Brick veneer on a 50 × 30 ft single-story house with 9 ft walls, eight 3 × 5 ft windows and an entry door covers 1,300 square feet. In modular brick that is 8,775 brick, or 9,214 once 5 % is added for breakage and culls: about 19 cubes of 500. Laying them takes about 74 bags of masonry cement and 9 tons of sand, and the veneer needs 487 wall ties. The calculator above does this count for any brick size, joint and bond, for a veneer or a solid wall two or three wythes thick.
How the calculator works
Enter the walls as a house (length × width, the walls being the perimeter) or as a total wall length, then the height. List the windows and doors: their area comes off. Choose the brick size, the joint, the wall thickness in wythes and, for a solid wall, the bond pattern. The result is the number of brick to buy, with the face and backup brick shown apart for multi-wythe walls.
Brick per square foot
The count follows BIA Technical Note 10, Table 4. Modular brick are made so that the brick plus its mortar joint fits a 4 in module: three courses of modular brick rise 8 in, and one brick plus a joint is 8 in long. The count per square foot therefore depends only on the nominal face, not on the joint:
| Brick | Nominal face, in | Brick per ft² | Mortar, ft³ per 100 ft² (⅜″ joint) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Modular | 2⅔ × 8 | 6.75 | 5.5 |
| Engineer modular | 3⅕ × 8 | 5.63 | 4.8 |
| Closure modular | 4 × 8 | 4.50 | 4.1 |
| Norman | 2⅔ × 12 | 4.50 | 5.1 |
| Utility | 4 × 12 | 3.00 | 3.7 |
| Standard (non-modular) | 2¼ × 8 specified | 6.55 | 9.5 |
Non-modular brick are counted from their specified size plus the joint you choose. A standard brick, 8 × 2¼ in, laid with a ⅜ in joint occupies 8⅜ × 2⅝ in of wall, which gives 6.55 per square foot; with a ½ in joint it is 6.16.
Wythes and bond patterns
A veneer is one wythe, 4 in of brick tied to a frame wall behind an air space. A solid brick wall is two or three wythes, 8 or 12 in thick. In running or stack bond every course is stretchers and the count is simply wythes × Table 4. Header bonds tie the wythes together: common bond with a header course every fifth, sixth or seventh course, English bond with headers every other course, Flemish bond with headers and stretchers alternating in every course. Headers put more units in the face wythe and take the same number out of the backup, so the total hardly changes but the face brick count does. BIA Table 6 gives the increase: one fifth for headers every fifth course, one half for English bond, one third for Flemish. Face brick is usually the more expensive brick, so the calculator lists it separately.
Mortar
There are two different mortar numbers, and both are useful. The first is what you buy. Masons use roughly 8 bags of masonry cement and 1 ton of sand for every 1,000 brick; NCMA TEK 04-02A gives the same batch for brick-sized units, along with one 80 lb bag of mortar mix per 50 brick and one Type S batch (1 bag of portland cement, ½ ft³ of lime, 4½ ft³ of sand) per 225 brick. These figures include the mortar that falls, sets up in the board or fills cores.
The second is what stays in the joints: BIA Table 4 gives 5.5 ft³ per 100 ft² of modular brick with ⅜ in joints. BIA recommends adding 15 to 25 % for waste, and the calculator adds 20 % by default. Solid collar joints between wythes add 3.13 ft³ per 100 ft² for a ⅜ in joint (BIA Table 5). The difference between the two numbers is real: theory says three bags of masonry cement per 1,000 brick, practice says eight. Order by the batch figures.
Veneer ties
Brick veneer is held to the wall behind it with corrugated or wire ties. The IRC (R703.8.4.1) allows each tie to support no more than 2.67 square feet of wall, with ties spaced at most 32 in horizontally and 24 in vertically. For 1,300 ft² of veneer that is 487 ties. Add ties around openings as your installation details require.
Common mistakes
- Using the actual brick size for modular brick. A modular brick is 7⅝ in long, but it fills 8 in of wall with its joint. Counting by the actual size overstates the number by about 24 %.
- Forgetting the culls. Chipped and off-color face brick get set aside. 5 % is the minimum BIA suggests; textured or tumbled brick often needs more.
- Ordering mortar by joint volume. The joints hold about a third of the mortar a job consumes.
- Headers on a single wythe. A veneer cannot have true headers; the calculator counts it as running bond.
For concrete block backup walls and foundations, use the Concrete Block Calculator; for the footing, the Concrete Calculator.