Brick & Mortar

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 […]

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

Every November I used to get the same call at the commission office: a homeowner in Westville whose contractor wanted to keep pointing through December, asking whether that was allowed. The permit rarely says anything about it. The mortar does. What cold does to fresh mortar Mortar gains strength through hydration, and hydration effectively stops

Two cracks on the same Morris Cove house: one stepping diagonally through the mortar joints above a basement window, one running dead vertical through brick and joint alike near the middle of the long elevation. Same wall, same age, two entirely different causes and two different repairs. Step cracking: the wall is being bent A

A crack in a brick wall is a record of something that happened. Read properly it tells you what moved, in which direction, and whether it is still moving. Most of the panic I get called into on Westville houses is about cracks that stopped moving before the current owner was born. The four questions

An East Rock owner brought me a photo of two bags from the builders’ merchant and asked which one was lime mortar. Neither was. One was masonry cement, the other was a Type S bagged mix with a small lime content. The distinction sounds academic until you put the wrong one on an 1890s wall.

A mini-split line set needs a three-inch hole. In a Riverdale building with a solid brick party wall, that three-inch hole is the difference between a clean installation and a crack running diagonally up two floors. I have been called to look at both outcomes, and the tool was the same in each case. Why

Every open-plan kitchen project in an Astoria two-family runs into the same question on day one: is that wall holding anything up? The answer is usually yes, and the way the crew handles the next two days decides whether the job goes smoothly or turns into a structural repair. Establishing what the wall carries In

The addition detail that generates the most callbacks on my projects is not the roof and it is not the flashing. It is the vertical line where new brick meets old, on a Garden City colonial where the original wall was laid in 1948 and the new one went up last spring. Six months later

A Riverside bungalow I surveyed last spring had brick that looked sandblasted on the river side and perfectly ordinary on the street side. Nobody had sandblasted anything. That is what forty years of salt-laden air does when it lands on a wall that never gets rinsed by driving rain. How airborne chloride gets into a