Category: Brick & Repointing

There’s a row of brick houses over near the Licking River where four of them were repointed together in the early 2000s, one contractor, one weekend rate. Three of those four now have brick faces popping off in coin-sized flakes along the lower courses. The fifth house in the row, the one that didn’t participate, is fine.

I get called to the three. And the conversation is always harder than people expect, because the damage isn’t in the joints they paid for.

What the brick around here is

Most of the nineteenth-century brick in this town was made close by, from river valley clay, fired in small batches. That gives you units of uneven color and size — you can see it on any unpainted wall in the old neighborhoods, the way the reds run from orange to near purple within one course.

It also gives you a soft, absorbent brick. That was fine, because it was laid in a lime mortar that was softer still, and the whole wall was designed to take on water and give it back.

The word that matters is sacrificial. The joint gives up material so the brick doesn’t have to. Repointing every sixty or eighty years was the maintenance cycle those buildings were designed around.

What hard mortar does to it

Put a modern Portland-based mortar into that wall and the ranking reverses. Now the joint is the strong part.

The wall still moves — it expands in July, contracts in January, and around here it does that through a lot of freeze-thaw cycles, more than the Deep South and fewer than Wisconsin, but with the wet winters that make every one of them count. Something has to yield, and it’s no longer the mortar. The brick spalls at the edges nearest the joint.

Water does the other half. With a dense joint, moisture that gets into the wall can’t leave through the mortar, so it leaves through the brick face, carrying dissolved salts. Those salts crystallize just under the fired surface and pop it off. That’s why the damage concentrates at the bottom of a wall — that’s where the water is.

How to tell before you hire anyone

Look at the relationship, not at either part alone.

• Perfect joints, crumbling brick edges — incompatible repointing, and it’s ongoing.
• Receding joints, sound brick — normal aging. This wall needs pointing and it’s in no danger.
• Scratch test. A key marks lime mortar without effort. If it skates off, that’s Portland.
• Color line. Modern repointing usually reads greyer and more uniform than the original, and you can often see exactly where the earlier work stopped.

What can be done about it now

Here’s the uncomfortable part: you can’t undo it cheaply. Cutting hard mortar back out of a soft wall risks more damage than leaving it, because the mortar is now stronger than the thing you’d be prying it away from.

What I recommend, in order of how much it helps per dollar:

Get the water off the wall. Gutters, downspouts discharging well away, grade falling away from the base, no sprinkler hitting the brick. On a wall already in trouble this slows the spalling more than anything else available.

Leave it uncoated. The instinct is to seal a spalling wall. A film-forming sealer traps the moisture that’s causing it, and you’ll take off more face in three years than you would have in fifteen.

Replace units selectively as they fail, in a compatible lime mortar, matching size and color as closely as salvage allows. $40 to $75 per brick.

When a whole elevation is due, redo it properly — cut out by hand, repoint in a matched lime mix at $25 to $45 per linear foot of joint. Expensive, and it ends the cycle instead of extending it. The distinction between that work and cosmetic tuckpointing is worth understanding before you buy either, and I’ve set it out in repointing and tuckpointing are not the same job.

If you’re getting bids, ask what mortar type they’d use and why, and whether they cut joints by hand or with a grinder. The technical notes from the Brick Industry Association cover mortar selection for older masonry, and a contractor who’s read them will answer in specifics rather than in reassurance.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my brick flaking off after repointing? Because the new mortar is harder than the brick. Movement and trapped moisture then damage the brick face instead of the joint. It’s the most common cause of spalling on nineteenth-century walls and it continues until the water is managed or the wall is properly repointed.

Can hard mortar be removed from old brick? Sometimes, by hand, at real risk to the brick — the mortar is now stronger than the units around it. It’s usually only worth doing as part of a full repointing of an elevation, not as a spot correction.

What mortar should be used on old soft brick? A lime-based mix softer than the brick, matched to the original by analysis where the building warrants it. The joint should always be the sacrificial element in the wall.

