Jeremy Stacy, “List-en Up!” associate producer
Bruce Ammerman interview
Feb. 10, 2009

Jeremy Stacy: Please give me your name and your business name for the record.

Dr. Christina Wilson: My name is Dr. Christina Wilson and I'm the president of Renaissance Development. Renaissance Development is a small construction company in Washington, D.C. We have been in business for five years.

Our specialty is exterior masonry. We do patios, walkways, retaining walls, steps and tuckpointing. Tuckpointing is really our bread and butter, but we also do a lot of urban gardens for people. In urban neighborhoods, people have a tendency to have a small front and back yards so we specialize in creating nice gardens for people to spend time in.

JS: How did you get involved in this line of work?

CW: I have a Ph.D. in architectural history and my specialty is American architecture. For years I worked in continuing education, which is education for adults. I was director of programs and adult education at the National Building Museum in Washington [D.C.] and I was there for four years. I was working a lot of nights and weekends, so I wanted to try something different so I did some odds and ends for a while.

I met a friend of a friend who built patios in suburban Virginia and so I helped him with his business for a while just on a consulting basis. I realized there was a really big market for this kind of work in Washington, D.C. It didn't seem like many contractors were doing it and it's a very good market for D.C. because D.C. is a brick city.

That's the very short version of how I got into this business.

JS: What is tuckpointing?

CW: Tuckpointing is the restoration of the mortar joints in a historic brick building. The reason it's called tuckpointing - sometimes it's called repointing - some purists say repointing is the more accurate term, but tuckpointing is the term more commonly used - it refers to the process of removing aging or failing mortar between the bricks in an old building and then replacing it with historically appropriate mortar.

JS: Can the terms tuckpointing and brick restoration be used interchangeably?

CW: Tuckpointing specifically refers to addressing the joints themselves. During the process of tuckpointing we often repair brick faces and clean them and that sort of thing. Masonry or brick restoration is a big umbrella term and tuckpointing would probably go within that because tuckpointing is specifically referring to the restoration of the joints themselves.

JS: Why do homes require tuckpointing?

CW: Historic buildings in the United States that date anywhere from the 18th century up until the 1930s, for the most part, were built with bricks fired in either a fire-burning kiln or a coal-burning kiln. Those bricks are relatively soft because that sort of fire doesn't get that hot, relatively speaking.

These historic bricks are very soft and the mortar that was used to put them together originally was a lime-based mortar. Lime is a stone, and just like the bricks, you burn it in a kiln and then you add sand and a couple other things and you put the building together — at least historically.

Let's say that you have a building that’s 100 years old.  Because the lime mortar is relatively soft, when it's exposed to wind and weather over the decades, it starts to fail. You'll see mortar that you can stick a key in. It's soft enough where the mortar will just come right up. That can lead to structural problems for a building and it can also lead to water penetration if there are gaps in the brick joints.

It's very important to take away the failing mortar - the crumbling stuff - and then put mortar back that replicates the original [mortar] in consistency, content and texture. It's very important not to use cement. Cement is a modern building material that was used primarily ¬¬as a paving material at the turn of the 20th century for walkways and steps and that kind of stuff. But, it became very commonly used in new construction during and after World War II.

Typical 1950s suburban developments, for example, were all built with bricks fired at a very high temperature and then concrete was used to put them together. But concrete is a modern material that doesn't get along with the historical materials.

Concrete is very hard. It's harder than the old bricks themselves, so it can cause those bricks to crack if you tuckpoint with concrete. Concrete also has chemicals in it and so if you tuckpoint a historical building with concrete, the chemicals in the concrete can actually eat away the bricks and old mortar like acid. It's very important if your tuckpointing a historical building that you do it with the right materials.

Tuckpointing is sort of a weird animal because most people don't know anything about it, but then they buy a historic brick house and they wonder why the mortar is falling out.

JS: Do newer homes require tuckpointing?

CW: Buildings built after World War I - in the 1920s and the 1930s - they rarely need tuckpointing because they do tend to be constructed with mortar that has a little bit more cement in it. By the 1920s and 1930s, the bricks that were used in new construction were fired at a much higher temperature. So those buildings are not only newer, but they tend not to fail the same way an 18th or 19th century building would.

Any building built after World War II doesn't need tuckpointing because the materials that were used are so hard and again, it hasn't had the chance to age to the same extent that a Colonial or Victorian house has.

JS: Tell me about the process of tuckpointing.

CW: Tuckpointing is a lot like ice skating. It looks really easy until you try to do it.  It takes a tremendous amount of work. All the guys that work for me are from Honduras and they've been masons all their lives. They're very experienced bricklayers and they know how to do new construction.

