Historic Work

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 […]

The single most common thing I told applicants, over and over: the commission is not judging whether your repair is a good idea. It is judging whether it changes the appearance of a designated property. Those are different questions, and confusing them is why people arrive angry. What triggers review Local historic district ordinances vary,

A Midtown Atlanta building came to me after a cleaning contractor had taken a hundred years of grime off its brick in two days. He had also taken the fired skin off about a third of the units. The wall was cleaner and it had lost maybe forty years of service life. Start by identifying

In Coconut Grove I watched a beautiful mahogany window surround go into a CBS wall with the jamb screwed straight to the block. Two rainy seasons later the back of that jamb was black. The joinery was perfect. The interface was not. Masonry is a moisture reservoir Concrete block, brick and stucco all hold water

In Barrio Viejo you can date a repair from across the street. The adobe walls with soft lime render look flat and slightly uneven and have been standing since the 1880s. The ones with cement stucco have hairline map cracking, dark damp patches at the base, and bulges where the render has let go of

A Capitol Hill owner called me out to price what she described as “bad brick.” Her front elevation had lost the face off maybe sixty units in a band about four feet high, right where the hose bib and the downspout are. The joints between those ruined bricks were pristine — hard, gray, tight. That