A New Door and Amazing Bricklaying Historical Engineering

Right now, the Grafton 123 Coffee House is just a concept. We are in the process of gutting the first floor. Because the first floor was most recently a dentist's office, the floor plan does not fit our needs. Neither does the entry. The street face of the building is narrow and because we have the wide-open parking lot side exposure, we've decided to put our main entryway on the west side. Plus, the improved access will make renovation easier:

You can barely see the door outline in the picture above, but you can see where it'll be located in the wall.

This one shows a closer view. You can see the steel header that they have cut and bolted into the brick wall and the vertical outline cuts:

The small hole in the center of the door was a test cut. The brick wall is actually three bricks thick. Because it was built 117 years ago, the brick was laid in the old style, as its own support rather than a facade. Most of the rows of brick are laid horizontally with the long side out, but every 7 rows are laid with the short side out so that they can cross two rows below them. By staggering the turned-brick row from both sides of the wall, everything gets tied in pretty tight. Pretty amazing really. Look at this picture:

While you can see the turned rows, you can also see that the mortar joints on the outside of the wall are messy. This is because it was originally built up against an existing building (I'm not sure how long it's been gone) and the mason couldn't 'strike' them.

According to John, our friend the mason who helped with the door layout, it's called 'striking:' where the excess mortar is scraped down to a thin, clean line. In cold weather, apparently, it can keep it from freezing before the concrete sets, but mainly, I think, it just looks nice. And professional.

This is view from the inside:

You can see the mess and the existing reception desk still leftover from the dentist office. Opening up this new door will make it easier to haul stuff outside. You can see the brick down low on the wall under the hole, but up higher it's an old wallboard that was under the dentist office paneling.


Here's a view out the peek-hole. My husband, PC, is on the left and John, the Mason, is on the right (even though you can barely see them because of the bright sunlight outside):

I'll try to remember to take more pictures of the destruction mess...