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I’ve recycled some great old interior brick. Beautiful shades of orange, yellow and brown. I have enough brick to floor the mudroom and breezeway as well as an earth cellar. The mudroom and breezeway are currently a rough finished concrete slab (no previous flooring). The cellar has 4-6″ of levelled and compacted sand. The cellar will get a poly vapour then another 1-2″ of sand before the brick.
Now I know the cellar floor is going to shift and move with time (it’s been doing that for 90 years, I don’t expect it to stop now). I thought it would be best to bed the brick in sand and leave it at that.
The slab on the other hand should be good for many lifetimes. I’ve considered bedding the bricks in mortar here, maybe even laying the mortar down dry and wetting the bricks in after the floor is laid out. Or skipping the morter all together and using a light sand layer to keep things level.
How would the experts handle this? To seal or not to seal? To grout or not to grout?
(oh, and any tips on cleaning stubborn mortar from old bricks would be great!)
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Hey Scott,
I'm not an expert on this, but have done some brickwork. One mistake I made once was using bricks that were made for walls as pavers for a patio. They did not last even 2 years before they were crumbling and chipping. They came off of a 100 yr. old building, were made locally. So, make sure you've got paver brick or this will be a huge mistake!
Archives have some info on cleaning the mortar. One way is in an acid solution, I think it was muriatic acid. I don't have a problem with your ideas or methods, either. The concrete could draw moisture, unless it has a vapor barrier under it-may need to address this for that part of the job, but the sand is pretty straightforward, you'll have no trouble there as long as you're comfortable with some movement.
MD