About Bedjoint

Bedjoint is named after the horizontal joint that carries the load in every masonry wall — the part nobody photographs and everything depends on. The site covers brick, block and stone on houses: how walls fail, how water gets into them, what a real repair involves, and what that work costs when it is done properly.

What Bedjoint is for

Masonry problems announce themselves years before they become expensive, and almost always in the same handful of ways. A joint raking out. Efflorescence returning every spring in the same place. A crack that has opened a little since last autumn. Reading those signs is a learnable skill, and a homeowner who has it spends far less over the life of a building than one who waits for something dramatic.

The cost figures, and their limits

• Always a range, never a quote. Tied to a stated region and a described scope, because those two things move the number more than anything else.
• Collected from recent work. What crews are quoting now, not a national index or a figure carried over from an earlier year.
• Wrong for your wall, on purpose. The point of a range is to tell you whether a quote you have been given is reasonable, not to replace it.

Recommendations, and complaints

Where an article points at a business, it does that because the firm works in that area on that type of job. Nothing here is paid placement and nothing is sold. Use a mention as a starting point, then get more than one written quote and check that anything requiring a permit has one. This site does not quote, book or carry out work, and nothing published here substitutes for someone qualified looking at your building. If a figure has aged or a fact is wrong, the contact page is how to tell us; if a dispute with a contractor is what you are dealing with, the Better Business Bureau and your state licensing board are the right places to take it.