With all this swine flu going around, it might seem merely opportunistic to add a pig to the title of this post. But then, you probably can’t see the bricklaying on my neighbour’s renovation.
My partner who’s a carpenter, frequently has a gentle whinge about brickies. (Oh, and for those who have my book about my disastrous renovation, no, he wasn’t involved in the beginning. He just rode in on his white horse later and helped me fix it.) Back to the story.
Part of the reason he has this whinge is that a carpenter has to spend loads more on his tools. (Or that’s his excuse anyway.) In fairness, a brickie rocks up to site with a wheelbarrow, trowel and if you’re lucky, their level. A carpenter rocks up to site with a ute-load.
My next door neighbour is doing a fairly major renovation - he basically pulled down the whole house leaving the front facade and is re-building everything. The bricklayers have been there recently and they’re not doing such a great job. Just this week, my partner ran into our neighbour shaking his head and muttering at his front door.
It turns out that on at least two walls, the bricklayers realised part way up the wall, that the bricks they’d laid weren’t level. (They must have left home without the level that day.) The out of level amount was a whopping 70mm. Imagine the top course of bricks running at a slope from one side to the other with a difference end to end of that much.
They thought they’d try and compensate by cutting down the height of the next course of bricks. So what you have then is basicaly a series of bricks that become kind of wedges to kind of even the whole thing up.
My partner checked it out with the neighbour and laughed himself silly. “They’ve got a pig next door he told me.” “What???” (I’d thought this weird language would stop after I learnt about a “cat’s lip” - in my book in chapter 7.)
Basically a pig is where, well, the brickies have laid the bricks out of level by one course and then tried to cut down the bricks in the next course to make them level up.
They’d clearly never heard that you can’t put lipstick on a pig. No wonder my neighbour wants them to pull it down and start again.
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