Say that the first line of bricks on the foundation runs parallel to a reference point, let's say a nearby road, and the next line of bricks is put on top of the first line, but this time all the bricks are pointing in a direction that is 90 degrees to the road, and then again the third line of bricks is parallel to the road again etc. Why don't you do this instead? Laying cement and making sure everything's even isn't my strong suit and I want to build a house, so can I do it without cement, just pure brick? Let's say the walls are 4-5 bricks deep.
the cement holds the bricks together.........w/o cement, they would move around and possibly fall
It's called mortar, and while there are mortar-less installs, with mortar, you don't have to have things level, either the bricks or the laying, and there's less gap between them.
Yes you definitely need mortar to hold the bricks in place. Do you remember the story of the three little pigs? Without mortar your house will be like the one in that story that the wolf blew down. The first strong wind that came up and all of your bricks would fall over and your whole house would fall down.
Not cement, mortar. The mortar helps bind the bricks to each other. Laying one dry next to another means there's no bond between them at all. You just need a couple of seasons of ground movement (you'd be amazed how much the ground moves with the seasons) to start making your bricks move apart from each other. I get what you're saying, laying bricks in the traditional fashion isn't the easiest thing in the world to do. It's really more of an art in practice, and a science in layout. You have to stay on your toes. But it isn't impossible either, those guys laying brick professionally didn't take a flying saucer to work. They don't wear capes and worry about kryptonite. They're regular people just like you, and you can learn the same skills they did. You say you want to build a house. Awesome. But if you want to put out that much effort, it's really worth it to do it right, right? I don't know where you could use this in your project but there is a product called surface bonding cement that allows you to build a wall by first dry-stacking the blocks, then coming back and troweling on the SBC. It has reinforcing fibers in it that allows the SBC to provide tensile strength even over the joints between blocks and keep the entire wall together. I don't know much about it, I haven't used it myself. It sounds like okay stuff however, and it may be that local codes permit you to use it to build your foundations. Good luck with your project.
