While you may never get as proficient as a professional brick layer, there are a lot of projects you can get involved in. For example, you might want to do a barbecue pit or you might want to do a wall coming out from your house. There are all sorts of things that you can do.

One thing that you need to know is, that the mortar that holds it together is a mortar mix. You can buy that. All you have to do is add water. The next thing is, be careful about the amount of water that you add in there. You want to have it about the consistency of lets say a pancake batter. And then, here is a trick that I learned from an old brick layer: I don't know why, but he always put just a little shot of liquid soap in there and mixed it up. And he said it really gave it a lot better consistency, made it easy to work with, and I've always used it and it's worked out fine.

One of the things that you want to keep in mind is that the width of the mortar joints makes a difference in what you're going to end up with in the number of bricks. A quarter-inch joint would require 7 bricks per square foot. While a 3/8^th-inch joint would use only 6.55 bricks per square foot. Now that doesn't sound like very much, but over a large surface like a whole wall, it is going to mount up.

This is a little tool that you use to rake the joints. If you don't want to do that though, a lot of people will use the end of a toothbrush, the handle part, and that does a pretty nice job. But my favorite is just take a rubber glove put that on and let your fingers do the raking. The important thing is if you're making repairs, make your joints look like the rest in the wall.

Incidentally, if you have left over mortar, be sure you store it in a plastic bag, otherwise it's going to turn into a rock and not be usable.