Our Dichotomous Life: brick floor

Well...with the wonderful aid of modern machinations (Littlefoot's mom...guess that would make her my mom-in-law?) and a borrowed JD diesel tractor with front end loader...we got the brick floor nearly completed.

Concrete would have cost nearly $500 just for a half truck of "mud"..not to mention forms, rebar, labor to pour and finish...when I have all these bricks FREE.!!

Nephew Joe did the tractor work and brick loading on Sat/Sunday. Then Monday I got "Jackie" out to handle finishing up the brick placment.

Let's see...32 cubes of brick...each cube has a tad under 500 bricks...so what's that 16K bricks?
These were left over from an apt const job I was managing back in 1995. They had planned to install a long, high-dollar brick privacy fontage screen wall, and these bricks are special order to match the original phase one bricks (we were adding 120 units for phase II project to match in looks/etc), I ordered the bricks early in the job, due to a long lead time. By the time we were framed up and started brick work, the development dept decided "no fence"...we could not get credit for the over order of bricks...and we did not have any storage area for saving the extra materials. (Big REIT public-held company that wasted $$ like no tomorrow that I worked for). We had to pay for them to complete the purchase order...so I had these last 2 truckloads shipped out to my 3 acres west of DFW.. instead of telling the brick supplier to "keep 'em".
These are "wood mold" bricks, and somewhat irregular in shape. Not the standard wire-cut neat longer bricks we see mostly nowdays. Made via the old method when they used wooden carved molds. No round holes in these bricks, just square tapered holes on bottom side called "frogging" for some reason...at least the brick salesman explained it to me like that.

Joe loaded the bucket as full as he could, then drove to the Pack/Shack and dumped them. I started a few bricks Sunday afternoon...

Smooth out the dirt with a long metal "screed" and eyeball leveling, and little trowel fine tuning...and start laying bricks. Shoulda wet it down to help setttle in the dirt first...but hose not long enough and I ain't haulin water in a barrel.