The brick for the exterior was delivered and seemed to be so much brick. I thought I ordered a lot extra for a mailbox, some brick on the garage and a small fence between the house and garage. I was wrong! Our brick layers were very wasteful. I have enough to brick the garage where I wanted but nothing else. We do have a ton of broken half bricks to get creative with. We fished them out of their throw away pile.

We started the brick job by making custom brick hangers. We used the strapping that was used to hold the exterior fabric to the slab. We cut it into 8 inch pieces and drilled a hole in one side and then bent it about 2 inches from the end. We cut out the foam and drilled a hole into the concrete, attached the bent metal piece to a tap con and screwed it into place. We then had to refill the holes with foam.

This was very time consuming and wasteful of the already paid for foam. We have learned that if you plan on having brick or rock you should poke some sort of hanger out from the inside through the foam before the shot-crete goes on. Something on the lines of rebar hangers just a bit stouter to the exterior. This would be incredibly strong and much easier.

The brick layers worked for about 2 weeks laying our brick. There were brick pieces everywhere! They did clean up but unfortunately we did not have a dumpster. We wound up moving it all into a dumpster but found all those half bricks to use around our flower beds.

We are happy with the brick job and really think it makes our dome beautiful. We do however need to run a bead of silicone around the top of the water ledge and around the brick on the upper window arches.