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# The Mortar Line

Masonry materials and workmanship

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## Posts

- [Repointing Pre-War Brick in New York: Lime vs Portland](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/repointing-pre-war-brick-in-new-york-lime-versus-portland/) - I spent eleven years on scaffolds before I moved into estimating, and the argument I still have most often with owners starts the same way: someone repointed a 1920s building with a bagged Type S mortar, it looked sharp for four winters, and now the brick faces are shelling off in dinner-plate flakes while the
- [Soft Brick, Hard Mortar: Why Rowhouse Repairs Keep Failing](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/soft-brick-hard-mortar-why-rowhouse-repairs-keep-failing/) - 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
- [Marble Steps and Brick Stoops: Repairing a Philadelphia Front](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/marble-steps-and-brick-stoops-repairing-a-philadelphia-front/) - The marble steps on a Fishtown rowhouse are usually the oldest thing anyone looks at every day, and they are almost always the first thing a well-meaning owner ruins. I have watched people patch a worn tread with gray concrete, watched it debond over two winters, and then watched them do it again with more
- [Brick Veneer or Solid Masonry: How to Tell What You Have](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/brick-veneer-or-solid-masonry-how-to-tell-what-you-have/) - Half the arguments I have with owners about repair scope would disappear if they knew which of two completely different walls they own. A brick veneer and a solid masonry wall look nearly identical from the sidewalk and behave like unrelated buildings. On Staten Island you get both on the same block — a 1910
- [Freeze-Thaw and Mortar Joints: Why North Walls Go First](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/freeze-thaw-and-mortar-joints-why-north-walls-go-first/) - Walk any street in Grand Chute in late March and the north elevations tell you the whole story. South and west walls look tired. North walls look chewed — joints raked back an inch by nothing but weather, brick faces flaking, the bottom four feet worst of all. Same building, same brick, same year. The
- [Brick in Humid Climates: Moisture Cycling and Efflorescence](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/brick-in-humid-climates-moisture-cycling-and-efflorescence/) - 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
- [Coastal Salt and Brick: What Airborne Chloride Actually Does](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/coastal-salt-and-brick-what-airborne-chloride-actually-does/) - 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
- [Limestone in Hot, Dry Climates: Thermal Movement and Joints](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/limestone-in-hot-dry-climates-thermal-movement-and-joints/) - The Hyde Park bungalows with limestone bases have a tell I look for on every survey: a hairline running vertically through three or four courses, always somewhere near the middle of a long run, always tighter in the morning than in the afternoon. That is not settlement. That is a wall with nowhere to expand.
- [Lime Render on Desert Walls: What Survives Heat and Monsoon](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/lime-render-on-desert-walls-what-survives-heat-and-monsoon/) - 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
- [De-Icing Salt and Concrete Scaling: What Air Entrainment Buys You](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/de-icing-salt-and-concrete-scaling-what-air-entrainment-buys/) - Two driveways on the same Squirrel Hill street, both poured in the same decade, both salted every winter. One has a surface you could still eat off. The other lost its top eighth of an inch years ago and now sheds sand every spring. The difference was decided in about ninety seconds at the batch
- [Expansive Clay Under a Slab: Thickness, Steel and Joints](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/expansive-clay-under-a-slab-thickness-steel-and-joints/) - I have poured flatwork on Blackland clay for most of two decades, and the driveways that come back to haunt you are never the ones that cracked. They are the ones where a section lifted two inches above its neighbor after a wet spring. Cracks are cosmetic. Differential movement is the thing that ruins a
- [Rebar Corrosion in Coastal Concrete: Cover Depth Decides](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/rebar-corrosion-in-coastal-concrete-cover-depth-decides/) - The crack that runs parallel to a bar, about two inches in from an edge, with a rust stain weeping out of it — that one tells you exactly what is happening inside and roughly how long it has been going on. I see it on Coral Gables driveways, seawall caps and pool decks constantly,
- [Compacting a Base on Sand: Lifts, Moisture and Proof Rolling](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/compacting-a-base-on-sand-lifts-moisture-and-proof-rolling/) - Everyone in San Marco has seen the same failure: a driveway with one panel that has dropped a half inch below the rest, usually near where the old sewer lateral was replaced. The concrete did not fail. Something under it moved, and nobody checked before the pour. Sand is not automatically a good base Northeast
- [Dry-Stack or Mortared: Choosing a Retaining Wall on a Slope](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/dry-stack-or-mortared-choosing-a-retaining-wall-on-a-slope/) - On a La Mesa hillside I once took down a mortared block wall that had been standing for eleven years and failed in a single February. There was no weep, no drain, and eight feet of saturated fill behind it. The wall was well built. It was just asked to hold back something no wall
- [Parging and Damp-Proofing a Block Basement Wall](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/parging-and-damp-proofing-a-block-basement-wall/) - 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
