Well I’m at the point of needing to make the stabilized lime bricks so I can begin building the foundations. I’ll use standard adobe bricks on top of the stabilized lime brick foundation. Now comes the part of my frustration. How to estimate the number of bricks that I’ll need to make for the foundations. Well I naturally went online looking for a calculator to use. Man was that a frustrating waste of time. All I could find was calculators for bricks of set sizes like red brick or people just saying this is how any you should estimate.
So I decided to put together a spreadsheet that would allow me to enter all of the information to be able to estimate just how many bricks I would need. I’ll make the form available for free to anyone that wants to use it. I hope it will help.
It’s a very simple and plain form as you can see in the picture but, it works very fast to give you a pretty solid estimate. This form is designed to work with any custom sized bricks. Since we tend to make adobe bricks based on the size we need I thought it was important to make the custom size available in this form.
So what I came up with was needing an estimated 614 bricks. So how did I come up with that? I measured the exposed length of each side in inches. Then I added all of them together to get the total length. I then added the length of the brick at 10.5 inches plus the end joint of 0.5 inches giving me 11 inches. I took the total length of 1661 inches and divided that by 11 inches. I figured that at my deepest point I would need a minimum of 12 inches of foundation. This rounds up to 14 inches for 4 rows of bricks. So I took 1661 bricks divided that by the 11 inches and multiplied that by the 4 rows. I also factored in a few extra bricks in by figuring 5 bricks multiplied the number of rows and then divided in half giving me 10 extra bricks. This gave me a total number of bricks of 614. I also rounded up all the number of bricks so that I would have a few extra rather than not enough since a bricks sometimes break.
I am making the brick estimation form available for download for anyone who might find it useful. I saved the spreadsheet form in 2 formats to make it easier for people to use. The first format is .ods from LibreOffice Calc and the second format is .xls from Microsoft Excel. I used the older Excel version to try and make it more compatible.
Brick Estimation Form.ods
Brick Estimation Form.xls
{These links have now been deactivated. A new enhanced version of this form has now been posted. Please check the post dated April 3rd, 2013 for the links to the updated version 2 of the Brick Estimation Form.}
I have tested both of these spreadsheet forms with Google Sheets as well and they both work. I hope this form makes it a little easier for any brick project that you may have.
Please also take into consideration if you plan to build your wall a brick and a half thick, 2 bricks thick or more and adjust the wall thickness on the form to get the correct estimate. Also keep in mind that this form is designed for walls and not solid filled in spaces such as the hearth of a fireplace or base of an oven. To get a better estimate some changes in the calculations would need to be made.
Also please keep in mind that this form is for estimation purposes and that every design is unique. This brick estimation form has not been designed to estimate circles or domes but, that option could be added if needed later.