The question comes up on nearly every Dupont Circle rowhouse I look at. Somebody painted the front in 1978, the paint is peeling in sheets, and the owner wants the brick back. My answer is usually yes, carefully, and slowly — and sometimes it’s no.

Why it was painted, and why that matters

Find out what the paint was hiding before you plan to remove it. Three common reasons, with very different outcomes.

Sometimes it was fashion, and the brick underneath is perfectly sound. Sometimes it was covering a bad repointing job or mismatched replacement brick, and you’ll expose that mess. And sometimes it was applied over brick that was already spalling, in which case the paint is now the only thing holding the face together — take it off and you have a repointing and replacement project you didn’t budget for.

A test patch tells you which situation you’re in. Two square feet, in an inconspicuous spot, before anybody quotes the whole elevation.

The methods, from safest to worst

Chemical poultice. A paste applied thick, covered, left for hours or overnight, then removed with the paint. This is the method for historic brick. It’s slow, it’s messy, and it works without touching the fired surface. Multiple applications are normal on layered paint.

Low-pressure steam. Effective on some coatings, gentle on the substrate, and increasingly common on preservation work. Often paired with a poultice.

Abrasive blasting. Never, on soft historic brick. Sand, soda, walnut shell, dry ice — all of them remove the fired face along with the paint. A blasted rowhouse is identifiable from across the street for the rest of its life, and it will absorb water badly from then on.

Heat guns and grinders. Fire risk in a wall full of hundred-year-old framing, and grinders take the edges off. Not on a facade.

Formstone removal on Philadelphia rowhomes runs into exactly the same question — whether what’s underneath survived being covered — and the diagnostic logic is the same, laid out in taking formstone off a rowhome.

The lead question

Anything painted before 1978 should be assumed to have lead in some layer until tested. That isn’t a formality — it changes the containment, the waste handling, and who is allowed to do the work. Contractors doing this on pre-1978 housing are required to be certified under the renovation, repair and painting rule, and the requirements are set out by the EPA’s lead program.

Practically, it means plastic on the ground, controlled removal, and disposal of the residue as regulated waste. A crew that shows up planning to hose the poultice into the tree box is not the crew for this.

What happens after the paint is off

Expect to repoint. Paint removal exposes joints that have been protected for forty years and are usually eroded behind the film. Budget for it rather than being surprised by it.

And leave it bare. The instinct after all that work is to seal the brick, and a film-forming sealer puts you right back where you started — moisture trapped in the wall, leaving through the face. If the brick is sound, uncoated masonry with good joints is what lasts.

Costs

Chemical paint removal on a rowhouse facade runs $12 to $25 per square foot, which on a typical two-bay front is $6,000 to $14,000 depending on the number of layers and the access. Lead-safe practices are part of that number, not an add-on.

Repointing afterward is another $25 to $45 per linear foot of joint. Replacement of brick that turns out to be spalled is $40 to $75 per unit.

If the test patch shows the face is already gone under the paint, the honest recommendation is to leave it painted and maintain the paint properly — a good mineral or breathable masonry paint, correctly prepared. It’s not the answer people want, but it’s cheaper than the alternative and it doesn’t destroy anything.

Frequently asked questions

Can painted brick be restored to bare brick? Usually yes, with chemical poultices or low-pressure steam, provided the brick face under the paint is sound. A two-square-foot test patch before quoting the job is what determines whether it’s viable.

Is sandblasting brick ever acceptable? Not on soft historic brick. Abrasive blasting removes the fired outer face along with the coating, leaving a permanently more absorbent wall that deteriorates faster from then on.

How much does removing paint from a brick rowhouse cost? Roughly $12 to $25 per square foot for chemical removal with lead-safe practices, so $6,000 to $14,000 for a typical facade. Repointing afterward is usually necessary and adds $25 to $45 per linear foot of joint.

I was asked to look at a house off P Street in Georgetown, built somewhere in the 1820s. Someone had repointed the front elevation about twelve years earlier with a standard bagged mortar. The joints were immaculate — straight, uniform, still hard. The brick around them was falling apart. Roughly one unit in six had lost its face, and along the water table it was worse than that.