- [Tying New Masonry Into an Old Wall on an Addition](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/tying-new-masonry-into-an-old-wall-on-an-addition/) - 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
- [Cutting an Opening in a Load-Bearing Wall: Lintels and Needles](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/cutting-an-opening-in-a-load-bearing-wall-lintels-and-needles/) - 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
- [Footings and Frost Depth for a Three-Season Room](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/footings-and-frost-depth-for-a-three-season-room/) - A Huntington client sent me photos of the three-season room a previous contractor had built for her: a nice job, sitting on a slab poured on grade, with a two-inch step now opening between the room and the house. Nothing about the room was wrong. It had simply been built on something that moves in
- [Fitting Timber to Masonry: Bucks, Shims and Moisture Breaks](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/fitting-timber-to-masonry-bucks-shims-and-moisture-breaks/) - 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
- [Preparing a Garage Slab for a Coating: Moisture Tests First](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/preparing-a-garage-slab-for-a-coating-moisture-tests-first/) - The most expensive garage floor I have ever been involved with cost the owner twice, because the first coating went down on a slab nobody tested. It looked immaculate for five months. Then it started lifting in dinner-plate discs, each one with a chalky white ring underneath. What that white ring is Water vapor moving
- [Slab Moisture Vapor Emission: What the Numbers Mean](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/slab-moisture-vapor-emission-what-the-numbers-mean/) - A Summerlin homeowner told me his slab could not possibly have a moisture problem because it had not rained in two months and the desert is dry. The relative humidity probe in his slab read 89 percent. Both statements were true, and that is the part that trips people up. Where the water comes from
- [Core Drilling Through Masonry Without Cracking It](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/core-drilling-through-masonry-without-cracking-it/) - 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
- [Chases, Flues and Abandoned Chimneys: What to Do With Them](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/chases-flues-and-abandoned-chimneys-what-to-do-with-them/) - When a Tarrytown house gets a new high-efficiency furnace, the old masonry chimney usually stops being a flue and starts being a liability. Nobody plans for it. The heating contractor is finished, the chimney is still standing, and for the next twenty years it quietly takes on water. Why an abandoned chimney deteriorates faster A
- [Crawlspace Vents, Humidity and Brick Piers](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/crawlspace-vents-humidity-and-brick-piers/) - 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
- [Chimney Flashing and Counter-Flashing: The Joint That Leaks](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/chimney-flashing-and-counter-flashing-the-joint-that-leaks/) - If a house leaks at a chimney — and in Gresham, with eight months of rain a year, a lot of them do — the odds are heavily against the masonry being the cause. It is the joint between two trades: the roofer's flashing and the mason's wall. Why this joint is hard A chimney
- [Cleaning Masonry Without Damaging It: Pressure, Chemicals, Poultices](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/cleaning-masonry-without-damaging-it-pressure-chemicals-poultices/) - 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
- [Lime Mortar Basics: Hydraulic, Natural and Bagged](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/lime-mortar-basics-hydraulic-natural-and-bagged/) - 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.
- [Reading a Crack in a Brick Wall: Pattern, Width and Movement](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/reading-a-crack-in-a-brick-wall-pattern-width-and-movement/) - 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
- [Brownstone in New England: Why It Delaminates](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/brownstone-in-new-england-why-it-delaminates/) - The brownstone steps and window surrounds around Wooster Square fail in a way that looks almost geological, because it is. Sheets come away parallel to the face, a quarter inch to two inches thick, taking the tooled surface with them and leaving a soft, sandy interior exposed to the weather. The stone is layered, and
- [Fieldstone Foundations in Old New England Houses](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/fieldstone-foundations-in-old-new-england-houses/) - Under most of the pre-1900 houses in Fair Haven there is a wall of gneiss and granite fieldstone, laid dry or in a weak lime mortar, sitting directly on the ground. No footing, no damp-proof course, no drainage. They have held up houses for 150 years, and they alarm every home inspector who sees one
- [Pointing a Rubble Stone Wall Without Turning It Into Cement](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/pointing-a-rubble-stone-wall-without-turning-it-into-cement/) - I sell lime mortar out of a small yard, which means I spend a lot of time talking people out of buying it for the wrong job and into buying it for the right one. The job it is most often wrong for is a modern block wall. The job it is almost always right
- [When a Chimney Needs a Liner, and When It Does Not](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/when-a-chimney-needs-a-liner-and-when-it-does-not/) - Liner quotes are where chimney work gets confusing for owners, because two contractors can look at the same flue and one says $400 of repointing and the other says $4,500 of stainless. Often both are describing something real. The question is what the flue is going to be used for. What a liner is for
- [Step Cracking or Vertical Cracking: What Each One Tells You](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/step-cracking-or-vertical-cracking-what-each-one-tells-you/) - 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
