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Got'cha Covered

Mortar
Now that the bricks are all installed its time to add the mortar detail. My plan was to use household spackle you can find at a hardware store. This stuff is easy use and is water-soluble. I used a small 'spoon' type of tool to scoop out the spackle and apply it to small areas of the wall. It is easiest to work in small areas so the materials don't dry before you can work with them. I was not worried about covering too much of the bricks with the spackle. This was for two reasons, 1. I was planning on wiping off the majority of excess material, and 2. Some excess would get rubbed into any gaps in the bricks acting as filler. After an area was filled in with spackle I used a wet cloth, cotton swab and a wet finger to wipe in and away the excess. As I was cleaning off the excess I made a point of using a cotton swab to recess the mortar a bit and make a concave depression along the mortar line. You can also use your fingertip to do this. Study a real brick wall and you'll notice the mortar is not flush with the bricks. Depending on how much spackle you added, this could be a multi step process. I had to wet and wipe the entire wall 2 to 3 times to get a nice even mortar consistency.

Final Detail
My plan for the detail at the top of the wall was intricate ‘dental’ detail. I didn't want to use clay for this because it would be very involved and complex. I searched the dollhouse section at a craft store and found a variety of small detailed wooden molding. I selected one that represented stones. I cut three pieces and glued them to the top edge of my wall. My research showed that the roofline of many buildings ended at the top edge of a wall in an integrated gutter system. I wanted to duplicate this. I planned on using the thickness of the molding as a gutter. I used a rotary tool and a grinding bit to grind out a gutter groove. This was easiest to do after the pieces were glued in place; again it made the corner angles easier to deal with. This gutter detail played into the next step - the roof. I needed to join the wall and roof at the gutter line, not the edge of the molding.