Water & Damp

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 […]

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

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

People want to know how to get rid of the white stuff. The more useful question is where it is, because a salt bloom is a map of how water is moving through a wall, and once you have read the map, the cleaning takes twenty minutes. What is actually depositing Masonry contains soluble salts

Every crawlspace I open in Roswell in July tells the same story: foundation vents wide open, 82 percent relative humidity under the floor, condensation beading on the ductwork, and brick piers with white salt bloom halfway up. The vents were supposed to prevent exactly this. Why venting backfires in a humid climate The theory behind

A Sandy Springs homeowner asked me why the parging on her foundation kept falling off in sheets. It was falling off because it had been troweled onto a dusty, unwetted block wall in August, and because the real problem — water sitting against that wall every time it rained — had never been touched. What

I survey masonry for buyers, which means I get about ninety minutes with a house and no permission to open anything up. In Decatur the thing I look for first is not cracks. It is the white bloom along the bottom of the brick and the line where it stops. What efflorescence is telling you