Building a miniature herringbone brick floor (Construction #4)

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The technique chosen for the cellar floor is the herringbone (opus spicatum), one of the most classic and decorative motifs used since ancient times.

I rely on a simple but effective material for laying on the concrete base: vinyl glue. This glue is white at first, but becomes transparent when it dries, thus avoiding annoying stains in case of smudging. The only “flaw”: it’s water-soluble, which is why I can’t use the Domus as a garden decoration!

First, I place a row of bricks along the entire perimeter of the basement and around the bases of the pillars until they form a sort of frame. However, I am very careful not to let the glue leak out of the cracks, and for this I use a pair of metal tweezers that allow me greater precision (the bricks are definitely small in this scale, and working exclusively with my fingers would risk a nervous breakdown).



After the frame, I begin laying the first row of bricks at a 45-degree angle, preparing small areas of the floor with glue from time to time. If there are areas of unused glue, I remove it before it dries so that its volume does not interfere with the laying of the next bricks.

Everything goes more or less smoothly, with the only difficulty being keeping the “spikes” straight. The bricks are not all the same length, and some have to be reworked before being laid. In addition, the more than one thousand pieces I made ran out about halfway through the work, forcing me to interrupt the laying to prepare a second board (a full day’s work between modeling, cutting, drying, and later finishing with sandpaper).





Once the composition of the spikes is finished and the remaining corners along the edges are filled with custom cut bricks, I evel the entire floor with some rather vigorous sanding.

The last step, after thoroughly cleaning the surface from clay dust (a sea of dust), is to fill the joints with cement. I use quick-setting cement, which reaches optimum hardness in 2 to 4 hours and can be applied without the addition of sand. This makes the mixture more fluid and it penetrates better into the spaces between the bricks.





At this point I let it dry, although I’ll have to sand the entire surface again later to fill in the recurring cracks. I’ll still leave some bumps and minor imperfections to make it more realistic to the eye.

Cleaning is done with a slightly damp cloth, which allows the bricks to re-emerge by removing excess material.





(Extract from the book "DOMUS project: Building a Miniature House Brick by Brick. The BasementDOMUS project: Building a Miniature House Brick by Brick. The Basement")





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