The pointing hadn’t failed. That was the problem.

The joint is supposed to be the weak part

In a soft historic wall, the mortar is designed to be sacrificial. Brick of that era was fired at lower temperatures and is relatively soft and porous — compressive strengths in the range of a thousand to two thousand psi are common, sometimes less. The lime mortar around it is softer still.

That relationship does real work. The wall moves — thermally, seasonally, as the building settles — and the mortar accommodates it by deforming and, over decades, by slowly giving up material. When you repoint, you replace the joint. That’s a hundred-dollar-a-foot maintenance item on a schedule of fifty to eighty years.

Put a modern Portland-based mortar in that wall and you invert it. Type S runs around 1,800 psi, Type N around 750; a traditional lime mortar might be under 350. Now the mortar is stronger than the brick, and when the wall moves, the brick is what yields. It spalls at the arris — the edges nearest the joint — and it does not grow back.

There’s a moisture half to this as well. A soft lime joint lets the wall breathe, and moisture that gets in leaves through the joint. Seal that path with a dense mortar and the water leaves through the face of the brick instead, carrying salts and taking the fired surface with it in the first hard freeze.

How to tell what you have

Three checks that don’t require a lab.

• Scratch it. A key or a nail will mark historic lime mortar without much pressure. Portland mortar resists.
• Look at the color and the fines. Lime mortars are usually lighter, often with visible sand and sometimes small unburnt lime lumps. Modern mortar looks uniform and grey.
• Look at where the damage is. If the joints are perfect and the brick edges are crumbling, you’re looking at an incompatible repointing job. If the joints are receding and the brick is fine, that’s normal aging.

For anything on a contributing building I’d have a mortar analysis done — $200 to $500 — before specifying a replacement mix. It tells you the binder, the aggregate and the ratio, and it’s the difference between matching and guessing.

Doing the work

Joints get cut back by hand to two and a half times their width, square at the back, with the old material removed and the brick edges left intact. Angle grinders are where historic walls get destroyed by well-meaning crews — one slip widens a joint permanently or nicks the arris.

The new mortar goes in in lifts, not one deep pass, and it needs to be kept damp while it cures. Lime carbonates slowly; rushing that step is how a correct mix still fails. Repointing and tuckpointing get used interchangeably and are not the same operation at all, which I’ve spelled out in repointing and tuckpointing are not the same job.

The National Park Service’s preservation brief on repointing mortar joints is the document most preservation offices and good contractors work from. If a bidder hasn’t read it, that tells you something.

What it costs, and what the alternative costs

Hand-cut repointing with a custom-matched lime mortar runs $25 to $45 per linear foot of joint in this market, which puts a typical rowhouse front elevation somewhere between $9,000 and $22,000. It’s expensive because it’s slow and it can’t be subcontracted to a crew that does it once a year.

Replacing spalled historic brick is $40 to $75 per unit, salvaged stock permitting, and matching it is never perfect. On that Georgetown house the brick replacement alone came to more than the original incompatible repointing had cost.

If you’re interviewing contractors, ask what mortar they’d specify and why, and whether they’d have it analyzed first. Anyone doing serious DC masonry on historic buildings will answer that in detail without being pushed. A quick answer about Type N is a reason to keep looking.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my brick crumbling but the mortar looks fine? That pattern almost always means the wall was repointed with a mortar harder than the brick. The joint is supposed to be the softer, sacrificial element; when it isn’t, movement and moisture damage the brick face instead.

Can you use regular mortar on an old brick house? On a soft historic wall, no. Portland-based mortars at 750 to 1,800 psi against brick that may be under 2,000 psi will cause spalling within a decade or two. A lime-based mix matched to the original is what those walls need.

How much does lime mortar repointing cost? Roughly $25 to $45 per linear foot of joint for hand-cut work with a matched mix. A mortar analysis beforehand runs $200 to $500 and is worth it on any building with historic significance.

