Maintenance

The Annual Masonry Walk-Around Any Homeowner Can Do

You are not diagnosing anything. You are building a record, so that next year you can tell what moved and what has been sitting still since the house was built.

The point is the record, not the diagnosis

A homeowner standing on the lawn cannot tell a settled crack from an active one. Nobody can, from a single look. What tells you is the same crack photographed a year apart.

So the goal of this walk is not to work out what is wrong. It is to leave behind twenty dated photographs and a short list. Do that three years running and you own something a mason would love to have: a history.

When to do it, and what to take

Late February into March is the best window in Middle Tennessee, and the reason is the winter you have just come through. Our cold does not settle in and stay. It crosses the freeze point and comes back, over and over, and each of those crossings expands the water sitting in a mortar joint and takes a little more of the wall with it. Walking the house once the crossings are done shows you what the winter actually cost.

The timing helps on the repair side too. Mortar work largely stops while temperatures sit below about 40 degrees, so anything you find in February is waiting on the first settled warm stretch regardless, and the crews fill up quickly once it arrives. The leaves are also still down, so you can see the walls.

It takes twenty minutes and almost no equipment.

• Binoculars, which do most of the work on the chimney
• An old flathead screwdriver for testing mortar
• Your phone, with the date stamp on
• A tape measure, and a coin to sit beside cracks for scale
• A notepad, or a note on your phone you will actually find next year

Start low, where the water is

Walk the perimeter looking at the bottom three courses of brick and the ground in front of them. Nearly every masonry problem in Rutherford County is a water problem first and a freezing problem second, and both of them start at grade, where the wall stays damp longest.

You want soil sloping away from the wall, not toward it. You want mulch and flower beds below the brick rather than piled against it. You want downspouts discharging well clear of the foundation instead of dumping at the corner.

Weep holes deserve a hard look, particularly on the newer brick veneer around Smyrna and La Vergne, where those small openings at the base course are the entire drainage path for the wall cavity. A landscaper with a fresh load of mulch can bury every one of them in an afternoon.

Look for a fine line of sand or grit along the base. That is mortar leaving the wall, and it means something above is shedding.

• Soil and mulch held down off the brick, not banked against it
• Downspouts extended away, splash blocks still where you left them
• No standing water or dark saturated soil against the foundation
• Weep holes at the base course open, not caulked or blocked by mulch
• Air conditioner condensate lines draining clear of the wall

Then the joints and the field

Take the screwdriver to a few mortar joints on each elevation, including one on the shaded north side. That side dries slowest and freezes first, so it is usually where soft mortar turns up before anywhere else. Sound mortar resists a firm push. If the tip sinks in or the joint crumbles into sand, that section wants repointing.

Then look at the field of the wall from about ten feet back, where cracks show up better than they do with your nose against the brick. Photograph anything with a measurement or a coin beside it. Note whether the crack runs through the mortar or straight through the brick faces, because the two mean different things.

Do not try to decide what a stair-step crack means. Just record where it is, how wide, and whether it has an end.

Openings, sills and lintels

Windows and doors are where masonry walls are weakest, and where damage hides behind trim. Look at the steel lintel above each opening. Rust streaking on the brick below usually means the lintel is corroding, and corroding steel expands and lifts the brick above it.

Check the sill under each window. It should shed water away from the wall, and the joint where it meets brick should be closed. A sill that holds a puddle instead of draining it is a small problem in July and a spalled sill after a winter of overnight freezes. Cracks that fan up and out from the top corners of an opening are worth photographing every year.

Look up: chimney, flashing and caps

The chimney takes weather on all four sides and gets ignored because nobody sees it. Binoculars from the far side of the yard beat any other method available from the ground.

You are looking for a cracked crown at the top, mortar joints that read dark or ragged, brick with the face popped off, and flashing that has lifted where the chimney meets the roof. Sight the chimney against a vertical line, such as a corner of the house, and see whether it stands parallel.

Do the same for anything else with a horizontal top. Retaining wall caps, step treads, pier caps and porch columns all hold standing water rather than shedding it, which is exactly the condition that a freeze overnight and a thaw by lunchtime pulls apart.

Sort what you found into three piles

Watch means photograph and revisit next year. Hairline cracks with no displacement, light efflorescence, and one weathered joint fall here. Plenty of masonry sits in this pile for a decade and never moves.

Schedule means real but not urgent. Soft mortar over an area, a couple of spalled brick faces, a cracked crown, mulch that needs pulling back. This is spring or summer work by necessity as much as by choice, since mortar will not cure properly in the cold, and it is much cheaper than what it turns into if you leave it through another winter.

Call now is short. A chimney out of plumb, a wall that bulges when you sight along it, a crack you can put a pencil into, a retaining wall that has leaned since last year, or fresh cracking that appeared over a single season. None of that needs a lecture. It needs someone standing at the wall.

Related services: Brick Masonry · Stone Masonry · Outdoor Living Masonry