The design comes to life!

Okay, to get things moving along while we make decisions on who what where when how, I’ve bought some little modelling bricks off eBay and have begun construction of how I see the pond looking. I’m going for a stretcher bond (where the long, thin side of the brick is showing) construction at this stage as it will require the least amount of bricks and will be one of the easier structures to build, as well as the weakest. Here’s my model, complete with octagonal concrete foundation to scale!

Other options for the style of ‘wall’ are double stretcher bond, where two skins or withes run inside and outside of each other; header bond, where the smallest side of the brick is showing; English bond, where courses alternate between stretcher and header; and Flemish bond, where bricks alternate along the course between stretcher and header and are offset to one another from course to course. All of these ‘other’ options would effectively produce a wall that is one brick length in thickness, as opposed to half a brick in the single stretcher bond, which would mean twice as many bricks as needed in the model, and therefore double the cost! But one of these methods would be far stronger…