Took me 4 hours to fix a corner I could've done in 20 minutes

I was laying a herringbone pattern on a fireplace last Tuesday and hit this weird bump where the mortar kept squeezing out too much on one side. I figured it was a leveling issue so I pulled it all apart, rechecked my story poles, even went back to the garage for a different trowel. Turns out the brick itself had a slight bow I missed during sorting. I made a rookie mistake and didn't check each one for flatness before I started.

2 comments

2 Comments

eva6663d ago

Four hours on a corner that should have taken twenty minutes sounds like a brutal way to spend a Tuesday. But is it really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things? Sometimes you just gotta chalk it up to learning the hard way and move on.

hill.jade3d ago

Man, four hours is rough. I used to be all about just pushing through and blaming the tools or the prep, but this one example honestly changed my mind. @eva666 is right that it's a learning thing, but I realized I was skipping the basic step of checking each individual piece. That bow in the brick cost me an afternoon because I assumed they were all perfect from the box. Hard lesson, but now I spend that extra 30 seconds per brick before I even mix mud.

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