You have to be very careful when you're scraping out those joints that you don't damage the old bricks because they are old. It's very easy to chip the corners off and do damage that way.

We also do all this work by hand. We don't use diamond blade saws or machines to cut out the joints because you can do damage to an old building if you do that.

Then, when you put the mortar back in, it's very tricky because you've got this open joint. The bricks are just sitting there with spaces between them and you have to get the mortar in. It has to be the right consistency. It can't be too wet. When you add the water to the mortar, it can't be too runny and it can't be too thick. You've got to make sure there aren't air bubbles.

Then when the joint is filled in, all the joints have to be scored, which means you take a concave tool and you scrape the mortar out so there's a slight recess to the joint. That way the water will flick off the wall so it won't run straight down. To do that and make it look good and consistent is very tricky. It's also very tricky to keep the mortar in the mortar joints and not get it smeared all over the bricks because you want to have a very clearly defined joint. And, you want to have a demarcation between the brick itself and the brick joint.

We actually redo a lot of bad tuckpointing projects. We work on buildings that have aged and need attention, but a lot of times these buildings have bad fixes or masonry works that's just not very well done. We spend a lot of time undoing that kind of stuff and redoing it the right way.

JS: Are there certain parts of a brick home that tend to deteriorate more quickly than others?

CW:  The most acute level of failure that you'll see first tends to be around the first floor and the basement area. That's because when water hits the wall, it runs down the face of the wall and as it runs down it slows down. It tends to penetrate the brick joints at the first floor and in the basement. That's when people usually notice it. Of course, if it's at eye level you can really see it.

A lot of people think that if you just address the first floor of the basement - because it looks the worst - that's going to solve the problem. But, that level of failure is usually pronounced over the entire building. It's just not as obvious if you're looking at it with the naked eye from the ground.

There are plenty of contractors out there that will just do what we call spot tuckpointing, which means they would just tuckpoint here and there. We don't do that. If a building needs tuckpointing, the whole thing needs tuckpointing. It's all or nothing.

JS: How can a homeowner tell if their home is in need of tuckpointing?

CW: The first thing homeowners should ask themselves is "How old is the house?" If the house was built before 1920 and it's brick, there's a very good chance it at least needs some attention.

I have a key on my key ring, which I call my tuckpointing key. When I go to see clients, I use my key to see if I can stick the key in the mortar joint. Now if I can put a key in the joint and the mortar is soft enough that the key will stick there, that's a real sign that the mortar is getting soft and it probably needs to be redone.

JS: How long does a typical project last and what's the average cost?

CW: I really couldn't give you a cost because it varies so much. If you're in a row house in a historic neighborhood - in D.C., row houses on Capitol Hill and the older parts of town tend to be 17 to 18 feet wide. If you're just doing the front facade, you're looking at a project that's maybe 750 or 800 square feet. If you're doing the sides or the back, those walls can be much larger.

Historic buildings have a tendency to be typological, but they're all different. The way we estimate the cost for tuckpointing is we measure the square footage of the side of the building that needs work, then we give a price based on the square foot and the level of deterioration and also the extent to which there have been bad fixes.

For example, if you have a wall that's been covered with concrete and it's chewing up the bricks that are behind it, that's going to be more expensive to fix because we have to undo the bad stuff. If we have to take away that concrete, we have to stabilize the wall, then we have to tuckpoint. It's very rare for us to find a building that doesn't have bad fixes that we have to undo.

The question is what is the extent? Is it just a few joints here and there? We've had buildings where the entire side facade is covered with a layer of concrete. When we take the concrete off, some of the brick faces come with it.

You could have three buildings on a street that were all built at exactly the same time, but they could be in totally different states of repair or disrepair depending on who's owned them and what's been done to them.

Based on that, I can't really give you a price [range] because old buildings are so different.

JS: Have any interesting stories come out of tuckpointing projects you have done?

CW: The first thing that comes to mind is I've had clients that like to climb on the scaffolding. I'm always telling my clients that I don't want them to climb on the scaffolding because of the liability. I have a clause in my contract that states that you can't climb on the scaffolding unless the president or the crew foreman is there.

I have one client that climbed the scaffolding and she measured all the mortar joints to make sure that we scraped out enough. She got up there with a ruler and she measured them all. We made her happy though.

Tuckpointing is a very satisfying thing because it's very hard to find a contractor that knows how to do it properly. Sometimes homeowners are very nervous about who's going to do it and how they're going to do it. It's very big investment. It's like getting a new roof. You want to make sure you have somebody who does it right.

