Brick Repair & Tuckpointing in Louisville, KY

Brick repair and tuckpointing is the most common masonry work on Louisville houses. Mortar is the sacrificial part of a brick wall: it is supposed to wear out before the brick does. After 20 or 30 years of rain, the joints get thin, sandy or hollow, and water starts getting into the wall. Catching it at that stage means repointing. Waiting means replacing bricks.

Signs it is time

• Mortar you can scrape out with a key or that falls out on its own
• Joints recessed more than about a quarter inch behind the brick face
• Bricks with faces that have flaked or popped off (spalling)
• Stair-step cracks through the mortar, often from window corners
• White, powdery deposits (efflorescence), a sign of water moving through the wall
• Loose bricks at the top of a wall, a parapet or a chimney
• Damp walls or peeling paint inside, behind the brick

Tuckpointing and repointing, explained

The words get used interchangeably. Repointing means removing damaged mortar and replacing it. Tuckpointing, strictly, adds a thin contrasting line of putty along the joint for a crisp look, though most people use it to mean repointing. Either way the work is the same at its core: remove old mortar to a sound depth, pack new mortar in layers, and tool the joint to the right shape.

The Louisville Landmarks masonry guidelines give a useful rule for depth: cut out old mortar to about two and a half times the width of the joint. A 3/8-inch joint gets raked to roughly an inch. Shallower than that and the new mortar falls out in a few years.

The mortar matters more than anything

Brick in pre-war Louisville houses is often softer than modern brick, and it was laid in lime-rich mortar. If that wall is repointed with a hard, cement-heavy mix, the joint becomes stronger than the brick. When the wall moves or freezes, the brick cracks instead of the mortar. The city's guidelines say new mortar should be no harder than the original, and that a mix of 1 part cement, 1 part lime and 6 parts sand is often acceptable when a lab analysis of the old mortar is not practical.

For older homes we also:

• Remove old mortar with hand tools or careful cuts, not wide grinders that chip brick edges
• Match the color, sand texture and joint profile of the original
• Repoint only joints that are failing, not sound ones
• Avoid sandblasting and high-pressure washing, which strip the hard outer face of the brick

On 1950s and later brick veneer, a standard Type N mortar is usually the right choice. We tell you which mix we plan to use and why.

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Replacing damaged brick

Where bricks have spalled or cracked through, we cut them out and set new ones. Matching takes some effort: size, color, texture and strength all matter. The Landmarks guidelines say replacement brick should not be much stronger than the historic brick around it. We look for salvaged brick for older houses and close modern matches for newer ones, and we show you a sample before work starts.

Fixing the cause

Repointing alone does not help if water keeps getting in. We check gutters, downspouts, missing flashing over windows and doors, blocked weep holes at the base of veneer walls, and soil sloping toward the house. If one of those is the cause, it goes on the quote with the repointing.