Concrete fence walls vs brick veneer. Who wins?
When you think about installing an exterior fence, a lot of options come to mind including precast concrete fences, wood fences, concrete walls, or even brick walls. Brick can make a superb exterior to any home if done right, but the challenge is getting the job done properly. Installing brick veneer to your home is far from an easy task that can be done by anybody. There are certainly some projects that you can do to your home, but installing brick veneer is far from a walk in the park.
Whether you are doing a home redesign project in California (think Los Angeles or Riverside) or Texas (think Dallas or Houston), when you are able to increase value to your home all by yourself, there is ultimately a sense of satisfaction and achievement. Knowing that you added beauty to your home will make it feel even more pleasurable than before. But there is definitely a difference between adding value wrecking a part of your home.
Installing brick veneer is a large project that can potentially ruin a house if done improperly. You may even be able to rent the correct equipment needed to do the job right. And you may even be able to hire a temporary hod carrier to mix the mortar and keep your brick supply up. Without a doubt, having skill plays a monumental role in doing a good job building your fence or wall.
Professional bricklayers also adjust the thickness of the horizontal mortar joints frequently to make sure the bricks pass over things with little or no cuts. This is something that takes a tremendous amount of skill and time to learn as oppose to something you can pick up over night. I am sorry to say, but watching the local home improvement channel is not going to give you the experience needed.
While the skill needed plays a primary role in whether or not you can install brick veneer to your home by yourself, the workload factors in as well. The thought of installing thousands of bricks to a home exterior seems like a pretty large task indeed. It will either take you an extremely long time to complete the job or it will be completed with a lack of true professionalism if you were to take on such a load by yourself.
There are a variety of ideas you can think of to improve your home by yourself or with help and add meaning and value to it. But installing brick veneer is not one of them. It takes a lot of skill and even more time and effort to get the job done effectively. And after all, you are trying to improve your home, right?
Craig Lewis is CEO of Artisan Precast, Inc., the innovation and customer-care leader in concrete fence walls and high quality fences to assure the on-time execution of your landscape project. Since 1982, their brands - Woodcrete®, Brickcrete®, Fencestone®, Cedarcrete® and Woodcrete® Rail,- have become very popularly accepted by architects, landscape designers, engineers, residential, commercial and industrial developers, utility companies, government agencies, and others in the construction industry.
Published July 18th, 2007
Filed in Home