In October of 2016 I decided to start a project to replace the wooded front deck of our house with a more permanent brick deck. As I started laying brick at the east end of the house, I discovered gravel in the yard just east of where I was working on the brick when I dug up an ornamental plant that was in the way. It was growing in a rather large patch of gravel. I already was “mining” gravel from another location on my land for use as a foundation for the brick work, so I separated this gravel from the dirt using screens to separate it into two sizes: pea gravel, and larger. in the same way I was using on the other site. Once the gravel had been removed from the area, the whole north side of the concrete pad on the east side of the house was clear and so I decided to start there instead of the edge of the house. As the project was getting started, the house looked like this:

And the wooded deck was already beginning to rot around the edges of the planks.

So the race was on to complete the new deck before the old deck became too dangerous to use.

The one thing I have learned from a lifetime of building things is that the foundation is the most critical part of the construction. The flatter and squarer the foundation is the better everything that goes on it will fit and look. Of course for a deck that foundation also needs to be firm and unmoving. The borders of the foundation I built is made of two bricks, one laid flat and the other stood on edge on it. This border is then filled with the coarse gravel, leveled off against this one brick wall. Before the covering brick is laid, this coarse gravel is covered with the pea gravel and smoothed out level again.

So now I’m ready to start laying down the brick. In order for the pattern to meet up with the pole at this end of the concrete pad I needed to lay out the pattern from the pole back to the edge of the concrete pad.

Once the correct spacing is established, the pattern is completed to the edge of the foundation.

From here on, the pattern progresses in completed rows until the gravel is covered. Then the foundation is extended:

Now the foundation is completed across the concrete pad. The brick in the foreground are from the first attempt at this project.

Filling the new foundation with leveled gravel.

Covering the smoothed pea gravel with brick completes the cycle of construction.

Picking up the brick and gravel from the previous attempt:

Inserting the recovered gravel and brick into the new project almost gets the brick work to the east edge of the house. Time to dig more gravel and buy some more brick.

At this point I realized that the ground on the west side of the house was just a bit higher than it is on the east side and right about here is where the ground terraced up to the new level, so I needed to build a step up to that level. This shot of the finished step shows how it was put together. I used a grouting adhesive to bond the first row of brick, on the edge of the step to their supporting brick, thus keeping them from sliding around on the edge.

Proceeding on with more foundation:

As the project approached the existing wooden deck I began to run out of gravel to harvest. At this point I removed the first section of the wooden deck and discovered a concrete pad under the section directly in front of the door.

And now I was completely out of large gravel, although there was still plenty of pea gravel available. Well, I have another project in my future that will require almost a truck load of gravel, so I bought a truck load of gravel (about 15 cubic yards). I need about 10 to 12 yards for the other project, and all I needed was about 3 or 4 yards of gravel to complete this project. Once the gravel was delivered I ordered and received 1000 bricks on a pallet hoping this would finish the project.

These new materials got me past the door. The remainder of the wooded deck needed to be completely removed along with its edge brick so the rest of the foundation could be put down.

The brick against the house went down first all the way to the west edge of the house. This foundation was used as a reference for leveling out the outer foundation wall, just like the previous foundations.

This allowed the foundation to be complete. I chose to extend the deck beyond the edge of the house to provide a place to stand under the phone and fuse box on this side of the house.

With the foundation filled with gravel I was able to bring the brick work to the edge of the house. As you can see I got luck and the pattern misses the edge of the house by about 1/4 inch. I could have trimmed the side pattern to fit, but the amount of slop already in the work made that unnecessary.

At this point I had run out of pea gravel and had to buy 8 ten pound bags of fine gravel to finish the project.

This purchased gravel turned out to be a lot easier to smooth out the what I had been mining from the yard.

This made the rest of the brick really easy to get down level. At the end of July 2021 the last brick was set in place on the replacement deck started almost five years before.

Now the house looks like this:

I am more than a little happy that this project is finished and look forward to enjoying this brick work for years to come.