The Russian bath is built not only from timber or traditional logs. Durable and environmentally friendly brick is also an excellent material for its walls. How to build a solid bath out of it - our article will tell you about this. Content:
- Advantages and disadvantages
- Seat selection
- Bath design
- Foundation construction
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Brick walls
- Masonry methods
- Preparation
- How to bandage
- Laying corners
- Creating seams
- Brick lintels
- Warming
- Waterproofing
- Finishing
During the production process, clay bricks are heat treated. It gives the product solidity and significantly increases its strength. Due to these properties, red brick is used for the construction of walls and masonry of stoves. In order to save material, brickwork can be carried out using a special technology, which provides for the creation and filling of voids in the wall with cheap materials with good thermal performance.
Advantages and disadvantages of brick baths
Brick walls are more durable than wooden ones, but, unlike a log house, they require increased attention to their thermal insulation. Nevertheless, in garden plots, brick baths are built no less often than their counterparts from logs.
The construction of brick baths has undeniable advantages:
- Building bricks tolerate high humidity and high temperatures in rooms, which distinguish a bath from a residential building, no worse than any other material.
- When erecting the walls of a bathhouse, we are dealing with piece material. This allows you to create absolutely any architectural form.
- Brick is a fire resistant material. Therefore, in terms of fire safety, a brick structure is more reliable than a wooden frame.
- The use of special facing bricks when laying the walls will exclude the external decoration of the walls of the bath.
In addition to the advantages, the brick building has some disadvantages. Brick can collapse from dampness, but this problem is solved with the help of vapor barrier materials and a well-thought-out ventilation system. A brick building is more expensive than a log bath.
Choosing a place to build a brick bath
A brick bathhouse, unlike a log house, is more afraid of moisture. Therefore, a place for construction should be chosen no closer than 30 m from a natural reservoir, since in case of spring floods, the threat of flooding of the site is not excluded.
Before laying the foundation of the bath, it is necessary to take into account the fire safety rules that prescribe the construction of a brick bath no closer than 12 m from your neighbors' house when burning its stove with wood. If the stove is planned to be electric or gas, the distance between buildings can be reduced to 5 m.
A brick bath in the form of an extension to a residential building is very convenient. There is an obvious saving of building materials and the convenience of laying engineering communications. In addition, in the winter, you don't have to shovel passages to the bathhouse from the snow and run around the yard with an armful of towels or linen.
Brick bath design
When designing a brick bath, figure out the purpose of the future building. It is clear that it is needed for taking hot steam and water for health purposes. But besides this, you can have a good time in the bath. Therefore, in addition to the dressing room, washing room and steam room, the rest room will be very useful. If financial possibilities permit, plan the construction of a font or pool for your bath. If there is a shortage of living space in the house, you can plan two floors in the bathhouse or an attic.
Another important point is to determine the required volume of each of the building premises. For example, a steam room should not be made the largest in terms of area, since the duration of stay in it is short. A relaxation room should serve for relaxation and tea ceremonies - make it larger to comfortably accommodate the right number of adults at the same time.
Pay attention to all the crucial points of the brick bath project:
- Bath windows should be oriented to the west, so you can save on lighting.
- The entrance is from the south. In winter, there are usually fewer snowdrifts near it, which will melt faster in spring.
- According to SNiP, the bath is located no closer than 3 m from the fence, so that in case of fire it can be accessed from all sides.
- For a steam room, the optimal dimensions are from 2, 5x2, 5 to 3, 5x3, 5 m.
- The door to the steam room is made with a threshold height above the floor of 30 cm and has a size of 1.7x0.6 m.
- The steam room window always opens outward, is located one meter from the floor and has a size of 40x50 cm.
- The shelves are made with a width of 70-80 cm with a height of 75 cm from the floor. There must be a distance of 105 cm from the upper shelf to the ceiling.
- It is better to place the stove with a firebox in the dressing room, and stones in the steam room.
- The door between the dressing room and the washing compartment measures 1, 7x0, 6 m.
- The opening of all the doors of the bath should be carried out only outward, as the safety precautions say.
After design studies, we proceed to a practical solution to our question, how to build a brick bath.
Construction of the foundation for a brick bath
For our bath we will carry out a reinforced strip foundation. Before installing it, the building site must be cleaned and the vegetation layer of the soil removed. The breakdown of the axes and the construction of the perimeter of the future foundation on the terrain is carried out using a cord, pegs and a construction tape. All dimensions are taken from the design documentation. A trench for the foundation is dug 10-15 cm below the level of soil freezing in your region.
The bottom of the trench dug for the foundation must be covered with sand and gravel by 10-15 cm. Then it is compacted and a reinforcing cage with a diameter of 12 mm rods is installed in the formwork.
For the passage of ventilation ducts into the future bath, the foundation must be equipped with appropriate holes. They are cut in opposite formwork panels and connected with a sleeve from a pipe or a wooden box. Naturally, all this happens before the concrete is poured into the formwork.
The concrete is poured up to the design level. After it has solidified, the foundation must be covered with waterproofing and laid on top of 3-4 rows of brickwork for the basement of the bath. In its last row, we leave a hole for the passage of communications. We lay the drainage pipe under the foundation and take it out at least 5 m beyond its borders.
Solid brick can be used as a foundation for partitions of internal premises.
Erection of walls for a brick bath
To build a brick bath with your own hands, first you need to choose the right one. Reliable walls are erected only from red brick, since its silicate analogue quickly collapses under the influence of moisture, which is well absorbed by its surface. Ceramic bricks are more resistant to dampness, and due to their fire resistance, they are used even when laying stoves.
