Barbecue - how not to build

Okay let's look this in an unusual way. You're standing in your garden one morning and you think 'I'll build a barbecue' - this is an object lesson in how NOT to go about it.

The benefits of building a brick barbecue are many, it can accent your patio beautifully, and the brick designs look good in any garden setting, but make sure you don't:

1. Pick up a job lot of bricks or even worse, concrete blocks, that don't match
2. Forget to allow enough extra bricks for breakages, or extra work you decide to do, or you'll end up with something that looks like each brick came from a different location
3. Plan too small - when you build your own, you want to design with at least twice as much grilling space as a metal barbecue and somewhere to put things down, or you'll end up juggling plates, trays and utensils.

Building a barbecue without mortar is an easy project, but make sure you don't:

1. Choose an uneven and unstable site, or your barbecue will fall down!
2. Pick and area where the kids and animals run through every day, or your other half walks to hang out the washing, or all you'll get is a daily complaint about your poor planning ability instead of compliments on your design skills.
3. Lay all the bricks facing the same way. For mortarless barbecues you need to have them as headers and stretchers, which means two bricks face one direction and the two next to those face in the opposite direction, like a basket-weave pattern.

And please don't try to build more than thirteen courses of bricks high, or it will start to wobble.

Barbecue badly made photograph by arjenvr, used under a creative commons attribution licence.

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