A woman in Fishtown called me out last spring because a chunk of her front wall had landed on the sidewalk. It wasn’t brick. It was a slab of formstone about the size of a dinner plate, and behind it the original brick looked like it had been chewed. She wanted to know whether the rest of it was coming down too, and what was underneath. Those are the two questions everybody asks, and the honest answer to the second one is that nobody knows until you take a piece off.

What formstone actually is

Formstone is a cement stucco troweled over the original brick, then stamped and colored to look like cut stone. It went up all over Philadelphia and Baltimore from the late 1930s through the 1950s, sold door to door as a permanent fix for brick that needed pointing — never paint or repoint again. It was cheap next to real masonry work, and on a block where three neighbors had done it, the fourth usually followed.

The problem is how it was attached. Installers scored the brick face with a hatchet or grinder so the cement had something to grab, hung wire lath in places, and troweled over it. That scoring is permanent damage. It’s why removal is never a clean reveal.

What you find when it comes off

Budget for a test patch before committing to anything: two square feet somewhere inconspicuous, taken off by hand with a chisel rather than a rotary hammer. You’re looking at how much original face is left and whether the joints are sound.

Three outcomes, roughly. Sometimes the brick is in decent shape with hatchet marks that read as texture from the sidewalk — that house can be repointed and left exposed. Sometimes the face is gone on half the brick, exposing soft inner clay that will spall the first hard winter; those walls need a stucco system or selective brick replacement, both dearer than people expect. And sometimes water has sat behind the formstone for forty years and the wall is soft enough to dig with a screwdriver — a structural conversation, not a cosmetic one.

The cost gap nobody warns you about

Removal isn’t the expensive part — getting formstone off a typical two-story front runs around $4,000 to $9,000 depending on height, access and how stubbornly it’s bonded. What moves the number is everything after. Repointing an exposed front is commonly $12 to $25 per square foot, and a few hundred replacement brick add meaningfully to that. So the realistic range for stripping a front and putting the brick right is wide: $15,000 to $40,000 for a standard two-story, more with cornice work or a bay. I’ve watched people start with $6,000 in their head and stop halfway, which is the worst place to stop, because a half-stripped wall is unprotected.

When leaving it alone is the better call

There’s no rule that says formstone has to go. Well bonded, uncracked and shedding water, it’s doing a job. Patching a failed section and recoloring is a legitimate repair, and on a block where most fronts are still formstoned, keeping it is arguably the more honest historic choice — that cladding is seventy years of the building’s actual history.

Where I push toward removal is when it’s failing in more than one place, because water is then getting behind it and you’re paying for damage you can’t see. Cracks running in a line, sections that sound hollow, rust stains bleeding through from the lath — it has stopped being a coat and started being a lid.

Before anyone touches the front, check whether the block sits in a historic district — the Historical Commission has jurisdiction over exterior changes on designated properties, and removal there is a review matter, not a homeowner decision. The National Park Service guidance on cement stuccos covers why repair-versus-remove isn’t as obvious as it looks.

Finding someone who has done it before

This is not general contractor work. The skill is in the chiseling — knowing when to stop, reading the brick as it comes off, and having the judgment to say halfway through that the wall wants stucco rather than exposure. Ask for addresses they’ve stripped and go look from the sidewalk; a rushed front looks patchy and over-pointed, with wide grey joints that don’t match the brick. When I hand these off I look for a Philadelphia masonry crew that does repointing as its main line of work rather than a sideline, because removal is only the first week of the job. To understand what you’re being quoted on the repointing half, the difference between repointing and tuckpointing is worth reading first — the words get used interchangeably on estimates and they are not the same labor.

Frequently asked questions

Will removing formstone damage my brick? The damage is already done — installers scored the brick face to make the cement stick. Removal reveals it rather than causing it. How much face is left varies wildly from house to house, which is why a test patch before committing is worth the few hundred dollars it costs.

Can I take formstone off myself? Physically yes, in the sense that a chisel and a hammer will do it. But the judgment calls — when the brick underneath can’t be exposed, when you’ve hit a structural problem — are the actual job. I’ve seen more damage from careful amateurs with rotary hammers than from weather.

