I have stood in enough Wooster Square front gardens while an owner explains what the last contractor told them to have developed a short list of questions. None of them is technical enough to be unfair, and the answers sort people quickly. The five questions “What is causing this?” Not what will you do, what […]
Hiring a Mason: Questions That Separate Trades From Sales Read More »
The most useful thing an East Rock client ever handed me was a manila folder. Inside were dated photographs of a wall going back to 1997, receipts, and a page of handwritten notes about which contractor did what. It turned a diagnosis that would have taken a day of investigation into a twenty-minute conversation. Why
Keeping a Maintenance Log for an Old House Read More »
Freestanding walls are the hardest masonry I build, which surprises people who assume a garden wall is simpler than a house. A house wall is loaded from above, sheltered by eaves, warm on one side and dry at the base. A boundary wall has none of that. It is exposed on both faces, top and
Garden and Boundary Walls: Frost, Footings and Copings Read More »
An Edgewood porch I rebuilt two years ago had been rebuilt once before, in 2009, by someone who poured a new slab straight onto the old fill and tied it into the house wall. It lasted six winters. Most of what goes wrong with porches and stoops is decided before anyone lays a single brick.
Porch and Stoop Rebuilds: What Goes Wrong Read More »
I build in stone for a living, mostly outdoors, and the detail I get asked about most on houses is the one nobody thinks about until it fails: what happens at the top and bottom of a window. On a Dwight two-family last spring, a $300 sill problem had been left long enough to become
Sills, Lintels and the Details Above an Opening Read More »
My basement in Morris Cove has a stone foundation, an earth-and-slab floor, and a corner that gets damp every March. Three contractors have offered to waterproof it. All three quotes involved sealing the inside of a wall that has been managing moisture successfully since 1891, and all three would have made the house worse. These
Basement Water in a Stone-Foundation House Read More »
The cheapest masonry repair I have ever done cost $140 and took an afternoon: two downspout extensions and a wheelbarrow of soil regraded away from the west wall. The efflorescence band that had been coming back every spring for six years has not returned since. The bottom three feet is where walls die Walk any
Gutters, Grade and Splash-Back at the Base of a Wall Read More »
Someone sealed the front of my house in East Rock in the mid-nineties, before I bought it. I know this because there is a crisp line four courses above grade where the treatment stopped, and above that line the brick faces have been coming off in flakes for thirty years while the untreated brick below
Waterproofing Coatings on Brick: Usually a Mistake Read More »
There is a yard off the Quinnipiac where I have bought brick three times, and the second purchase was a mistake I paid for twice. The brick looked perfect on the pallet. It was interior common brick from a demolished mill, soft as a biscuit, and half of what I laid in an exposed garden
Salvaged Brick: When It Is Worth It Read More »
I have owned an 1893 house in Edgewood for eleven years and I have made every matching mistake available. The worst was a rear wall repair where I matched the brick beautifully and got the mortar wrong, and the repair is visible from the yard to this day. Nobody looks at the brick. They see
Matching Brick and Mortar Color on a Repair Read More »
