Tuckpointing & Masonry Repair in Oak Park

Oak Park has some of the most significant residential architecture in the country, and the masonry work here deserves to be treated accordingly.

Prairie School homes, Victorians, greystones and brick two-flats, most of them a century or more old and nearly all of them laid up with soft lime mortar over limestone foundations and details. There are also real historic district review requirements on many properties, and we work within them.

The technical considerations are the ones that apply to any building of this age, but the stakes are higher.

Mortar must be softer than the brick. Century-old brick is more porous and less hard-fired than modern brick. Repoint it with a Portland-heavy modern mortar and the brick, not the joint, becomes the sacrificial element. You get spalling faces within a decade.

Joint profiles must match. On a home where the brickwork is part of the architecture, a wrong joint profile is visible from the sidewalk regardless of how good the color match is.

No abrasive cleaning. A considerable amount of the deteriorated greystone and brick around Oak Park and the near west side traces directly back to sandblasting done in the 1970s and 80s. It strips the fired face off brick and the hard skin off limestone, and there is no undoing it.

We would rather turn down a job than do it in a way that damages a building like this.