I actually went on a course a couple of years ago to be trained in how to prepare and use traditional lime mortars - the course had us building a wall that was going to be knocked down and the stones re-used for the next class:
NB I did this because our house is an old Scottish farm building that was converted to a house ~12 years ago - I wanted to be able to do proper wall repairs and build garden walls in the same style.
Neat! I just added a very small section to an existing brick wall and I'm super frustrated with the result because the original wall had it's bricks in the weirdest lines and I had the choice of following them or trying to improve it. I tried the latter and ended up with something that was less bad than it could have been but it still isn't perfectly level at the top so I'll have to do some improvisation to make the connection to the ceiling.
If you see experienced bricklayers at work, the speed with which they go and the perfection of the result then that's always a good reminder that plenty of the 'trades' that IT people tend to look down on are actually highly skilled professions that can take the better part of a lifetime to master.
