Brick wall installation in Wilmington NC - a garden wall that stays steady and dry

Most folks who call about a new brick wall want something low along the front yard, a garden wall to frame a bed or patio, or a wall that marks the edge of the lot, and if you've already got a wall that's cracking or losing mortar, that's brick repair instead. On a new wall, the price moves with the length and height, how much base and how many piers it needs to stay steady, and how plain or detailed the brick pattern is. The schedule turns on the wall's size, good weather for laying mortar and whether your lot needs historic review before we start. I walk the job with you and put the estimate in writing, and that's where your own figure comes from.

Before anything gets laid out, I talk height and length with you, because a taller or longer wall may need piers or a wider base to stay steady, and that's much easier to settle before we dig. We also look at the patio, walk or paving that'll sit beside the wall and plan how it slopes, so rain runs away and the bottom rows stay dry. Then our crew digs out and packs the base, lays the brick course by course with a mortar mix picked for the job, tools the joints so water sheds off them and cleans the face down before we leave. I like to show you what's under the wall before it's covered, because that's the part you'll never see again and it's the part that decides how long the wall lasts.

If you'd rather have natural stone, or want stone caps or a stone base with your brick, that's our stone masonry work. And if an older brick wall on the property has joints that are wearing out, brick pointing puts fresh mortar back in them so the old wall holds up next to the new one.

If your property sits in one of Wilmington's local historic districts or historic overlays, a new wall counts as an outside change, and the city requires a certificate of appropriateness, its historic review approval, before it goes up. The city's design standards for those districts say new walls should use traditional materials and design, with cinder or cement block only when it's stuccoed or faced with brick. Low brick walls are the traditional front yard choice there, and pierced brick walls, with open gaps left in the pattern, often show up on corner lots, so on a district lot we plan the design around what already fits the street. Whether any of this applies comes down to where your lot sits. I'll tell you at the estimate whether historic district review could come into it, and we help you get the paperwork together before work starts.

Across the rest of Wilmington, a lot of the new walls we're asked about go beside a patio, walk or driveway that's already there, so I check how water runs off that paving before we set the wall's line. We see the same kind of yards on jobs in Myrtle Grove and Ogden, and we plan those walls the same way.