No, I will never give up on egg carton brickwork, but I tried an experiment to help a friend out with a brick floor project. We were thinking egg carton brick, but she has a Beacon Hill and three large floors to fill. Even with awesome results, cutting egg carton bricks is time consuming and daunting to say the least.
Then the other day I was down a Pinterest rabbit hole, and I ran across an old entry from Tiny Handmade. The miniaturist had made a wood tile floor from popsicle sticks. I thought, what about skinny sticks for bricks? :D
Skinny sticks are 1/4″ wide, have a flat side and rounded edges on the other side. The rounded edges will give a break between the bricks, so I made sure to use that side facing up. And, as with dating, you want to weed out the obviously warped and damaged ones.
I measured 3/4″ bricks and used my Easy Cutter Ultimate to make quick work of cutting.
A little sanding on the edges to get rid of the excess.
I glued them to my sample template (just a piece of black paper without lines). They have enough variance to make for more realistic looking bricks but are pretty uniform in width to make bricking easy. Strip wood would be too uniform and you’d have no gaps between the bricks unless you made the rounded edges.
I stippled on Moon Yellow by Americana using a stencil brush, which gave it a subtle texture. These are going to be relatively smooth bricks compared to the bumpy egg carton material. If you wanted more surface texture, you could use gel medium dabbed on with a sponge brush before painting. But, having them nice and smooth will make furniture placement on the surface much easier. Here the paint is still wet.
Grouting didn’t seem necessary as I just made sure there was excess paint in the grooves to cover evenly, but that would be simple enough to add with spackling, grout or other filler. These would work especially well for a painted brick wall or floor since you aren’t going to be able to bend these around a three dimensional object.
