Brick pointing in Wilmington NC - tight joints that keep water out of your walls

Most calls start the same way. You notice sand at the foot of a wall, a joint you can scratch out with a key, or mortar that's sunk back so the brick edges stick out, and you want to know how bad it is. If some of the bricks are cracked or flaking too, we can replace those as part of brick repair. The price mostly comes down to how much wall needs doing, how high it goes and how soft or stubborn the old mortar is, since hand work on old brick takes longer than newer brick. The schedule turns on the size of the job and whether a historic district review has to happen first, so I walk it with you and put your estimate in writing before anything starts.

Here's how a pointing job goes with us. I start by walking the wall with you and marking the joints that are soft, cracked or sunk back, and because it's hard to tell which ones are actually letting water in, the usual advice is to do every joint in that stretch of wall, not just the worst few. On older or soft brick our crew cuts the old mortar out by hand with chisels and hammers instead of a grinder, because a saw in a thin joint almost always chips the brick edges and runs too deep into the short vertical joints. It's slower, but your brick edges stay whole. We take the joints back to an even depth and mix new mortar that's no stronger than what's already in your wall, because harder mortar pushes the stress into older brick and the face starts flaking off, which masons call spalling. Then we pack the joints, shape them to match the rest of the wall and clean up.

Sometimes the joints are telling a bigger story. If the same cracks keep opening up after they've been filled, the wall may be moving, and that calls for foundation repair before fresh mortar goes in. Chimneys get the same careful pointing, and when the crown or flashing is part of the leak we take care of it under chimney repair.

New Hanover County Permits & Inspections issues Wilmington's building permits for alterations and remodeling inside city limits, and its list names that kind of work but doesn't mention brick pointing, so the list alone doesn't settle whether your job needs a permit and the county is the place to ask. You can apply online through COAST, the county's permitting portal, or in person. If your house sits in one of Wilmington's local historic districts or historic overlays, the city also requires a certificate of appropriateness for exterior changes, which is its check that the work fits the district's historic character. We tell you which office handles your address and whether a historic review could come into it, and we help you get the paperwork together before work starts.

A lot of what I see around Wilmington is older brick that was pointed once before with a hard gray mortar over the softer original, and that's usually where the brick faces start to go. We cut that back out the same careful way, and we run into the same mix of old and newer brick on jobs in Kings Grant and Leland.