You're really helping homeowners. People who live in historic buildings are really making a commitment to spend more money and more effort than folks who tend to live in newer houses. Old houses do need a lot of work and they need a lot attention. Tuckpointing is something that an old house needs that a new house doesn't.

If you're living in a 1970s or 1980s suburb, nobody needs tuckpointing. But, everyone on Capitol Hill does to a certain extent. It's satisfying because you're really fulfilling a need for people who love their old houses and want to take care of them.

The other thing that's great about it is buildings that are 100 years old, they tend to get dirty over time. When we tuckpoint, the wall gets washed several times. At the end, not only are all the mortar joints consistent in their color, but also the walls are clean. People are always amazed at how good the building looks.

Usually they call us and say the mortar is falling out so we need to get the wall tuckpointed, but then they're always amazed at how pretty it is. You don't quite expect that. You're used to grungy old dirty brick buildings.

When they're all cleaned and they're so beautiful, that's just great. I always tell clients at the beginning when we start that you're not going to believe how good this is going to look. They don't quite believe me until we actually get done and they're like "Wow, this is so gorgeous!" That's very gratifying.

JS:  What kind of questions should homeowners ask when they're trying to select a contractor to perform tuckpointing.

CW: The first thing you want to do is check to make sure your contractor is licensed, bonded and insured. Always request a copy of the license and a copy of the insurance information.

Then, you want to ask how long the company has been in business and how long they've been doing tuckpointing and how many projects they've done.

You want to ask who is doing the work. Is it full-time employees or subcontractors? A lot of construction companies focus on carpentry and remodeling interiors and if there's brickwork, they tend to subcontract it out because brickwork is sort of a specialty.

You really need to ask who is going to do the work. All of my employees have been with me for five years. They're all full-time employees. I know them very well and I know how skilled they are. We've completed well over 100 projects. I've lost count we've done so many.

The other important question is what sort of materials are going to be used? It's very important that the mortar used in historic buildings is lime-based and doesn't have any cement in it.

A lot of contractors that do tuckpointing will use mortar with some cement in it because they think it's better to have some of that hardness. I don't agree with that. I think you should use just lime [-based mortar].

The homeowner will really want to ask exactly what kind of mortar is going to be used. They might even want to do research on the company that manufactures the mortar to check out its content and so on.

A lot of times people will just go to the hardware store and buy a bag of cement and go "Oh, I think I'll just try this myself." You see a lot of what I call Frankenstein fixes. You'll see a building that has sort of a jagged edge of mortar in between the bricks sort of here and there. It's not consistent and it sort of looks like somebody climbed up the ladder on a Saturday afternoon and just fiddled with 1 square foot of the wall and that was it.

It's actually worse to have repairs like that as opposed to doing nothing because of the potentially bad workmanship and also because of the materials that are harmful.

We see concrete and cement on these old buildings. We also see silicone. I've seen duct tape. I've seen bathtub caulking in brick joints. Roofers have a tendency to - they're very good at roofs - but they'll tend to put roof sealant all over the chimney, which is a mess. We undo that kind of stuff too.

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Jeremy Stacy, “List-en Up!” associate producer
Bruce Ammerman interview
March 11, 2009

Jeremy Stacy: Please give me your name, location for the record.

Bruce Ammerman:  My name is Bruce Ammerman and I live in Asheville, N.C.

JS: Tell me about your home.

BA: This is a brick and stucco house that was built in 1924. At some point it was painted. When I bought the home at that time, I did not know that it could be a real bad idea to paint a brick house.

JS: Why isn't it a good idea to paint a brick home?

BA: It might be easiest if I start chronologically. Sometime last summer, I was out under the deck in the rear of my house where things tend to get stored and I noticed that a number of the mortar joints were missing a lot of mortar.

I crouched down and took a twig and poked in at some of these holes in some of these mortar joints. In a couple of them, when I poked the twig in between the bricks, sand just started to pour out and I started to freak out a little bit because it doesn't seem like a good idea for sand to be making little piles on the ground underneath your wall.

I realized as I continued to explore it with a twig or my finger that in many of these joints between the bricks, the mortar was so soft that it was crumbling with the touch of my finger.

I did a lot of research and it turns out that bricks that were made before the 1920s or 1930s were fired at a lower temperature so they're not as hard as modern bricks. Also, the mortar that was typically used was a lime-based mortar, which is also somewhat softer than the modern mortars, which are made using Portland cement. Most importantly, the lime-based mortars that are typical in houses built before the mid-1920s are rather porous to moisture. That's a good thing because if moisture gets caught inside the walls, it can gradually kind of wick its way through the bricks and through the mortar joints out into the atmosphere without threatening the integrity of the structure.

