Saving your stonework when others fall short.
Saving your stonework when others fall short.
The Ghost of the Port City: A Lesson in Material Hubris I remember a cold, damp morning on a job site in an old industrial port town. A homeowner had spent a fortune on a 1905 Victorian, only to watch the facade begin to crumble. He called me in after a ‘general contractor’ had finished […]
The Ghost of Mortars Past: A Forensic Look at Failing Facades I remember my first mentor, a man who smelled eternally of tobacco and damp sand, pointing his calloused finger at a 1920s bungalow in the dead of a Chicago winter. The brickwork was weeping. Not just wet—the actual faces of the clay units were […]
The Mortar Mismatch: A Silent Killer of Historic Masonry I recently walked onto a site where a majestic 1880s carriage house was literally shedding its skin. The homeowner had hired a general contractor who thought ‘mortar is just mortar.’ They used a high-strength, Type S Portland cement to repoint the soft, hand-molded clay bricks. The […]
The Ghost of Mortar Past I once walked up to a 1912 Tudor Revival where the homeowner was near tears. She had hired a ‘masonry expert’ who treated her historic facade like a common sidewalk. He had ground out the original, buttery lime joints and replaced them with a harsh, slate-gray Portland-heavy mix. Within two […]
The Ghost in the Wall: Why Forensic Mortar Analysis is Your Building’s Only Hope The homeowner thought it was just a hairline crack. But when I put my scope inside that 1920s facade, I saw the structural steel was rusted to dust, expanded to three times its original size, and was literally exploding the brickwork […]
The Ghost in the Wall: Why Your Facade is Faltering I remember a project in the historic district where a homeowner called me out because his 1890s brickwork looked like it was ‘melting.’ He’d hired a handyman the year before to patch a few spots. That handyman, bless his heart, used modern Type S Portland […]
The Ghost in the Wall: Why Traditional Restoration is Failing I remember a job in a historic district where a young contractor had just finished ‘fixing’ a 1910 brownstone. From thirty feet away, it looked clean. But as I got closer, I could hear the building screaming. He had used a high-speed diamond blade without […]
The Forensic Reality: A Boroscope Into the Void I recently stood before a 1914 Flemish bond facade that looked, from the sidewalk, like a reasonably well-maintained piece of history. The homeowner had been told by a cut-rate contractor that the ‘hairline’ cracks were just settling. I didn’t buy it. I pulled out my boroscope and […]
The Forensic Scene: Beneath the Surface of a Failing Facade The developer thought it was just a hairline crack, a minor blemish on a century-old industrial warehouse. He called it an ‘aesthetic touch-up.’ But when I climbed that forty-foot lift and put my borescope into the cavity, I didn’t see solid masonry. I saw a […]
The Deception of the Surface: A Forensic Reality Check The homeowner thought it was just a hairline crack. But when I put my scope inside that cavity wall on a 12-story commercial loft in the West End, I saw the structural steel was rusted to dust. The ‘orange rot’ had claimed the lintels because the […]
