Major pet peeve in my own life is that the brick and mortar on the porch columns of my apartment don't match the rest of the building. It's not something most people would notice at first or maybe at all, but it drives me crazy.
The brick on the building is an old sandmold standard-size flashed burgundy brick and a plain buff mortar in a flush joint. If I were to match these, I would use Belden Brick's Belcrest 740 bricks. Those aren't available in standard size, but the modular size they're made in will work because it's the same height. (Matching size exactly doesn't really matter for columns or other projects where the brick isn't going to be laid directly into the existing brick wythes (in fact, the bricks on the columns are a bit longer and a bit less tall than the bricks on the house)). I'd match the mortar with Heidelberg's Old Colonial, the go-to for matching older structures, from their Flamingo colored mortar series. Heidelberg's premixed Old Colonial could also work.
The brick on the columns is just over 8 inches long and just under 2 1/4 inches tall, so it's a weird size. They may have been "seconds", meaning the factory screwed up and had to sell them at a discount. That would explain the mismatch -- mighta been a 1970s Landlord Special. Nonetheless, they're beautiful bricks. A rusty brown color with ironspot texture ("ironspot" is somewhat literal: the clay and/or shale is mixed with actual flecks of metal, usually manganese these days I think, that melts in the kiln and makes a sort of glaze of freckles on the surface of the brick!), laid with an almost-matching red mortar.
These bricks have to have been discounted, because it shouldn't have been at all difficult to match the brick on the existing building. The reason for the red mortar evades me; colored mortars are usually more expensive than plain mortar. More traditional colors like Old Colonial are popular enough to be not much pricier than the plain grey. Idk why tf they woulda done red, except maybe to hurt me personally.
this is exactly the type of rant i signed up to tumblr to see
