Saving your stonework when others fall short.
Saving your stonework when others fall short.
The Deception of a Fresh Coat I have spent forty years in the dirt and dust, and nothing makes my blood boil quite like seeing a historic brick facade smothered in a thick layer of latex paint. To the untrained eye, it looks like a clean, modern update. To a third-generation mason, it looks like […]
The Tragedy of the Suffocating Stone I remember walking onto a site in the historic district where a homeowner had just spent a fortune on a limestone facade restoration. To ‘protect’ it, they hired a local handyman who rolled on a thick, glossy acrylic sealer he found at a big-box store. Within two winters, the […]
The Forensic Scene: When the Stone Starts to Bleed The homeowner called me out because she thought her 1890s sandstone entryway was just ‘getting dusty.’ She had hired a local handyman the year before to brighten it up, and he had applied a glossy, film-forming driveway sealer he had leftover from another job. When I […]
The Forensic Scene: A Ghost in the Wall The homeowner thought it was just a hairline crack, a minor blemish on a multimillion-dollar facade. But when I put my scope inside the cavity of that brick column, I didn’t see structural integrity; I saw a graveyard. The structural steel was rusted to dust, and the […]
The Forensic Scene: When Walls Begin to Weep The homeowner pointed to a tiny, shimmering trail of moisture running down the fieldstone in the cellar. He thought it was a hairline crack, a minor annoyance. But when I pulled out the borescope and slipped it into a void behind a crumbling joint, I didn’t see […]
The Anatomy of a Dying Wall The homeowner thought it was just a hairline crack, a little salt-like dust on the floor of the cellar. But when I put my scope inside that cavity, the reality was a horror show: the structural brick ties replacement they’d ignored for years had left the outer wythe unsupported, […]
The Forensic Scene: When the Walls Start Weeping I remember standing on a suspended scaffold twelve stories up, looking at a modular panel system that was less than five years old. The owner had called me because of what he described as ‘sweating’ on the interior drywall. When I put my moisture probe to the […]
The Sugaring of History I stood last Tuesday in front of a 1890s limestone courthouse, running my thumb across a decorative corbel. What should have been sharp, crisp architectural detail felt like a pile of wet granulated sugar. This is the ‘sugaring’ effect, the physical manifestation of a building literally dissolving in the rain. Most […]
The Forensic Scene: A Facade in Mourning I stood on a swaying scaffold thirty feet above the pavement, looking at a historic limestone facade that was literally shedding its skin. The homeowner called me because they saw ‘a few flakes’ on the sidewalk. To the untrained eye, it looked like old age. But when I […]
The Anatomy of Basement Decay Walk into any pre-war basement in the humid sprawl of the Northeast or the river-fed valleys of the Midwest, and you will smell it before you see it. It is a sharp, mineral scent—the smell of a building slowly dissolving. When you look at the base of the walls, you […]
