"Unbuilding... one brick at a time"
May 7, 2018 7:58 PM   Subscribe

Ready to get way more interested than you thought in the old bricks of Baltimore? There's a project in Baltimore where local residents are hired to deconstruct old abandoned rowhouses and save the construction materials for reuse/architectural salvage. They have a really great detailed blog, about building practices, and local history, and what you find when you take apart old houses.
posted by LobsterMitten (9 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
This reminds me of the episode 99% Invisible did on the bricks of St. Louis.
posted by deadbilly at 8:50 PM on May 7, 2018 [5 favorites]


I've worked on remodel jobs in old houses. Stuff like this is fascinating to me. I've started reading reading through their blog, and I'll probably be reading for days, even though this isn't my city. I really appreciate Brick by Brick providing this kind of documentation on the buildings they're salvaging heartwood pine flooring and other material from. Thanks, LobsterMitten, for linking to this.
posted by nangar at 9:47 PM on May 7, 2018


We have a big Reuse Center that started out as a building/architectural salvage. They merged with an agency that taght teenagers how to refurbish donated computers and electronics for sale. They branched out into the furniture from the deconstructed houses, and it's grown since then into two big storefronts. I always look there first for just about anything.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:19 PM on May 7, 2018 [1 favorite]


It’s interesting, but it’s also very entertainingly well-written. This is a great find!
posted by MexicanYenta at 12:12 AM on May 8, 2018


Cool, thanks for posting this! It's very interesting. I'm always on the lookout for salvage bricks in my late 19th C neighbourhood, for use in the garden. Once you start picking them up and cleaning them off, there's quite a variety. They are all frogless, too.
posted by carter at 4:04 AM on May 8, 2018


> This reminds me of the episode 99% Invisible did on the bricks of St. Louis.

Me too, and it makes me wonder what the ratio is in Baltimore of buildings dismantled legitimately to buildings torn down illegally for their bricks.
posted by ardgedee at 4:38 AM on May 8, 2018


Good stuff!

As much as I like the idea of re-using old bricks, I think masons prefer the uniformity of working with new. At least the guy working on our 100-year-old house did. We'd asked the contractor to re-use existing (frogless) brick as much as possible when we had some changes made to the rear wall of the house. Then I overheard the mason telling his helper who was handing him bricks when there was a mix of new and used bricks to pick from: "don't give me that old shit!"
posted by exogenous at 6:35 AM on May 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


Another Baltimore company doing stuff like this, though with less web presence and more focused on finished pieces, is sandtown millworks. (Full disclosure, I have a coffee table from them made from Baltimore rowhouse lath strips, that I'm very happy with.)
posted by advil at 7:25 AM on May 8, 2018


We have something similar in Chicago. Vintage Chicago common bricks are salvaged and prized (and no longer in production). Just had my chimney rebuilt with them.
posted by chimpsonfilm at 7:54 AM on May 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


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