I'm looking to put in a brick patio and have been really wanting to do it with reclaimed road bricks. The problem here is sourcing enough to do an entire 18×18 patio and not spending a months salary on just the bricks. So the thought is to just use standard bricks, you know the ones with holes in them. These normally would be for the side of a house and not really exposed to the full force of a Michigan winter with 12"+ of snow on the ground.
Would these bricks hold up? Would grouting them into place help? Also might a sealer help?
Edit:
The base will be made of crushed rock. I am not sure if a layer of sand is needed or not at this point. But Will be added if needed.
Best Answer
My wife and I collected an assortment of old house wall bricks from various sources on craigs list and put them down in a patio in the mid-Atlantic a couple years ago. They're on packed gravel and sand with no mortar, laid flat in a herring bone pattern. We've had only one issue which is that some of the bricks were of the softer, less dense variety (light orange and easy to cut). These didn't make it through the first winter. They seemed to have trapped moisture, froze, then exploded into very small pieces. We'll be pulling these out and replacing them.
Other than that we found the old bricks to be great. Patina and slight variation in size make the patio look older than it is. Lots of character and other than a few exploding bricks, little maintenance.