Methods and rules for laying brick walls
For the walls of the bath, there are such methods of laying bricks:
- One and a half or two bricks.
- Masonry "in the well" is a double wall, interconnected internally by short transverse partitions. The free space is filled with insulation.
- Double walls with an air gap of 4-6 cm.
When laying bricks, it is important to follow these rules:
- The first row of masonry should always consist only of undamaged piece products.
- Each row is laid with external bricks.
- Broken bricks can be used to fill the inside of the spoon rows.
- Broken brick is not used for bandaging corners and laying support areas.
- Before laying, the brick is moistened with water for better adhesion to the mortar.
Now let's look at how to conduct masonry from ceramic red bricks.
Preparation for bricklaying
First of all, orders must be established on the finished foundation. This will help keep the laying evenly. This is done using a plumb line at the points of contact and intersection of the walls at the corners of the masonry and on its straight sections. The cords are pulled to align each row. To avoid sagging of the cord, lighthouse bricks are placed under it every 5 m.
How to tie up brickwork
In order for the finished wall after shrinkage of the bath not to creep along the vertical seams, their correct dressing is necessary.
There are three ways:
- Single row chain system - alternation of butt and spoon rows. The vertical seams are tied on half a brick, and the transverse seams in each row are shifted by one quarter of the brick. This system is quite labor intensive, but reliable.
- Every three spoon rows alternate with one butt row. Transverse vertical seams are not tied in three adjacent rows. This system is very suitable for masonry columns and small walls.
- The "multi-row" system - here five spoon rows alternate with one butt row. The transverse vertical seams of the spoon rows are shifted by half a brick, and the bonded ones - by a quarter. Such masonry can use halves of bricks, thereby saving material.
Laying the corners of a brick bath
Do they start to lift the first corner by laying in it? bricks. With a low load on the walls, halves of bricks can be used for the bottom of the window openings. So that there is no displacement of the vertical seams, a mile is folded by one quarter of the brick (a mile is the extreme rows of bricks in the masonry). When laying an odd row - with butt sides (the brick lies across the wall), and an even row - with spoon sides (the brick lies along the wall).
The inner mile is done in any way - it depends on the thickness of the wall. The voids in the corners are laid with brick quarters. The geometry of the laid out corner is checked with a construction square, and its verticality is checked using a plumb line and a rule. Minor deviations are corrected near above.
Create brickwork seams
Masonry mortar is prepared from water, sand and cement. It must be flexible enough to properly fill the voids between the bricks. If you correctly lay the bricks with good quality mortar, the masonry will turn out to be strong. The thickness of its vertical seams is taken to be 10 mm, and the thickness of horizontal seams is 12 mm. The shape of the masonry seams is concave, convex and rectangular. It is created with a special tool - construction joining.
Brick lintels for openings in the bath
Ordinary lintels over window and door openings are used for spans less than two meters. When making them, it is necessary to observe the horizontal rows and the rules for bandaging bricks in the masonry. In height, an ordinary lintel has 6-9 rows, and its length is half a meter more than the width of the opening. Lintels are laid on M25 mortar made of high-quality bricks.
For the manufacture of lintels, formwork from boards with a thickness of 4-5 cm is used. Sometimes it can be replaced by door and window frames fixed in the masonry. In this case, their wood must be protected with a layer of roofing material.
First, a mortar is laid on the formwork in a layer of 2-3 cm, three reinforcing rods with a diameter of 6 mm are placed in it, which are launched into the common masonry by more than 25 cm and are fixed by tying the brick.
An ordinary lintel is kept on the formwork for a little more than 12 days at an ambient temperature above ten degrees and up to 24 days at a temperature of up to ten degrees.
Thermal insulation of a brick bath
The brick walls of the bath are subject to mandatory insulation. If the walls are laid in the form of a "well", the space is filled with half-meter layers of a mixture prepared from "fluff" lime, sawdust and light slag in a ratio of 2: 2: 1. Each of the layers is filled with a solution of lime.
Tiled heaters, which are used for other types of masonry, are more profitable to use. They are attached to the wall from the inside of the room with synthetic binders and clamps.
Outside, the brick walls of the bath can be insulated with polystyrene sheets, then plastered and sheathed with decorative panels.
Waterproofing a brick bath
A brick bath needs waterproofing of the enclosing structures. This work can be done in two ways at once:
- The glued waterproofing provides for pasting the walls with roll materials. Before that, it is necessary to close up all gaps and cracks in the structures.
- Paint insulation is carried out by coating with bitumen mastic in places of moisture penetration. The mastic is made from bitumen, asbestos and lime.
The vapor barrier film is laid on the ceiling and the inner surface of the walls before covering them with finishing materials.
Brick bath decoration
The outer walls of the bathhouse can be left to shine with the beauty of the facing bricks. If there is none, they can be plastered with a cement-lime mortar containing a light filler: expanded clay, pumice or slag.
Internal walls are painted or sheathed with clapboard. In the steam room, wall and ceiling cladding is made of aspen clapboard, i.e. wood that does not emit tar at high temperatures. The floors and walls in the wash compartment can be tiled.
How to build a brick bath - watch the video:
The main part of the building is done, you already know how to make a bathhouse out of bricks. The only thing left to do was to install the stove, fill the openings with windows and doors, cover the bath with a roof and lay the floors. There is still work to be done, but you can handle it!
