Brick renovation work on Mobile houses

Most brick work on a house is repair. A few spalled bricks get cut out and replaced, or a stretch of worn joints gets repointed. Renovation is the bigger job. A section of wall comes down and goes back up. A room is added and its brick has to meet the old brick at the corner. A fireplace is redone, or an old window is bricked in. The trade is the same. There is more brick moving, and more of the house to think about while it moves.

On a lot of older Mobile houses the line between the two is blurry. Donald looks at what is there and tells you which kind of job your house needs before anything starts.

Sometimes the damage runs too deep to fix one brick at a time. The faces have popped off across a whole stretch, the mortar behind them has gone to sand, or a section has bowed away from the wall behind it. Then the fix is to take that section down to sound brick and lay it back up, tied into the brick on each side.

Around Mobile that stretch tends to be low on the wall where rain splashes back off the ground, under a window sill that has been spilling water down the face, or at a corner where a downspout came loose. And if water keeps getting in at the same spot, the new brick goes the way of the old, so finding how it got in is part of the job.

Additions are where matching gets hard. Brick made in different years comes in different sizes, colors and surfaces, and the joints on an old house are often a different width and color than a mason would lay today out of habit. Miss any of that and the new room looks stuck on.

The usual way to make new brick read as part of the house is to find the closest brick available, match the mortar color and the way the joints are finished, and tooth the new wall into the old one. Toothing means cutting out every other brick along the edge of the old wall so the new courses lock into the gaps, which keeps a straight seam from running up the corner. On very old brick an exact match is not always possible, and Donald says so up front.

• Brick size, color and surface
• Mortar color
• Joint width and finish
• Courses that line up with the old wall

Inside, a brick fireplace can have loose brick in the face, a hearth that has cracked or sunk, or brick somebody painted over long ago. Outside, brick columns carry porch roofs and carports on plenty of Mobile houses, and they take wind driven rain on every side. Open joints near the top of a column and cracked brick at the base where water sits are both common.

Fireplace work here means the brick and mortar you can see. Whether a fireplace is safe to burn in, and the flue and liner inside the chimney, are questions for a chimney sweep. The outside of the chimney is on the chimney repair page.

Older houses get changed a lot. A back door becomes a window. An addition covers a window that used to look out on the yard. An old vent or coal opening sits empty. Filling one of those in with brick so it reads as plain wall takes brick matched to the house, toothed in at the sides, with the courses lined up to the ones around it.

Cutting a new opening into a brick wall is a bigger question, because the brick above has to be carried while it comes out and after. Some jobs call for a structural engineer before any brick moves.

If the house sits in one of Mobile's historic districts, such as Oakleigh, Old Dauphin Way or Church Street East, changes to the outside may need review before work starts. Ask the City of Mobile about that early. The same goes for permits on an addition or any change bigger than a repair.

Old brick in those neighborhoods is usually soft and was laid in lime mortar. New mortar on a house like that has to be softer than the brick, so the joints take the wear instead of the brick.

A wide photo of the wall, fireplace or opening, a close one, and a few words about what you have in mind. For an addition, a photo of the corner where the new wall will meet the old helps. Call or text (251) 305-5966. Donald is based in Mobile, and if you are outside the city, call or text and ask.