Do I need a permit to remove formstone in Philadelphia? Exterior alteration permits through L&I are typically required, and if the property is individually designated or sits in a historic district, the Historical Commission reviews the change separately. Check both before scheduling, not after.

A homeowner in Decatur called me three summers in a row about the same crack. Same brick, same spot above the dining room window, about a sixteenth of an inch. Every August she could slip a business card into it. Every February it closed up so tight she thought I’d finally fixed it. I hadn’t fixed anything — I’d pointed it twice, and the second time I told her to stop paying me to do it.

That crack was the house telling her what the soil under it was doing, and around here the soil does a lot.

What red clay does under a brick house

Georgia red clay is expansive. It swells when it takes on water and shrinks when it dries, and the difference is enough to lift and drop one corner of a foundation by a fraction of an inch through the year. Sand doesn’t do this. Clay does, and the tighter the clay, the more it moves.

Our rainfall pattern makes it worse than the annual number suggests. Heavy spring rain, then a stretch of dry heat in July and August that pulls moisture out of the top few feet — especially where a mature oak is drinking from it. The clay on the shady side stays damp while the sunny side contracts, and the house sits on both.

Brick is stiff and mortar is stiffer than people think. Something gives, and it gives at the weakest line in the wall: the corner of an opening, a change in wall height, or wherever the bricklayer stopped for lunch fifty years ago.

Telling a clay crack from a real problem

The seasonal ones open and close. Mark the ends of a crack with a pencil in February and check it in August — a clay-driven crack will have grown at the ends or widened, then reversed. That pattern by itself is not an emergency.

What I do worry about: cracks wider than about a quarter inch, cracks that step diagonally through several courses toward a corner, cracks that keep growing without reversing, doors that stop latching, and any crack with one side pushed out of plane from the other. That last one — where you feel a lip running your hand across it — means the wall is moving in two directions, not just breathing. That’s a structural engineer’s call, and it’s worth the $400 to $600 for the report before anyone mixes mortar. If you want to get better at reading them first, I’ve gone through the differences in which brick cracks actually matter.

Fix the water first, the mortar second

Repointing a seasonal crack without changing the moisture around the foundation is a subscription, not a repair. Before I quote pointing on a house that moves, I walk the perimeter looking at four things: where the downspouts discharge, whether the grade falls away from the wall for the first six to ten feet, whether the gutters are actually carrying water, and how close the big trees are.

Most houses I see in Decatur and Avondale Estates have downspouts dumping within a foot of the wall. Extending them out six feet with a buried line costs a few hundred dollars and does more for the brick than a thousand dollars of pointing. Regrading a low spot is dirt work — usually $600 to $2,000 depending on access.

Once the water is boring, then point. Cutting out and repointing a single crack line, matched for color and joint profile, generally runs $18 to $35 per linear foot here, with a minimum charge because mobilizing a crew for two hours costs what four hours costs. A full elevation gets priced by the square foot instead.

What to expect afterward

A properly cut-out joint on a house that still moves will usually hold for years, because you’ve replaced a hard, cracked joint with mortar that has some give. What it won’t do is stop the movement. A hairline may reappear along the same line, and that isn’t failed work. The Brick Industry Association’s technical notes library covers joint design in plain language if you want the reasoning.

One piece of timing advice worth more than the rest: have the wall looked at in late summer, when the clay is driest and the cracks widest. Plenty of work gets quoted in February, and a winter walkthrough makes a moving wall look better than it is. Whoever you bring out — there are a lot of crews doing Atlanta masonry — ask which season they measured in.

Frequently asked questions

Is a hairline crack in brick a foundation problem? Usually not by itself. On Georgia clay, hairlines that open in late summer and close in winter are normal seasonal movement. Width over a quarter inch, diagonal stepping toward a corner, or one side offset from the other are what warrant an engineer.

Why did my repointed crack come back? Because the movement causing it is still there. Repointing restores the joint; it doesn’t change how much water the clay under your footing gains and loses. Fixing downspouts, grade and gutters first is what makes the repair last.