- [Efflorescence and What It Says About the Water Path](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/efflorescence-and-what-it-says-about-the-water-path/) - 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
- [How to Tell Repointing From a Skim Coat of Cement](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/how-to-tell-repointing-from-a-skim-coat-of-cement/) - An East Rock buyer sent me photos of a house whose listing said the brickwork had been "fully repointed last year." The joints in the photo were flush, uniform, slightly glossy, and ran across the face of several bricks. That is not repointing. That is a skim coat, and it costs about a fifth as
- [Cold-Weather Masonry: Tenting, Heat and When to Stop](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/cold-weather-masonry-tenting-heat-and-when-to-stop/) - 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
- [What a Masonry Estimate Should Itemize](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/what-a-masonry-estimate-should-itemize/) - Part of my old job was reading contractor proposals submitted with applications for work in the Wooster Square district. The good ones ran two or three pages. The bad ones were a line of text and a number, and about half of those turned into change orders or complaints before the job finished. The seven
- [Getting Three Quotes That Are Actually Comparable](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/getting-three-quotes-that-are-actually-comparable/) - Three quotes on a Fair Haven chimney: $2,400, $6,800 and $11,500. The owner assumed the middle one was the safe choice. In fact the cheap one was a partial repoint of the visible face, the expensive one included rebuilding the top eight courses and a new liner, and the middle one was somewhere in between
- [Scaffolding and Access: Why It Drives the Price](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/scaffolding-and-access-why-it-drives-the-price/) - An owner on Prospect Hill could not understand why repointing her rear elevation cost more than the front, when the front was twice the area. The front was flat, at the sidewalk, reachable from a light scaffold. The rear was three stories over a sloping garden with a conservatory in the way. The trowel work
- [Historic District Review: What Changes Need Approval](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/historic-district-review-what-changes-need-approval/) - 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,
- [Matching Brick and Mortar Color on a Repair](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/matching-brick-and-mortar-color-on-a-repair/) - 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
- [Salvaged Brick: When It Is Worth It](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/salvaged-brick-when-it-is-worth-it/) - 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
- [Waterproofing Coatings on Brick: Usually a Mistake](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/waterproofing-coatings-on-brick-usually-a-mistake/) - 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
- [Gutters, Grade and Splash-Back at the Base of a Wall](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/gutters-grade-and-splash-back-at-the-base-of-a-wall/) - 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
- [Basement Water in a Stone-Foundation House](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/basement-water-in-a-stone-foundation-house/) - 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
- [Sills, Lintels and the Details Above an Opening](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/sills-lintels-and-the-details-above-an-opening/) - 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
- [Porch and Stoop Rebuilds: What Goes Wrong](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/porch-and-stoop-rebuilds-what-goes-wrong/) - 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.
- [Garden and Boundary Walls: Frost, Footings and Copings](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/garden-and-boundary-walls-frost-footings-and-copings/) - 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
- [Keeping a Maintenance Log for an Old House](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/keeping-a-maintenance-log-for-an-old-house/) - 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
- [Hiring a Mason: Questions That Separate Trades From Sales](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/hiring-a-mason-questions-that-separate-trades-from-sales/) - 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

## Pages

- [About The Mortar Line](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/about/) - The Mortar Line is an independent publication about masonry materials and workmanship — brick, stone, mortar, and the concrete and drainage work that sits underneath them. It is written for people who own older buildings and want to understand what is happening to them before they spend money on it. What we cover Most of
- [Editorial Standards](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/editorial-standards/) - These are the rules we hold ourselves to. They exist because most of what gets published about building repair is either advertising or copied from other advertising. Numbers Every cost figure is a range, tied to a region and a scope, and reflects recent quoting rather than a national average. Technical figures — compressive strengths,

## Categories

- [Brick & Mortar](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/category/brick-mortar/)
- [Stone & Foundations](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/category/stone-foundations/)
- [Chimneys & Flues](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/category/chimneys-flues/)
- [Water & Damp](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/category/water-damp/)
- [Walls, Steps & Hardscape](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/category/walls-steps-hardscape/)
- [Slabs & Concrete](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/category/slabs-concrete/)
- [Historic Work](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/category/historic-work/)
- [Costs & Hiring](https://masonrynewhavenct.com/category/costs-hiring/)