Masonry work in Chicago and the South Suburbs
Forty-five years of brick and mortar on the South Side. Whatever the specific job turns out to be, it usually starts with the same question: where is the water getting in, and how long has it been doing it?
Water is almost always the answer
Nearly every masonry repair we are called out for traces back to water and to the freeze-thaw cycle that follows it. Water gets into a wall through a failed joint, a cracked crown, a rusting lintel or an open coping seam. Then it freezes, expands, opens the gap it came in through, and lets more water in next time.
Which is why we will always want to find the entry point rather than just tidy up the damage. Fix the symptom and you are booking the same job again in three years.
The work, by type
Tuckpointing
Grinding out dead mortar and repacking the joints. The most common job on this list by a distance.
Brick & stone repair
Spalled faces, cracked courses and rebuilt sections, matched to the existing brick.
Chimneys
Crowns, repointing, partial and full rebuilds — and new chimneys built from scratch.
Lintels
Rusted steel above windows and doors, cut out and replaced before it splits the wall.
Parapet walls
The wall above the roofline, and the coping across the top of it.
Waterproofing
Sealing sound masonry to protect the repair — after the joints are right, not instead.
Concrete
Driveways, walks, porches, steps and slabs, plus cutting and removal.
Commercial masonry
Larger buildings, scheduled around your tenants and your trading hours.
Versatile enough to be worth one phone call
One job last season ran from replacing the decking on the back of a house, to painting it, to building brick flower beds around the property. That is three different sets of hands at most companies and three separate schedules to coordinate.
A six-man crew that has been together a long time can move between trades without renegotiating the job every time something else turns up. It also means that when we are on site for one thing and spot another, we can usually just deal with it.
Fitting the work to the budget
There is nearly always more than one honest answer. A wall might want full repointing, or it might want the two elevations that take the weather done now and the others in a couple of years. A chimney might want rebuilding, or it might want the crown recast to buy real time.
We will lay out the options and tell you what each one actually buys you. We can fit within most budgets, and after forty-five years we have no interest in selling anybody a job they did not need.
Get a masonry 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.