Tuckpointing in Wilmington NC - mortar joints that keep water out of your brick

Most people call me after they spot sand piling up under a wall, joints that have sunk back behind the brick face, or a crack zigzagging through the mortar, and they want to know if it's a small fix or a big one. The price mostly comes down to how much of the wall actually has worn joints, how high we have to work and whether some bricks are damaged too, because every joint gets raked and packed by hand. The schedule mostly turns on the size of the wall and on whether your address needs a permit or historic review before we start. If the whole face of an older wall is tired, that's closer to a masonry restoration job, and I'll tell you which one you're looking at when I walk the wall with you and put your estimate in writing.

I walk the wall with you first and mark the joints that are worn, since sound original joints are better left alone. Before we touch the whole wall, we mix a test batch and set a little in a hidden corner so you can see how the color matches once it dries, and you decide if it looks right before we go any further. Then our crew rakes the old mortar out of the marked joints until we hit solid material, brushes and rinses out the dust so the new mortar grabs, and packs the joints back full in layers instead of smearing mortar over the top. We tool each joint to match the shape of the old ones, clean the mortar off the brick faces and leave your yard the way we found it.

Tuckpointing often turns up other work. If a brick is cracked or its face has popped off, new mortar around it won't help, so we take care of that as brick repair while we're already there. And since you've got a mason on site, it's a good time to talk about the outdoor project you've been putting off, like driveway pavers to replace a worn-out slab.

In Wilmington, building permits come from the New Hanover County Department of Permits & Inspections, which requires them for alterations and remodeling. The city's list names that kind of work and doesn't mention tuckpointing, so it isn't settled whether your job needs a permit, and the county office is the place to ask. If your house sits in one of the city's local historic districts or historic overlays, exterior alterations there need a certificate of appropriateness, which is the city signing off that the change fits the district's historic character. Before work starts, we tell you which office handles your address and whether a historic district review could come into it, and we help you get the paperwork together.

We're based in Wilmington and work across the cities around it, and a lot of what we repoint is older brick, from house fronts and front steps to chimneys and garden walls. We see the same mix of older brick and newer brick-front homes on jobs in Myrtle Grove and Ogden, and we treat the mortar with the same care there.