Home Project: My Brick wall

If there's a part of my home that I love, it is the wall of my back foyer where our fishpond is. It's covered in bamboo and seeing it transports me even just for 5 minutes to a tropical resort or paradise.We've had this wall for 3 years now and everytime I see this area of my home, I instantly feel relaxed. Recently though I got tired of it. Not of seeing it, but of maintaining. I realize that it's quite difficult to maintain the bamboo because insects and pests easily hide between and behind the poles. My sister Jaymie even said that she heard of warnings about walls like mine because they are possible breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Apparently the bamboo poles have small cup-like tops that could collect water when it rains.  With dengue-paranoid me, I decided it's time to let go of my tropical corner.So now I've given up my tropical corner, I go on to the next dream, a brick wall! From tropical to urban!I've always wanted a brick wall and noticed that I am drawn to places and homes where there are walls of this finish. Even on Instagram, I fall in love with the brick walls I see I end up 'screencapping' them. See the brick walls that are in my photo stream...Gang Badoy's wall, with her dog Justice in the foregroundTin Dychiao's wall which is the usual backdrop for her daughter Berry's most adorable OOTD shotsCheck out Jackie Go's OOTD shot against this faux brick pillar. (But with the gorgeous Jackie Go in front I'm probably the only who noticed anything else in the photo heehee.)I even caught this white wall i saw on Issa Litton's IG feed.And I still can't forget the blue assymetrical wall with a distressed finish at the Cupcakes by Sonja Shangrila East wing branchSo I embark on a new home improvement project. Determined to finish this before the holiday decor goes up, I call on my handy dandy all-around guy, Mang Andring!His first assignment was to source bricks.  At the Ortigas home depot and Wilcon they had brick pre-fab tiles in 1x1M or 2x1M cuts which cost around 1600 per piece! But I didn't want tile, I wanted real actual bricks so my architect friend Veepee Pinpin (who incidentally was the one who designed Ateneo's Church of the Gesu!) pointed me to Riviera Filipina on Edsa (see www.rivierafilipina.com.ph). Andring found the bricks I wanted but after computing, we would need more than 2,000 pieces and it would cost P16,000+ for the brick alone, excluding cement and labor. I decided to try go the adventurous route and do a faux brick wall instead.Luckily, Mang Andring is a very proactive guy and is used to all my unusual projects and out of the box requests so he was game! He suggested that we cover the wall with a thin layer of concrete and he will manually draw the brick lines into it.After a week, he present me with the dried wall with lines and it looks great! (I sometimes think Mang Andring is a frustrated artist himself!)Now to decide on the finish. This one was another dilemma for us! First Mang Andring asked me to buy latex paint - white and brick red and when he painted it on, it came out like this:I told Mang Andring the shade of red reminds me of those public waiting sheds (hehe)...not exactly what I had in mind.By this time, i was sending out SOS texts and emails to Veepee,my other archi friend Jay Caniza and my interior designer cousin Irene Dee (who designed our store, Nurture nook!).  Check out the photo i sent them. Irene said that the paint should be lighter. I asked Andirng to match the shade of a flower pot or paso.Was already thinking at this point our tipid project might be a total fail...We couldn't figure out how the lines (which i learned are called mortar lines) would come out so I decided to turn to Google and youtube! (Why didn't I think of that sooner!) From the info we picked up on You Tube (there were some which were overly tedious!) Mang Andring knew how to proceed.First, paint the lines gray (or whatever color you want your mortar lines to be)Paint the brick one by oneButi nalang may pagka-OC si Mang Andring...Tada!! Check out our finished DIY home improvement project: my very own (faux) brick wall!Yay! What do you think?:)