Digging up Bricks: My Weekend Adventure in the Neighborhood

In service of my larger goal of re-doing my backyard garden, I spent the weekend digging up a neighbor’s brick patio for the free bricks she was offering. In total, I got about 250 bricks for about 7 hours of work. And, the added bonus of helping a neighbor.

If you’re not familiar with the Nextdoor app, it is an app specifically for neighborhoods. You are only allowed to post if you are currently located in that particular neighborhood. I like it for staying on top of what is happening, and also for finding things for free or low cost. In this particular instance, I posted that I was looking for free or cheap bricks because of my garden project, and a wonderful woman named Joan answered the call.

I showed up and she took me to a patio that her husband had built some years ago. The bricks were in amazing shape, but tree roots had started to grow under them causing a lot of hazards for Mrs. Joan. So, really, we were both doing each other a favor with these bricks.

Always happy to help, I came back with some tools and got to work. Saturday morning it took me about 4 hours and three loads back to my house to get a little over halfway done. I came back on Sunday, and it took about another 2.5 hours to finish the job. I left her with some dirt, but I tried compacting it to the best of my ability with just my feet and a flat sided tool.

Here’s a timelapse video of some of my work. After the first load back to the house, I wised up and backed the car straight up to the patio for an easier time loading.

When I got the bricks home, I started chucking them out of the trunk in a truly lazy girl way, but it ended up being very efficient so…it looked a little something like this:

After I got everything “unloaded” I started stacking them up in a more orderly way so I could keep them out of the way of the lawn guys before I get to the bigger task of creating the brick patio I want to make surrounding the new garden beds I have.

I’m not sure exactly how many bricks I will need to make my idea a reality, but I think the 250 I’ve gathered this weekend will be a great start. I’ll take pictures along the way and probably make another post following my exact process when I actually get started on that.

My idea is to create this patio, surrounding the garden beds, and then have my fruit trees sitting on top. I also want to create an herb spiral with any leftover brick that I end up with. My backyard is about 45 feet long, and 22 feet wide. I’m planning on making the garden space about a 15 by 15 foot section in the back. I have a few crude drawings of different layouts, but we shall see what it ends up looking like.

The bricks are also pretty dirty, so I will also be hosing them down real good before I start doing anything. Anyway, that’s part of what I did with my weekend. It’ll probably be a few weeks before I get started on using these guys, but it’s good to have them.

I’ll keep you updated. Until next time, bye!