Isn't it funny how life can change you from one year to the next. Getting close to retirement and starting to slow down physically, we found ourselves out of cash and no where to live. Business ventures can do that to you.

So we ended up out country in a small city in a very old house that was in need of a major renovation. Well it was cheaper to buy like that but it sure put an end to that nearing retirement bit. There is going to be a lot of work ahead so where do you start.

The house had been empty for a while before we bought so the mice and cockroaches had taken over and it took a couple of weeks to get rid of the majority of them. The grass and garden had not been tended for a long time and the grass was waist high when we took over. That took a bit of taming and cutting many times with an old lawn mower. I have since dug most of it up into vegetable and flower beds. Should look nice in another season of growth.

We looked at the old weather boards and all the work that they were going to need. It would take much preparation to get them ready for a couple of coats of paint and then they would not be real smart. So we decided maybe we could make the house into a brick veneer and lay bricks over the weather boards and then have a brick house. That would surly increase the value and give us some capital gain when we were ready to sell.

I priced seconds in bricks at the local brick works and found it was still going to be a few thousand dollars worth to do the job. We are on a tight budget so I decided to make my own bricks and lay them myself. Glutton for punishment, that's me.

Considering it is an old house, new bricks would look funny so I decided that I would either bag them or render them and then paint some trendy color. There is only a twelve inch eve on the house so I had to bring the bricks right out to finish just under the fascia board. Once they are bagged over and painted it would look pretty good, I hope.

Next job was to dig a footing right round and fill it with concrete with a couple of rods of reinforcement steel in it. I bought a concrete mixer to make it all a lot easier. Then to make the bricks. That was a bit of trial and error but finally got something pretty good.

I made a mold from half inch ply wood from an eight foot sheet. One eight foot mold with partitions for bricks makes eighteen bricks. I found that I could fill the mold with a reasonable firm concrete mix and lift it off straight away and have eighteen bricks sitting there. Then I would plonk it down, using a sheet of plastic underneath and continue to pour. That way I would get almost a hundred bricks on my sheet of plastic each day.

Each morning I could lift the bricks and stack to one side and then pour some more. I found that I could make a hundred bricks in the morning and lay a hundred in the afternoon and soon get a wall done. Of course if you are young and fit you could do ten times that every day and soon complete the job.

The only other thing I had to do was cut strips of metal bracing to make wall ties every few courses to tie the bricks to the wall. Have one wall complete and it looks pretty good. It is ready to bag over and paint. A paint sprayer will be a lot easier than a brush on rough concrete.

Let you know how the job looks when it is all done. It is certainly going to be cost effective and hopefully will give us a brick house.