new dry pressed face brick can cost up to $2.20/brick

And there is no difference in the labour for laying new or recycled bricks. Another interesting tidbit I learnt was that bricklayers have to work from multiple pallets of brick at a time because no one pallet (even for new single colour face bricks) is completely uniform. Therefore they lay some bricks from one pallet, some bricks from another pallet and so on to ensure a certain inconsistent consistency.

So there you have it, bricks in a nutshell. Go ahead and plan your recycled feature brick wall. One last tip, I would recommend checking first with your builder what they have in their budget for bricks as we discovered our builder had budgeted $1/brick but the ones we chose are $1.50/brick. More later on contract variations…