03/03/2025
It's been 4 years since I decided to create a page and 3 years since I've posted anything. I've heard from a lot of people over the years that they weren't sure who to contact for masonry repairs for chimneys or things like this, or masonry fireplaces or small jobs, so figured I'd share this recent job and be more active on social media this year.
The walls of this old building (built around 1900) are a 3 wythe brick wall laid using common bond, meaning 3 brick wide and every 16 inches high, two courses laid perpendicular to tie the front and back walls together with the middle.
There was a crack through all 3 wythes of brick, running from the footing to the roof, which is approximately 30' high. This is the first phase of the repair. With temps from below zero to 20's, the backside was tented in with an R-3 concrete blanket and two electric heaters were placed at the bottom which achieved an average temp for the brick on the backside of anywhere from 50-60 degrees while filling the wall in. With a very close neighboring building, it worked very well to lay the wall from the inside.
We decided to make a control joint in the wall with only toothing one side of the joint, which saved a lot of time and cost, verses cutting out both sides of the joint. The walls were tied together with a 3/8" x 2' rebar every 16". With one half of the bar greased, a 12" deep oversize hole was drilled into the cut side, vacuumed and grouted for the bar to slide into, with the other end laid solid into the toothed side, which worked great.
One common difficulty with repairs is matching the face and size of the existing brick. What we found at a local yard was close enough for both.
There's about 860 brick in this little strip. With about 180,000 brick in this building, I can't image mixing all the mud by hand back then, must've been some tough laborers! Lots of good bricklayers back then too but with this all covered and/or not a main exterior wall, them ole boys way back when must've been throwing them in the wall.
