Brick Wall

Since early June, our driveway has been full of bricks. A pile of sand was delivered a few weeks ago. A pallet full of bags of cement followed. But there was one thing still missing:

Bricklayers!

They arrived early this morning, and by the time we had to leave to attend a birthday party, they had this much wall:

The weather was cold and windy, but at least it wasn't raining.

The birthday party was held at the Mt Buninyong Winery. This was a venue for a wedding which had to be abandoned in the Scotsburn bushfire last year.
Scotsburn bushfire fails to ruin big day

Burnt trees with re-growth right beside the venue:

There appeared to be the remains of a building through there, too, but I couldn't tell if it had been a house or a large shed.


The fantastic cake was made by a family member:

You've seen Reg's real-life tractor on this blog quite a few times, such as here in March.

Notice the chook outside? There was a small flock of them wandering around out there:

With a couple of roosters to keep an eye on them.

When we returned home, the wall didn't seem lots bigger than it had been when we left:

The reason can be seen in these two stills from one of the security cameras. Here's the wall at 2PM and 38 seconds:

 And here it is at 2PM and 40 seconds:

A 45km/h gust of wind brought down one section, and the rest followed. It had started to move in the top photo. Fortunately all the workers got out of the way, and there were no injuries. Just a lot of wasted effort! Apparently because the bricks were wet from sitting out in the rain for weeks, they did not suck moisture out of the mortar the way dry bricks would. As a result the mortar was still very wet and sloppy, so the wall didn't have a lot of structural integrity when the wind hit.

The poor brickies first had to clean up all the bricks, then re-lay them. They worked until it was too dark for me to get a photo.