Brick and stone repair
When the face of the brick is popping off, or a section of wall has moved, mortar work alone will not fix it. We cut the failed brick out and replace it with brick that matches.
Spalling: why brick faces pop off
Spalling is the flat face of the brick shearing away and leaving a raw, crumbly surface behind. It is a water problem, not a brick problem. Water gets into the brick — usually through failed mortar joints — and then Chicago does what Chicago does: it freezes. Water expands as it freezes, and it takes the face of the brick with it. Then it thaws, more water gets into the fresh damage, and it happens again the next cold night.
A spalled brick cannot be repaired. The face is gone and it is now an open channel for more water. It has to come out and a new one has to go in. What we can do is stop the cause at the same time, which usually means repointing the surrounding joints — otherwise the new brick sits in the same wet wall and starts down the same road.
Cracks, and which ones matter
Not every crack is structural, but the ones that are look different. A fine crack running down a mortar joint is usually the wall moving as it always has. A crack that runs straight through brick rather than around it, one that is wider at one end than the other, or one you can watch open across a season — those are the wall telling you something underneath has shifted.
Stair-step cracking that follows the mortar joints diagonally across a wall often points at settlement below, or at a rusted lintel above a window pushing the courses apart. Fixing the crack without fixing the cause just gives it somewhere new to appear.
Rebuilding a section of wall
Sometimes there is no repair small enough. If a section has bowed out, if the brick behind the face has broken down, or if enough courses have gone that there is nothing sound to tie into, that section comes down and goes back up. We take it back to something solid, rebuild it, and tie it into the surrounding wall.
This is also what happens on garage corners that have been clipped by a car, on porch piers that have been sitting in standing water for years, and on the back walls of two-flats where a downspout has been dumping straight onto the brick since the Clinton administration.
Matching what is already there
Chicago common brick is not one thing. Colour, size and texture vary by era and by neighbourhood, and a repair in the wrong brick is visible from across the street forever. We source to match, and where an exact match no longer exists we will tell you that up front and talk about where to put the closest available brick so it reads least.
Stone is the same exercise with less forgiveness — limestone sills, lintels and porch caps are common around here, and matching cut and colour matters more because there are fewer of them to hide behind.
New brickwork, not just repair
We build as well as fix. The same crew has put up brick flower beds around a house, rebuilt porch piers and steps, and laid new brick where an old wall came down. If you are looking at something you want built rather than repaired, that is the same phone call.
Get a brick repair price
Estimates are free and there is no obligation attached to one. Tell us what you are seeing and we will tell you what it actually needs.
A wall taken down and rebuilt
This one had gone past the point where pointing it would have achieved anything, so the bad section came out and went back up. The block you can see in the second photo is the structural core; the face brick is laid against it, and the limestone coping caps the top so water runs off the wall instead of down inside it.
Repair rather than rebuild
Most jobs are not that. This one in Roseland was spalled brick and failed joints on the side elevation — cut out the brick that had gone, match it, and point the rest.
