Showerthought: I laid my 50,000th brick last Tuesday and the number hit me harder than I expected

Gray Brown · 2026-10-03T10:45:03.717788+00:00

I was on a job in Bakersfield finishing up a fireplace surround when the foreman asked how many bricks I figure I've laid in 12 years. I did the math on the drive home: roughly 350 bricks on a good day, about 230 days a year, and it came out near 50,000. That number stopped me cold because I still feel like I'm learning something on every wall, like I just figured out last month that wetting the brick before a hot weather set keeps the mortar from drying too fast. Twelve years in and half a hundred thousand bricks down, and I'm still not sure I'd trust myself on a curved garden wall without checking my line twice. Any of you old timers ever stop and count yours, or am I the only one who does math in the truck?

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Showerthought: I laid my 50,000th brick last Tuesday and the number hit me harder than I expected | Bricklayers - Rigidtalk