When people paint these brick walls, particularly with modern paints, this forms a waterproof skin, which prevents wicking from taking place. If water gets into the wall, like from gutters or cracks in the walls, the water stays in the wall and gradually will break down the mortar. That's what happened in the rear of my house.

I had to find a mason who knew enough about these issues who wouldn't go throw a bunch of Portland cement into these joints. Why wouldn't you want to do that? Because if you patch an old brick wall made with lime[-based] mortar using a Portland cement-based mortar, the Portland cement-based mortar is much harder and it is water impermeable. Having these different mortars of different hardnesses in the same joints can cause the brick wall to continue to disintegrate over time.

It was not easy to find a mason who knew about these older structures. I had several masons come give me appraisals on the job and they probably would have been fine with a more recently constructed house. But, they didn't seem to know anything about older mortars and older bricks. It took me a while to find somebody who did.

JS: So you did all the research before you even picked up the phone to find a mason?

BA: Yes. I just started doing a lot of research on the Internet and the more I read, the more complicated it seemed to get. Also, the more I read, the more irritated I got at whoever it was that painted the brick house in the first place. And, [I was] irritated at myself for not having been more knowledgeable about the whole thing.

If I had known about all this stuff, I might not have bought the house. I don't know if that's the case, but it is one of those things where it's a lot more complicated than throwing paint over a brick wall.

JS: What kind of questions did you ask to find out if the masons were qualified?

BA: I believe that they were all qualified. The question is qualified for what? After I started asking masons what kind of mortar they planned to use, it became evident pretty quickly that they only really knew how to deal with modern structures.

JS: How did you find the mason you eventually hired?

BA: That was the tricky part. I volunteer for Habitat for Humanity and I asked people there, [but] they didn't really know because they're building modern houses. I eventually, through my research, found a couple of companies in the Asheville area that do renovations of old structures and I spoke to two of these different companies and explained my problem. Then I said, “Can you recommend somebody who understands about these issues in older structures?” Scott Fargo of Northland Masonry was the person they recommended as someone who was well-versed with this stuff.

Then I interviewed him and had him come out the house and talked to him about what kind of background he had and he struck me as somebody who wasn't — I don't mean to be demeaning to someone's profession — wasn't just a mason, but was also interested in some of these older techniques and the needs of older structures.

JS:  Will you walk me through the process of what he did to repair the home?

BA: Scott spent a lot of time looking at the house and said, "I can't give you a singe dollar figure because since the house is painted, I can't really tell how badly decayed many of these joints are until I do some power washing and some exploration."

In fact, it turned out that at some point the painters — [because] the bricks were so badly decayed and so much mortar was missing — they had just sprayed that spray foam between the bricks and then painted over it. Well, it looks fine when it's been painted over. You couldn't tell that wasn't mortar between those bricks. It was just plastic foam that came out of a can.

It took Scott a while exploring and spray washing to uncover what the healthy joints were from the decayed joints. He took out the remains of the bad mortar, or in some cases caulking, or in some cases the spray foam, and then packed it in with mortar designed for the needs of my brick house — not to be harder than the previous mortar that was in there.

This house was built with red tinted mortar — red brick and red mortar. Well, I wanted the new mortar to be the same color as the old mortar even though it was going to be painted over. Why did I want to do that? Because ultimately, I might decide to have the house sprayed with nut hulls, which will remove the paint, but not damage the brick or mortar. If I want to do that at some future point, I don't want to have a house that looks all modeled with mostly red mortar joints and some with modern while looking mortar joints.

So he did all the tuckpointing and he had to do quite a bit around the house. Fortunately, most of it that had to be done was in the back and in one general area close to the ground level.

I wanted to cover up the many new red mortar joints with a paint that would match with the rest of the house.     But, I didn't want to do it with a modern paint, which would just start the whole process over again. Scott had recommended a company and I corresponded with them and sent them a sample of the old mortar and of the present paint on the house. They sent me one of their products, which is a lime and casein-based paint, which is porous. It looks like paint. It goes on like paint. But, it is porous so that any water that gets caught up behind the paint in the wall can wick its way through like it's supposed to.

JS: Based on your experience, what would you recommend to homeowners who may need to have tuckpointing done to their house?

BA: It really helps to educate yourself about this so you have some sense of what you're looking at and hopefully find somebody who has some expertise and recognizes that there have been some major changes in the materials in masonry construction over the last 50 to 100 years.

I don't pretend to be a mason whatsoever. That's why I hired somebody. But kind of like when your car breaks down, if you don't know anything about cars at all, you feel like you're at the mercy of whoever you take it to. Few of us like that feeling.