Bricklaying and masonry repair near you

The most valuable thing on this page is a question to ask before anybody repoints a wall of yours: what mortar, and why that one. Mortar is meant to be the sacrificial part of a masonry wall. It should be SOFTER than the units around it, so that movement and moisture do their damage in the joint — where it can be raked out and replaced — instead of in the brick, where it cannot. A great deal of this region’s pre-war housing is soft red brick laid in a soft, lime-rich mortar, and a modern cement-rich mix is considerably harder than that brick. Point an old soft wall with a hard modern mortar and the freeze and thaw of a GTA winter has nowhere to go but into the face of the brick: it spalls, the face flakes off, and there is no repair short of replacing the unit. It is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes made on century houses here, and it gets made with good intentions by people who assume harder means better.

Second, the distinction that decides whether this is a task at all. Cosmetic failure is what this page is for and it is what you can see: crumbling or missing joints, a few spalled faces, a loose sill, a garden wall that has shifted, a porch coming apart. Structural failure looks different. A stepped crack running through the bricks as well as the joints and reopening after every repair, a wall that bulges or leans away from the house, a lintel over a window that has rusted and lifted the brickwork above it, gaps that visibly change with the season — those are a wall telling you it is moving, and the first call is an engineer’s opinion about why. Repointing a moving wall hides the evidence for a year or two and then the crack comes back through the new mortar.

Chimneys are where most GTA masonry work actually begins, because the stack above the roofline is the only masonry on a house exposed on four sides and on top, and it goes through freeze and thaw over and over inside a single winter. The crown cracks, water gets into the stack, the joints open, and the whole thing accelerates. Two boundaries are worth knowing. The FLUE — sweeping it, lining it, and the inspection you want before a wood-burning appliance is used — belongs to the roofing side of our pages, along with the flashing where the stack passes through the roof surface. The BRICK, the crown, the cap and the repointing are this page. And a chimney nobody uses any more is not therefore finished: it still has to be capped and kept dry, or it fills with water and eventually takes part of the roof with it.

Masonry is a warm-and-dry trade in this climate. Mortar has to cure above freezing and has to be protected from rain while it does, which is why the season runs roughly from spring through to the first hard frosts, and why the last dry weeks of autumn are the busiest of the year. Matching is the other constraint and it is worth knowing about early: the yellow and red brick on a great many Toronto houses came out of local clay deposits that stopped producing decades ago, so a repair gets matched from salvage rather than ordered from a shelf. Sourcing eight bricks can genuinely take longer than laying them. When you post, send a photograph from a few steps back plus a close-up of the joint, say roughly when the house was built, say whether anything has moved or is getting worse, and say how high off the ground the work sits.