Are reclaimed bricks worth using?

Reclaimed brick is one of the few materials where the second-hand version is often better than the new one, because the character of a hand-made Victorian brick simply cannot be bought new at a sensible price. The trade-off is that you are buying an unrated material of unknown history, and the frost resistance of any given brick in the pile is a matter of where in its previous building it came from.

Step by step

1. Be clear what you are buying them for.Matching an existing older building, or getting a weathered appearance that new brick cannot give. Those are good reasons. Saving money is usually not one — good reclaimed brick is not cheap.
2. Ask where they came from.A reputable yard knows. Bricks from a demolished local building of the right period are what you want. Bricks of unknown origin from an unknown place are a lottery on size, hardness and durability.
3. Check the size against your wall.Old bricks are frequently imperial and vary within a single load. Measure a handful. If they will not gauge with the existing coursing, no amount of character helps.
4. Sort the load when it arrives.Expect three piles: good faced bricks, bricks with one usable face, and broken or spalled ones. Do this before you start laying, so you know what you actually have and can place the best faces where the weather is.
5. Judge durability by the survivors.Reclaimed bricks carry no F rating. What they do have is history: a brick that has been in an external wall for a century and has a sound face has proved itself. A brick with a soft, powdery or already-spalling face has not, and it will not improve.
6. Keep the poor ones out of exposed positions.Softer or damaged bricks can go where they will be rendered, buried, capped or internal. They must not go in a parapet, a coping course, below the damp proof course or in a free-standing wall.
7. Clean the old mortar off carefully.Hard cement mortar comes off with a brick hammer and a bolster, working from the edge of the mortar rather than against the brick face. Lime mortar often comes off with a scraper and a stiff brush. Never use an angle grinder on a face you want to keep, and never soak bricks in acid to clean them — it draws salts out and causes efflorescence later.
8. Budget properly for wastage.Fifteen to twenty per cent is realistic, more if they arrive with heavy mortar. Order accordingly, because a second batch from a different building will not match the first.
9. Use a mortar weaker than the brick.Old bricks are usually softer than modern ones and want a weak mix, commonly a lime mortar. Bedding a soft reclaimed brick in a strong cement mortar reproduces exactly the damage the brick spent a century avoiding.
10. Check the provenance is legitimate.Buy from an established yard with an address. Stolen reclaimed materials, particularly from listed buildings and churches, are a real trade, and salvage associations maintain codes of practice worth asking about.

Tips

• Cleaning mortar off reclaimed bricks is genuinely slow work. Yards often sell cleaned bricks at a premium, and for anything more than a few hundred that premium is usually money well spent.
• Lay reclaimed bricks with a deliberate mix from several parts of the pile, so variation is distributed across the wall rather than concentrated in one area.
• If the job is a small repair, ask the yard whether they will sell you twenty rather than a pallet. Many will.
• Never mix reclaimed and new brick within a visible panel. Use one or the other, or separate them with a clear architectural break.

Questions people ask