What does it cost to repoint one cracked area? Roughly $18 to $35 per linear foot of joint, plus a minimum trip charge. Color and profile matching on older brick sits at the higher end, because the mortar has to be sampled and mixed rather than pulled off a pallet.

Half my clients use “repointing” and “tuckpointing” as if they mean the same thing, and honestly half the contractors do too. They are related but different, and the confusion matters when you are reading a quote, because one is structural maintenance and the other is largely decorative. If a bid says “tuckpointing” and you actually need repointing, or vice versa, you are not buying what you think you are.

What repointing is

Repointing is the real, necessary work: removing old, deteriorated mortar from the joints and replacing it with fresh mortar. Over decades, mortar weathers, cracks, and washes out, and once the joints open up, water gets into the wall and the damage accelerates. Repointing grinds or rakes out the failed mortar to a sound depth and packs in new mortar, restoring the wall’s ability to shed water and carry load. This is the job that keeps a brick wall standing.

What tuckpointing is

Tuckpointing, in the strict sense, is a decorative technique. It uses two contrasting colors of mortar, one matched to the brick and a thin line of contrasting color, to create the illusion of very fine, crisp joints, historically to make ordinary brickwork look like expensive gauged brick. It is a craft finish, not a structural repair. In everyday American usage the word has drifted to mean any joint repair, which is exactly where the confusion comes from.

Why the distinction matters on a quote

When you are hiring, what you almost always need is repointing, restoring failed joints so the wall stays weather-tight. Make sure the quote describes:

• How deep the old mortar will be removed (typically at least twice the joint width, to sound mortar)
• What mortar mix will be used, this is critical on old brick, which needs soft lime-based mortar, not hard modern Portland
• How the new joints will be tooled to match the existing profile

Knowing when joints have actually failed and need this work is its own skill, which I cover in how to tell when mortar has failed.

What it costs

Repointing is priced by the area of wall and the condition of the joints, commonly $10 to $25 per square foot, higher on historic work or hard-to-reach walls. The mortar-matching requirement is where quality separates from cheap: using the wrong hard mortar on soft old brick cracks the brick faces and causes worse damage than the open joints did. The Brick Industry Association’s technical notes cover joint repair and mortar selection through the Brick Industry Association. When you read a bid, look past the word used and check what the work actually is.

How the joint is finished, and why it shows

One thing homeowners rarely think about until they see a bad job is how the new joint is tooled, because the finish profile is both functional and highly visible. When mortar is packed into a raked joint, the mason strikes and tools it to a profile, concave, weathered, flush, or a few others, and that profile should match the rest of the wall or the repair stands out like a patch. A concave or “bucket handle” joint is the most common and sheds water well; a weathered joint, angled to shed water outward, also performs well; a flush joint looks clean but drains less effectively; and a raked joint, recessed for shadow lines, holds water and is a poor choice on a weather-exposed wall. On a repointing job, matching both the color and the profile of the existing joints is what makes the work disappear into the wall. If a repair looks obvious from the street, it is usually because the tooling or the mortar color was not matched, not because the structure is wrong. Ask any bidder how they will match the existing joint profile.

Frequently asked questions

Is tuckpointing the same as repointing? Not strictly. Repointing is replacing failed mortar in the joints, a structural, weatherproofing repair. Tuckpointing is technically a decorative finish using two mortar colors to fake fine joints. In common American usage the terms are used interchangeably, so check what the work actually involves rather than the label.

How often does brick need repointing? Good mortar joints can last several decades, often 50 years or more, before needing repointing. The trigger is condition, not age: once joints are cracked, receding, or letting water in, it is time. Historic buildings with soft lime mortar may need it more often.

Why does the mortar type matter for repointing? Because old brick is soft and needs a soft lime-based mortar that flexes with it. Hard modern Portland-cement mortar is stronger than the brick and forces moisture and stress into the brick face, causing it to crack and spall. Matching the original mortar strength is essential, especially on older buildings. Hardscape crews hit the same mismatch on old site walls; a San Diego hardscaping crew repointing a 1920s garden wall reaches for lime, not Portland.