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Description
Until "Artisan Crafts > Masonry" is made available, I am confined to categorizing this under Scuplture. I guess I did technically sculpt some of the bricks I used for this piece, but this is more accurately characterized as a piece of masonry.

My wife and I wanted to expose a brick wall in our living room. We did. And it was a lot of back-breaking work. I tore down the entire wall of sheet rock, chiseled half an inch of cement off the bricks, scrubbed the wall with acid, and then used a smaller chisel to point the brick. It took weeks, and it looked fabulous...while it lasted. In the process of tearing down the dry wall, we accidentally deconstructed the return vent of our central air conditioning. When I discovered this, I let out an expletive that rocked the neighborhood...and then quickly set upon the task of rebuilding that entire damn wall and reconstructing the return vent...now in the midst of summer...and without air conditioning. I have been to Hell.

But I put so much work into exposing that brick and cleaning it up, I was determined to make sure some part of it remained exposed. Had we just rebuilt the vent and left a portion of the wall exposed, the strip of exposed brick would have been too narrow to look good. So i got an idea. I would build a brick alcove and just leave the back of it exposed.

In my head, I have a list of things I want to accomplish before I die. Some things I've done...like falling in love, climbing a live volcano (Anakin and Obi-Wan have nothin' on me), siring a child, and rescuing a damsel in distress on a runaway horse.

Some things I haven't gotten to yet, like learning Italian or arguing a case before the United States Supreme Court.

And some things I never really thought I'd ever get to...like building a Roman arch. But this turned out to be just the opportunity to knock this baby off my list...so I did.

I appropriated about a score of discarded bricks from a nearby demolition site. I was careful to select a palette of bricks that I thought would closely match that used to build the original wall. I think I succeeded. Using my power drill and a saw-wheel bit, I chopped most of the bricks in half.

I rebuilt the wooden frame for the dry wall using the same 2"x4"s that I had torn down, making some modifications to the frame to create a shelf about hip high just before putting up new dry wall. On this shelf of lumber, I built the bottom of the alcove with whole bricks.

Using lumber from Home Depot, I built a scaffold...yes a real live scaffold, with an arched top, and around it I laid the half-bricks and mortar of the arch. After a few days, when I was convinced the mortar was dry, I deconstructed the scaffold. The result was this magnum opus. A close-up of the arch itself and the keystone (a whole brick) can be found in my Scraps section.

Was it worth it? I still debate that to this day.

Description
Until "Artisan Crafts > Masonry" is made available, I am confined to categorizing this under Scuplture. I guess I did technically sculpt some of the bricks I used for this piece, but this is more accurately characterized as a piece of masonry.

My wife and I wanted to expose a brick wall in our living room. We did. And it was a lot of back-breaking work. I tore down the entire wall of sheet rock, chiseled half an inch of cement off the bricks, scrubbed the wall with acid, and then used a smaller chisel to point the brick. It took weeks, and it looked fabulous...while it lasted. In the process of tearing down the dry wall, we accidentally deconstructed the return vent of our central air conditioning. When I discovered this, I let out an expletive that rocked the neighborhood...and then quickly set upon the task of rebuilding that entire damn wall and reconstructing the return vent...now in the midst of summer...and without air conditioning. I have been to Hell.

But I put so much work into exposing that brick and cleaning it up, I was determined to make sure some part of it remained exposed. Had we just rebuilt the vent and left a portion of the wall exposed, the strip of exposed brick would have been too narrow to look good. So i got an idea. I would build a brick alcove and just leave the back of it exposed.

In my head, I have a list of things I want to accomplish before I die. Some things I've done...like falling in love, climbing a live volcano (Anakin and Obi-Wan have nothin' on me), siring a child, and rescuing a damsel in distress on a runaway horse.

Some things I haven't gotten to yet, like learning Italian or arguing a case before the United States Supreme Court.

And some things I never really thought I'd ever get to...like building a Roman arch. But this turned out to be just the opportunity to knock this baby off my list...so I did.

I appropriated about a score of discarded bricks from a nearby demolition site. I was careful to select a palette of bricks that I thought would closely match that used to build the original wall. I think I succeeded. Using my power drill and a saw-wheel bit, I chopped most of the bricks in half.

I rebuilt the wooden frame for the dry wall using the same 2"x4"s that I had torn down, making some modifications to the frame to create a shelf about hip high just before putting up new dry wall. On this shelf of lumber, I built the bottom of the alcove with whole bricks.

Using lumber from Home Depot, I built a scaffold...yes a real live scaffold, with an arched top, and around it I laid the half-bricks and mortar of the arch. After a few days, when I was convinced the mortar was dry, I deconstructed the scaffold. The result was this magnum opus. A close-up of the arch itself and the keystone (a whole brick) can be found in my Scraps section.

Was it worth it? I still debate that to this day.